This paper develops a perspective on the political economy as an institutional regime dependent on sets of public policies whose character depends, in turn, on appropriate electoral coalitions. It grounds that perspective in an analysis of how the post-war political economies of the developed democracies changed from the 1950s and 1960s to the 1990s and 2000s and then uses this perspective to explain the responses of several contemporary political economies to the ‘great recession’. Building on work in the regulation school of economics, I argue that the economic formula of the initial post-war decades, organized around Fordist production and Keynesian policies, was the reflection of a political formula built on class compromise in the electoral and industrial arenas... see separate pdf with full abstract.