By contrast, VoC’s overarching message is institutional diversity and resilience. Rather than accepting the Thatcherite teleology, Hall and Soskice suggested that contemporary capitalism had stabilized around distinct institutional models — Liberal Market Economies (LMES) such as the United States and the United Kingdom on the one hand, and Coordinated Market Economies (CMES) such as Germany and Sweden on the other. In each VoC, national-level institutions shape firm-level strategy, promoting market coordination in LMES and nonmarket coordination in CMES. While each of these models shared certain structural features, they were nonetheless appreciably different in their institutional features, and in how they faced market pressures. In addition, coordinated market economies were able to sustain the redistributive and egalitarian thrust of the welfare states. Finally, the VoC framework implied that each model had an obduracy, a staying power, because each one generated stable political coalitions around it. So while CMES and LMES generate comparable levels of economic performance, the kinder, gentler, more egalitarian versions of capitalism were capable of resisting the drift toward the neoliberal American model.