Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism
... This means that the ideational scholarship we draw on operates from the assumption that ideas are not mere epiphenomena purely derived from the institutional and/or material position of actors (Berman, 1998;Campbell, 2004). Rather, the ideational approach recognizes the interpretive capacities of parties in relation to the political context they confront (Mudge, 2015a). This leads to a more sophisticated analysis of parties' motivations and strategies that deepens the traditional framework of "offices, policies, and votes" (Muller and Strøm 1999). ...
... In that, "programmatic beliefs provide guidelines for practical activity and for the formulation of solutions to everyday problems," which can be aggregated in specific political programs and party platforms (Berman, 1998: 21). In other words, programmatic beliefs "provide a relatively clear and distinctive connection between theory and praxis" (Berman, 1998: 21; see also Mudge, 2015a), making them practical ideas that enable political parties to align their broad ideological and strategic orientations with concrete policy prescriptions featured prominently in their political platforms. ...
... Moreover, electoral platforms are valuable data sources for analyzing the language through which parties articulate their programmatic beliefs. According to Stephanie Mudge (2015a), this language comprises policy prescriptions, the framing of policy programs and the social categories targeted by political parties. In our analysis, we utilize these dimensions to understand the beliefs of the four major parties in the House of Commons during this election sequence and the interpretation of the COVID-19 pandemic as a large-scale crisis that required a social policy response. ...
Why did the Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) and the New Democratic Party (NDP) enter into a supply-and-confidence agreement in March 2022? Interparty cooperation among federal parties is rare during minority governments, and yet the agreement created a formal alliance in the House of Commons. In this article, we argue that ideational factors led to the 2022 agreement. We examine the role of programmatic beliefs and strategic learning during the COVID-19 crisis and the 2019-2021 election sequence to shed light on changes in federal parliamentary strategies in Canada. From ad-hoc voting coalitions to extended cooperation on social policymaking, the LPC and the NDP learned how to work together in the House of Commons while using the agreement as a tool to compete with each other in anticipation of the next federal election.
... This deradicalization is now the subject of a vast scholarly literature, which I will try to summarize below (see e.g., Bartolini 2000;Eley 2002;Moschonas 2002;Mudge 2018;Sassoon 1996). But one strand of thinking that has been curiously neglected in this field is the work of the New Left historian Ralph Miliband. ...
... More narrowly, it also does not explain why party elites interpreted structural changes in society in the particular way they did. According to Stephanie Mudge (2018), the key actors here are the "experts" who do the interpretive and diagnostic work of translating social shifts into new political strategies. From this insight, Mudge then develops an account of the evolution of left-wing party experts: from the "party theoreticians" of the interwar period with their backgrounds in journalism, agitation and party organizing; to the "economist theoreticians" of the post-war settlement who emerged out of the world of professional economics; and finally the "trasnationalized, finance-oriented economists, strategists and policy specialists" of the 1990s (Mudge 2018: 1-43). ...
... But Mudge's (2018) work remains centered on the party-society dyad and does not address the fact that socialization also takes place within the institutions of the state. This is where I propose turning to Miliband (1964Miliband ( , 1969 for a more nuanced and less deterministic account of party-state relationships, and for insight into the workings of a crucial mechanism in the transformation of western European socialism. ...
The question of deradicalization looms large in the historiography of western European socialism. But in this contested field, the contributions of the New Left historian, Ralph Miliband, have been curiously neglected. Through his work on the British Labour Party, Miliband developed a distinctive account of deradicalization that foregrounds the fact that when parties enter government, party elites find themselves transplanted into new, alien institutions. Over time, he argued, they then come to internalize the worldviews of those institutions and reshape their parties accordingly. This essay presents the first quantitative and cross-national test of this “experience of governing hypothesis,” using Comparative Manifesto Project data from western European socialist parties between 1945 and 2021 and a novel matching technique for panel data. Miliband’s theory is strongly supported by this analysis, which also demonstrates the value of taking a multi-dimensional approach to deradicalization.
... Contemporary scholarship on leftist political parties appears to bear out this conclusion. Mudge (2018) traces the twentieth-century transformation "from socialism to neoliberalism" of four leftist parties in advanced capitalist democracies: the German and Swedish Social Democrats, the UK Labour Party, and the US Democratic Party (labeled leftist only after the New Deal). The mechanisms Mudge highlights to explain this shift -in particular the rise of professional economists within leftist parties, and the embrace of neoliberalism within the discipline of economics in the late twentieth century -are distinct from those pointed to by Michels and Przeworski. ...
... There has never been a significant labor party in the US, unlike other advanced capitalist democracies (Eidlin, 2016). Relatedly, the socialist tradition has been comparatively weak in the US (Sombart 1976(Sombart [1906; Mudge, 2018). Second, the US was one of the first countries (alongside the UK and Chile) to embrace neoliberalism, via the "Reagan Revolution." ...
... Second, the US was one of the first countries (alongside the UK and Chile) to embrace neoliberalism, via the "Reagan Revolution." As Mudge (2018) shows, Reaganism transformed not only the Republican but also the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton's denunciation of "big government" and proud support of the 1996 welfare reform bill, which significantly reduced the US welfare state (which was already modest compared to western European standards), are particularly vivid illustrations of this. ...
Utopian dreams of a fundamentally different world would seem to have little place in the de-radicalized political arena of the post-communist age. This article challenges this idea by ethnographically examining three cases of electoral politics in the contemporary United States, which can be seen as a “least likely” context for electoral utopianism. Evidence from these cases – the 2008 Obama campaign, 2016 Sanders campaign, and local organizing work of the Green Party – is used to make three claims: utopianism is present in the US electoral arena; utopianism and electoral instrumentalism are not incompatible and may “need” each other; and the relationship between utopianism and instrumentalism varies, resulting in multiple types of utopian politics. The article’s key contribution is to theorize and illustrate three such types.
... The usual list of suspects includes figures like Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan, among others, whose ideas -despite adhering to different schools of economic thought -nevertheless contributed to important right-wing political movements around the world beginning in the 1970s. However, by now it is generally acknowledged that the governing parties of the Centre-Left, including in continental Europe, have played an essential role in consolidating the neoliberal turn of developed economies since the 1970s (Humphrys, 2018;Mudge, 2018). Recognition of this fact is at odds with the recent preoccupation with a largely right-wing thought collective within the literature dedicated to the analysis of neoliberalism. ...
... Historically, this activity has taken the form of a variety of truthmaking processes, both secular and religious. In the modern era, the construction of economic theory on the part of professional economists has played a preeminent role in informing the ideological cohesion of the dominant social blocs and the policy activity of states (Fourcade, 2009;Mudge, 2018). These theories are essential ingredients in the construction and justification of the social bloc leadership's claims to superior political and economic competency. ...
This article aims to contribute to a growing literature on the role of social democratic and progressive parties in shaping neoliberalism. We argue that existing literature has not fully recognised the unique intellectual and ideological traditions of the Centre-Left as a distinctive wing of neoliberalism. Much of this confusion can be resolved by examining the unique ideological contributions of New Keynesian economics in the context of a Gramscian political analysis. Focusing on Centre-Left Anglo-American governments in the US, Britain, and Australia throughout the 1990s and 2000s, we demonstrate how New Keynesian theories provided the intellectual justification for the Third Way’s ideological project and model of state interventionism at the height of the neoliberal period. While Centre-Left political parties in these Anglo-American states have recently sought to re-invent themselves under a new interventionist economic paradigm, we conclude by showing how they have continued to reproduce orthodoxies associated with the New Keynesian consensus.
... A new fundamental cleavage has emerged between the winners and losers of globalization and deindustrialization (Bornschier & Kriesi, 2012;Häusermann, 2020). Established left-wing parties have increasingly concentrated on educated urban voters, distancing themselves from the provincial working classes (Mudge, 2018). The erosion of the democratic class compromise opens the door to anti-establishment, populist forces and the decline of the quality of democracy (Hopkin 2020). ...
... The region's neoliberalized leftwing parties collapsed because of their economic policy agenda: voters punished leftwing parties for moving to the right on economic policy (Bagashka et al., 2022;Snegovaya, 2022). This trend fits in the global decline of the left as it moves to the right and embraces neoliberalism (Mudge, 2018). The economic shocks Eastern Europeans experienced during the postsocialist transformation were more severe than shocks in Western Europe. ...
... Those governments that embarked on a path of permanent austerity therefore did not have their paths dictated for them, as the exogenous constraints thesis argues, but made active choices in this direction. More broadly, the process of liberalisation, while having a clear origin in the crisis of the late 1970s, in most Western countries resembled a constant and progressive adaptation from left-wing groups (Mudge 2018, Ferragina and Arrigoni 2021, Fifi 2023), more than a contingent, crisis-ridden response. ...
... A recent strand of the literature has highlighted the role played by the changing profile of party economists in bringing about changes in party policies. As traditional Keynesian party economists saw their ideas delegitimised by the crisis of the 1970s, they lost ground to orthodox economists defending supply-side over demand-driven solutions (Ban 2016, Mudge 2018). However, these accounts do not explain the swift conversion of key political figures -including previously staunch Keynesians such as Pierre Bérégovoy and Laurent Fabius (in France), or Joaquín Almunia (in Spain) -to balanced budgets or inflation control. ...
... In most countries the formal ties between unions and social democratic parties have been abandoned concurrently with many social democratic parties abandoned their Keynesian heritage of, for instance, full employment (most prominently in Germany and the United Kingdom) (Allern et al. 2007;Upchurch et al. 2009). Besides trade unions increasingly engaging with other political parties and actors (Rennwald 2020;Spier 2017), it may also imply that political ideas aligned with workers' interests have less influence on social democratic politics (Mudge 2018). It can even be argued that the political systems' overall responsiveness to the interests of workers have declined (Elsässer/Schäfer 2022; Hacker/ Pierson 2010). ...
The conjunctures between work, the economy and the political system continues to be a core issue within sociology. In this article we discuss how power resource theory can provide an analytical and theoretical lens that can enrich our understanding of the nexus between work, labour markets and politics. We emphasise how power and the power resources of labour (still) matter, such that workers and unions with more power resources can secure better conditions in the labour market, and we discuss the most important mechanisms through which the realm of work and political as well as broader societal outcomes are linked.
... The Swedish model is on the one hand related to the effective alignment of workers and firms, including centralised wage bargaining and 'no-strikes' clauses, as well as Swedish welfarism that grew household services and especially increased female employment numbers (see Table 2 and Appendix). For the Swedish case, Mudge (2018) discusses political changes in Sweden since the 1970s, making the case that changes in the economics profession led to the displacement of economic experts in public policy and party politics, so that Sweden's ruling Social Democratic party over time downgraded the priority of achieving full employment compared with other policy goals. ...
The concept of full employment is associated with diverse economic, political and social aspects. We provide a survey of theory, empirics and policy issues related to full employment. In doing so, we tie together aspects of full employment regarding definitions, theoretical perspectives, empirical measurements, policy debates and real‐world policy programmes. We distinguish concepts of full employment that provide systematic links to price stability, minimum unemployment and maximum employment approaches and the unfilled vacancies perspective. Furthermore, we provide and discuss different empirical measures of full employment for selected economies, and we propose a new full employment typology to better understand and categorise contributions in the literature. Based on our findings, we argue that conceptualising and measuring full employment is not merely a technical task but inevitably involves normative judgements. Finally, we discuss avenues for future research.
... It is among the rank and file of political activists that future-oriented positions of principle have tended to be strongest (Bickerton and Invernizzi Accetti 2021, 180ff.). As such groups become marginalized from positions of influence not just by leaders but also by electoral strategists, policy specialists, and technical experts (Mudge 2018;cf. Rye 2014), their capacity to shape the collective is weakened. ...
Beliefs about the future shape attitudes, experiences, and priorities in the present. This article explores the relationship between democracy and the expected world to come. As it argues, visions of the future are an important resource for democratic politics, putting the present in critical perspective, aiding in the formation of a collective agent, and consolidating commitment in adversity. Indirectly, they contribute also to the legitimacy of democratic institutions, shaping the exercise of citizenship and the capacity to contend with the flaws of representation. The democratic significance of the imagined future becomes even more visible in today’s age of skepticism toward future-regarding politics, in which speculative modes of thinking run up against the desire for certainty and precision.
... Traditional involvement of economists in trade unions has commonly been limited to assistance rather than leadership positions. Indeed, in the context of macroeconomic issues, neoclassical economists have gained a highly influential position, since economic expertise is crucial for assessing macro-level implications of unions' goals and strategies (Mudge 2018, p. 144, Pontusson 1994. By informing union leadership about the potential macroeconomic effects of wage agreements, they effectively influence wage demands (e.g. in Denmark (Campbell and Pedersen 2014, p. 186)). ...
... Trata-se de analisar a produção social de uma competência reformadora, no duplo sentido da capacidade de saber fazer e do direito legítimo de fazê-lo (Bourdieu, 2023b, p. 43). Mais uma vez, é uma questão histórica identificar e delimitar quais são as escolas de poder (faculdades imperiais de direito, medicina e engenharia; colégios internacionais; business schools etc.) nas quais florescem competências reformadoras em cada período específico, assim como quais são os itinerários (militância partidária, passagem do Estado para o setor privado, assessoria em think tanks, estágio no exterior etc.) que propiciam os recursos reformadores vigentes em cada estado das relações de dominação (Hey e Rodrigues, 2017;Hey, 2017b;Hey, 2021;Denord e Lagneau-Ymonet, 2017;Medvetz, 2012;Mudge, 2018;Wagner, 2020). ...
Introduction to dossier - "Sociology of reforms"
... Experts are crucial actors in political struggles, since they best poised to make authoritative knowledge claims about the world. Recruited into politics, experts translate demands into sound technical knowledge, thus speaking to and for different constituencies in policy language (Mudge, 2018). What type of expert comes to command legitimate authority to make public interventions is therefore critical (Eyal, 2013;Eyal and Buchholz, 2010). ...
O que impulsiona a implementação e a reversão de classificações escolares de alto risco baseadas em testes? Adaptando a teoria dos campos de ação estratégica ao caso chileno e mobilizando o conceito de doxa de Bourdieu, vejo a reforma de mercado na educação como o resultado de relações competitivas, cooperativas e conflitantes entre atores titulares e desafiadores. Enquanto os primeiros dominam o campo e, portanto, exercem poder de definição sobre como o campo deve ser organizado e reformado, os últimos competem por formas alternativas de estruturar o campo. Essa lógica de campo configura uma dinâmica contingente na qual o campo é transformado à medida que quadros desafiadores ganham moeda ideacional. Com base nessa estrutura conceitual, evidencio como ideias concorrentes sobre a educação baseada no mercado moldaram a construção técnica e o uso público de classificações de qualidade escolar. Implicações para uma sociologia da reforma seguem.
... Furthermore, scientization can sometimes be observed to emanate from specific parts of the academic world. Stepahanie Mudge's (2018) notion of the turn to 'economistic' leftism in social democratic parties during the first decades after World War II comes to mind as one example of how a certain branch of academic reasoning (economics) has made it into political thinking. Thus, when I apply scientization here, I more precisely do so with reference to especially psychology and sociology, as well as their interconnecting fields. ...
Empatia, the Finnish word for empathy, became used by politicians in Finland in the second half of the 20th century, just as other translations of the English term took root in their respective contexts. This article scrutinizes the Finnish case to find out how and why empathy became a political term there. The rise of empathy is examined in context of the growing interest in the role of political action within an immaterial realm, tracing the paths that led the concept into Finnish public discussions and contrasting it against earlier uses of sympathy. Based on this contextualization, I argue that empathy is both a symptom of the scientization of 20th-century political concepts and a continuation of a parliamentary rhetoric of positing interpersonal understanding as either important or unimportant to political decision-making. Politicians talking about empathy, while drawing on the scientific roots of the concept in psychology, still apply it rhetorically as if empathy were another word for sympathy, albeit in an improved, rational form. Parliamentary debates display how politicians use empathy to oscillate between numerous perceived dichotomies, such as nature and nurture, or individual and collective, depending on the rhetorical situation and without scientific precision. This usage highlights how scientific concepts mutate when they are made to do rhetorical work.
... Like the rise of career politicians, the rise of policy professionals is not a phenomenon specific to social democratic parties, but it represents a greater departure from their traditional practices. In the Swedish case, prominent ministers in recent social democratic governments-in particular, ministers of finance-have surrounded themselves with a tight team of loyal advisors, a practice pioneered by Kjell-Olof Feldt as minister of finance from 1982 to 1991(Lindvall 2004;Mudge 2018). It is striking that many prominent social democratic ministers and their close advisors have taken up lucrative positions in the business world at the end of their tenure in government. ...
This essay seeks to understand the strategic reorientation of social democratic parties in the 1990s and the reasons why these parties have lost support among working-class voters while failing to expand their electoral base among other voters. Focusing on the Swedish experience, the essay explores three topics: (1) what Social Democrats have done in government; (2) how the social background and practices of social democratic politicians have changed; and (3) how the decline of trade unions and changing trade-union practices have undermined working-class support for social democratic parties.
... We do so by zeroing in on the case of libertarian-leaning philosophy and economics subspecialties. 1 Although sociologists and other social scientists have made essential insights into how market-oriented faculty members and organizations of the past have served as key agents in the shift to international neoliberal policy (Burgin 2012;Fourcade 2009;Mudge 2018), they have paid less attention to libertarianism in contemporary higher education (cf. Wasserman 2019). ...
In this article, the authors draw on the literatures about academic career pipelines and the sociology of ideas to understand how an outside group of organizations provides resources to aspiring scholars as young as high schoolers and as senior as emeriti professors. One of the goals of these organizations is to promote libertarian ideas in the academy. The authors show how, in contrast to other academic pipeline building, libertarian-leaning organizations fear that their perspectives encounter resistance in the progressive field of higher education. Therefore, to keep libertarian ideas alive, they pursue strategies to guarantee a supply of graduate students for eventual academic jobs and provide professors with relatively easy access to funding, granting them autonomy vis-à-vis their home institutions. This funding may be used in part for programs that specifically hire libertarian PhDs, which in turn provide young scholars with a step ladder into the academy. The authors call this set of strategies an “idea pipeline.” On the whole, these efforts are designed to make a career studying libertarian ideas more desirable and viable for those inclined toward these viewpoints and to ward off the demise of libertarian thought in the academy.
... The extraction and exploitation of natural resources for global accumulation was a reliable way for leftist governments of the early twenty-first century to generate dividends despite the need for changes in their rhetoric and political values in relation to such practices (Ellner 2021). Indeed, as Mudge (2018) demonstrates in the case of center-left governments in Europe, and as Gonzalez (2019) and Gudynas (2021) have argued in studies of the Latin American pink tide governments in specific reference to extractivism, globalizing forces, and national-level political and financial imperatives often impel leftist or left-leaning governments to moderate their otherwise potentially radical, socialist, or revolutionary policy proposals to ultimately push and implement economic policies that are part and parcel of the neoliberal canon (Zibechi 2010;Rivera Cucicanqui 2012). ...
In 2012, the “climate hotspot” region of the “Bajo Lempa” in El Salvador was the recipient of a Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) Fund granted by the United States and administered by the leftist FMLN political party to bring “sustainable development” to the region. Local organizations initially pursued funding opportunities through this mega-project though their efforts were unsuccessful, thereby undercutting subsequent campaigns to resist the project for its environmental risks. Remaining pockets of resistance were undermined by gang violence directed at key community leaders, seemingly at the behest of local oligarchs. Thus, an interlocking web of political-economic obstacles blocked communal agency to forge alternative climate futures. By analytically foregrounding the meso-level relationships between community-based environmental movements and leftist-controlled state institutions subordinated to global logics of accumulation, I distill the contradictions inherent to anthropocentric state forms, and the inability of the Latin American left to incorporate environmental concerns into their projects of governance. Ultimately, I argue that despite their inability to halt the MCA, the political and agro-ecological practices of communities in the Bajo Lempa “overflow” channels of the Latin American left and instantiate communal projects of resource governance as horizons of climate change adaptation, and radically democratic forms of governing social life.
... Trends within the center-left are equally important. The democratic deficits associated with the economic style of reasoning at work in contemporary progressive liberalism (Berman 2022; Son 2020) and the shift toward neoliberal policy and governance among center-left political parties across the global north (Mudge 2018) have narrowed the scope of political debate and the horizon of political change. For those frustrated with their conditions of existence, there are few outlets available for them to challenge dominant regimes of governance which fuels both cynicism and extremism. ...
This study takes up Paul Gilroy’s recent call to take seriously the political problem of fascism in the contemporary conjuncture as an educational problem. Specifically, the study will begin with analytic work to identify a set of guideposts that delineate the political logics of fascism. It will then examine the still under-developed theoretical work examining the political problem of contemporary fascism as an educational problem. And, it will attempt to advance this necessary work by tracing the outline of an antifascist educational project. It will be argued that an anti-fascist educational project must, in the short-term, develop polemical strategies that articulate a new set of political logics to challenge the increasingly cemented fascist logics at work today and, in the long-term, advance structural changes to educational institutions organized around normative aims of humane and humanizing education, morality and responsibility, and sociological knowledge.
... Instead, they promoted the business corporation as a model for public service and an end in itself. Around the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, this neoliberal model was embraced by the social democratic parties in Europe, English-speaking countries, and beyond (Mudge 2018). The neoliberal programme, first tried out in Pinochet's Chile in the 1970s, and subsequently led by the Conservative Thatcher government in UK, was to privatise or outsource as much as possible of government activities. ...
Public goods are an anomaly in neoclassical economics, a form of ‘market failure’. They exist outside the efficient and equitable optimality of market exchange. It can be shown however that competitive markets are only efficient in short product cycles. Long-term objectives require social support. Corruption arises from the consequent private public interaction. Integrity, the absence of corruption, is a public good. Corruption has risen since the 1980s with privatization and outsourcing. How did European governments become honest in the first place? In the century after the 1770s, they moved from regarding public office as a form of private property to a conception of serving the public good. This integrity revolution was facilitated by Weberian bureaucracies, selected by academic merit and committed to impartiality by long-term incentives. The neoliberal revolution of the 1980s regarded bureaucracies as obstructive and slow. It admired the business corporation with its opaque procedures and charismatic leadership. Concurrently economics moved from neoclassical harmony theory to an asymmetric information model of ‘opportunism with guile’, providing doctrinal legitimacy for corruption. Corporate advertising is deliberately deceptive, and undermines the public good of trustworthiness. Digital platforms, powered by advertising, have subverted public discourse. Misinformation and disinformation have become prime risk factors for current societies. The practical operation of markets undermines the public goods of integrity and trustworthiness. The public good of a habitable climate cannot be achieved by market methods. For long-term payoffs, ‘free markets’ are a harmful delusion, inefficient, corrupt, impossible to achieve, and not sustainable.
... Trends within the center-left are equally important. The democratic deficits associated with the economic style of reasoning at work in contemporary progressive liberalism (Berman, 2022;Son, 2020) and the shift toward neoliberal policy and governance among center-left political parties across the global north (Mudge, 2018) have narrowed the scope of political debate and the horizon of political change. For those frustrated with their conditions of existence, there are few outlets available for them to challenge dominant regimes of governance which fuels both cynicism and extremism. ...
This study takes up Paul Gilroy's recent call to take seriously the political problem of fascism in the contemporary conjuncture as an educational problem. Specifically, the study will begin with analytic work to identify a set of guideposts that delineate the political logics of fascism. It will then examine the still underdeveloped theoretical work examining the political problem of contemporary fascism as an educational problem. And, it will attempt to advance this necessary work by tracing the outline of an anti-fascist educational project. It will be argued that an anti-fascist educational project must, in the short-term, develop polemical strategies that articulate a new set of political logics to challenges the increasingly cemented fascist logics at work today and, in the long-term, advance structural changes to educational institutions organized around normative aims of humane and humanizing education, morality and responsibility, and sociological knowledge.
... In the 1920s and 1930s, on the one hand, with the end of World War I, the abdication of the German Emperor, and the end of the century long rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, liberalism began to shift towards monopolistic capitalism (Lukacs, 2013); On the other hand, with the victory of the October Revolution in Russia, socialism emerged in practice. Under the challenges posed by both the "left" and "right" aspects of classical liberal economic theory, neoliberalism began to emerge on the stage of history, which also had a certain impact on Western Marxists (Mudge, 2018). Some left-wing scholars chose to abandon their positions and defect to the opposite side when facing neoliberalism, greatly weakening the left-wing camp to a certain extent (Petras, 2018). ...
... At the turn of the 21 st century, however, some left parties in the region accepted labor market liberalization and severed ties with organized labor, seeking popular support from unorganized popular sectors and/or middle classes (Roberts, 2021). We call this "left-liberal" strategy-alternatively coined as thirdwayism (Iversen and Wren, 1998;Mudge, 2018). Third way left parties attempted to reinvent themselves in a market-friendly manner. ...
Leftist governments in peripheral economies have usually faced problems fulfilling their distributive mandate. Because of their inability to earn foreign exchange to pay for imports or service their debt, these governments often ended in epic balance of payments crises and renounced their electoral programs while embracing stabilization and fiscal austerity. This reflects the fact that economic growth and distribution in peripheral economies are fundamentally balance-of-payments-constrained. How can we understand variation in the form of distributive strategies advanced by left parties in government if they are subject to balance of payments constraints? And how can we understand the emergence of different growth models within those constraints? This article contributes to understanding the politics of peripheral growth models by studying the variation in left government distributive and growth strategies in the context of balance-of-payments (BoP) constrained growth. While the BoP constraints are real and challenging and the push for monetary and fiscal responsibility has been blunt, we argue that the extent to which governing left parties build linkages with grassroots and subordinated groups, and extant institutional architectures, allow spaces for political agency that leftist governments can use to pursue distinct distributive and growth strategies. In turn, these strategies allow for diverse ways of managing the macroeconomic implications of the BoP constraints.
... Instead, when in power, they often implemented painful adjustment policies designed to reduce state deficits. This rebranding was unprecedented for social democratic parties' historical trajectory (Mudge 2018;Bremer and Rennwald 2022). ...
From the rise of populist leaders and the threat of democratic backsliding to culture wars, the rejection of open markets and the return of great power competition, the backlash against the political, economic, and social status quo is increasingly labeled “illiberal.” Yet, despite the increasing importance of these phenomena, scholars still lack a firm grasp on “illiberalism” as a conceptual tool for understanding contemporary trends. The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism addresses this gap by establishing a theoretical foundation for the study of illiberalism and showcasing state-of-the-art research on this phenomenon in its varied scripts—political, economic, cultural, geopolitical, and civilizational. Bringing together the expertise of dozens of scholars, the Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism offers a thorough overview that characterizes the current state of the field and charts a path forward for future scholarship on this critical and quicky developing concept.
... However, since 2012, Republicans have become more successful in attracting the victims of trade shocks, leading to Trump's 2016 victory(Autor et al. 2020;Che et al. 2016). This aligns with the extant literature showing that centre-left parties are particularly vulnerable to moving toward the right in economic policy(Bagashka et al. 2022;Fervers 2019;Mudge 2018;Snegovaya 2024). ...
The literature on populism is divided on whether economic factors are significant and robust causes of populism. To clarify this, we performed the first systematic review and meta-analysis of the evidence of a causal association between economic insecurity and populism. We combined database searches with searching the citations of eligible studies and recently published reviews. We identified and reviewed thirty-six studies and presented a concise narrative summary and numerical synthesis of the key findings. Although we found significant heterogeneity in several dimensions, all studies reported a significant causal association. A recurrent magnitude was that economic insecurity explained around one-third of recent surges in populism. We tested for publication bias by conducting a funnel-plot asymmetry test and a density discontinuity test of the distribution of t-statistics. We found significant evidence of publication bias; however, the causal association between economic insecurity and populism remains significant after controlling for it.
... Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, it was under a social democratic government that the process of neoliberalization really took hold (Mudge, 2018;Peck, 2010). This occurred not only with the continuation and intensification of active labor market policies, but also in policies on income, currency, budgets, and competition, not to mention a program of privatization and deregulation that resulted in the multinational ownership of enterprises formerly owned by the Danish state, especially in key infrastructural sectors (Iversen & Andersen, 2008, p. 319;Kolstrup, 2022, pp. ...
... For instance, Ibsen and Keune (2018) concluded that only limited possibilities for wage-setting at the firm level exist in Dutch collective agreements, supporting Rojer's (2004) conclusion that wages are highly coordinated. The option that erosion occurs within collective agreements and is coordinated in collaboration with trade unions is considered too infrequently, especially since we know that trade unions adopted a liberalized agenda in the 1990s and early 2000s (Mudge 2018;Humphrys 2019;Boumans 2023). ...
The gradual shift in power relations between organized employers and employees since the 1970s has increasingly affected the functioning of national industrial relations systems. According to a broad literature, the most important of these consequences is an increase in employer discretion. This article tests this claim by performing a longitudinal content analysis on three Dutch collective contracts. It develops an analytical framework based on four dimensions of employer discretion. Results show that although employer discretion did increase on all four dimensions between the mid-1970s and the 2020s, significant temporal and sectoral variation has occurred. In addition, the article argues that a loss of democratic influence by employees intensified the increase of the one-sided decision-making powers of employers, and that the collective contract is being transformed from a joint labor–capital effort to solve workplace problems to a management instrument.
... Neoliberal marketization is without a real opposition today, for at least two reasons. First, as mentioned, the Third Way Left has moved away from social protection to marketization (see also Mudge 2018). The left's giving in to neoliberalism, which originally had been a movement of the political Right, is even the very moment that neoliberalism gestates from ideology or "movement" into a full-scale "political order," as Gary Gerstle (2022) put it in his seminal account of the United States. ...
Karl Polanyi described the crisis of his time in terms of a “double movement,” in which the rise of the self-regulating market was counterpointed by a protectionist movement of its losers. Updating Polanyi, Nancy Fraser argued that the current crisis is better conceptualized as a “triple movement,” with “emancipation” as a “third political project,” separate from “marketization” and “social protection.” This paper examines significant variation under the emancipation umbrella. In particular, I contrast liberal multiculturalism, as canonized by Will Kymlicka, with diversity, which has taken both neoliberal and illiberal directions.
This essay argues for a critical reconsideration of cosmopolitan human rights and of the post-Cold War Human Rights Project. It begins by contextualizing cosmopolitan rights in their historical and ideological context, showing that they are deeply complicit in a broader regime of neoliberal global governance, helping to justify and to depoliticize new modalities of coercive conditionality that characterize that regime. It shows how specific features of cosmopolitan rights contribute directly to this form of indirect rule and opines that present indifference or hostility toward human rights can and should be understood in part as a product of this complicity and of the wider failures of neoliberal global governance. The essay concludes with some reflections on the study of backlash against human rights amidst the real threat of rising ethno-nationalism and fascistic politics.
This article compares the policy and collective bargaining responses in the three Scandinavian countries to the cost-of-living crisis that began in 2021. The countries are known for their coordinated and consensual response to exogenous shocks. However, Scandinavian variants of neoliberal reforms, the 2009 Financial Crisis and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic have challenged the model. The comparative analysis finds three things. First, Norway and Sweden opted for rather generous measures compared with Denmark, and their measures were generally universal in nature, whereas the Danish measures were more targeted on specific groups. Second, with no statutory minimum wage, all three countries relied on collective bargaining to shore up wage incomes. Third, the different responses in the three countries pertain to different political and economic problem loads. We also find signs of convergence as wage solidarity seems to be experiencing a revitalisation in all three countries. This could have lasting effects on bargaining systems.
Leftwing activism of recent decades exhibits an anarchist turn evident in quantitative indicators like mentions of anarchists in news reports and by activists adopting anarchist modes of organization, tactics, and social goals-whether or not they claim that label. The authors of this Element argue that the very crises that generated radical mobilizations since the turn of the millennium have both led activists to reject other strategies for social transformation and to see anarchist practices as appropriate to the challenges of our time. This turn is clearly apparent in the Americas and Europe, and has reverberations on an even broader transnational, perhaps global, scale. This suggests the need for research on social movements to consider anarchists and other marginalized radical traditions more fully, not just as objects of study, but as important sources of theory.
Das Konzept der Vollbeschäftigung ist mit verschiedenen wirtschaftlichen, politischen und sozialen Aspekten verknüpft. Wir geben einen Überblick über Theorie, Empirie und Policy-Fragen im Zusammenhang mit Vollbeschäftigung. Wir leisten einen neuen Beitrag, indem wir mehrdimensionale Aspekte der Vollbeschäftigung in Bezug auf Definitionen, theoretische Perspektiven, Messungen, politische Debatten und Policy-Programme zusammenführen. Wir unterscheiden zwischen Konzepten der Vollbeschäftigung, die eine systematische Verbindung zu Preisstabilität herstellen, Ansätzen minimaler Arbeitslosigkeit und maximaler Beschäftigung sowie dem Fokus auf unbesetzte offene Stellen. Zudem diskutieren wir verschiedene Messungen von Vollbeschäftigung für ausgewählte Volkswirtschaften und schlagen eine neue Vollbeschäftigungstypologie vor. Auf der Grundlage unserer Ergebnisse argumentieren wir, dass die Konzeptionalisierung und Messung von Vollbeschäftigung nicht nur technische Aufgaben sind, sondern unweigerlich normative Positionen beinhalten. Abschließend erörtern wir Optionen für zukünftige Forschung.
As a result of the partial privatization and public listing of two large state-owned enterprises in 2001, the Norwegian state became the largest owner at the Oslo stock exchange. A new mode of corporate governance was developed, through which retainment of the corporate headquarters (HQ) of hybrid state-owned enterprises became the sole political goal of continued state ownership in these corporations. This article explores the perceived benefits to the national economy of these company HQ through an investigation of public documents and interviews with key stakeholders. The article argues that the main function of the goal of HQ retainment was to portray national interests and political goals as mere (positive) externalities of HQ location, and that this goal was formalized due to a perceived need to depoliticize the corporate governance of hybrid state-owned enterprises.
Around the globe, the very ideas and institutions are under attack whose historic victory was celebrated with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Contestations or challenges are nothing new for liberalism. On the contrary: they are the essence of liberal politics. However, the current disputes have taken on a special quality. Today, they are particularly diverse and polyphonic. And they can largely be traced back to endogenous causes. The contributions in this volume shed light on the internal tensions and broken promises in their spatial unfolding, in relation to individual problems and around the question of inclusion. The book concludes with the thesis that only a self-transformation will free the liberal script from its predicament. It is aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience from the humanities and social sciences and provides an overview of current research on the critique of the liberal script. With contributions by Shirin Amir-Moazami | Katharina Bluhm | Tanja A. Börzel | Marianne Braig | Gülay Çağlar | Daniel Drewski | Andreas Eckert | Jürgen Gerhards | Stefan Gosepath | Mark Hallerberg | Rahel Jaeggi | Gudrun Krämer | Bernd Ladwig | Thomas Risse | Fritjof Stiller | Mihai Varga | Christian Volk | Michael Zürn
This paper studies the relationship between Government´s economic ideology and income redistribution, using a panel of OECD countries spanning the years 2004–2020. Our results point to the existence of a partisan effect, showing that taxes and transfer policies implemented by parties on the left reduce income inequality more than those of parties on the right. Other political and electoral factors (the proximity of the elections, the number of years for which the chief executive has been in office, and the presence of coalitional and minority governments) do not seem to be as relevant. We also analyze the role that the Great Recession and the globalization process have played in the relationship between Government´s economic ideology and income redistribution, finding that they have significantly altered it.
In this article, I first point out that the contemporary democratic political system mainly promotes the realization of the political interests of the more advantaged social classes, especially those of the authority social network; only subordinated to such interests does it offer opportunities to the more disadvantaged social classes to realize their political interests. After that, I present a suggestion for the fundamental transformation of the democratic political system, the creation of the dualist political system. In the dualist political system, there is a relatively separate representative system, on the one hand, for the more advantaged social classes, and, on the other hand, for the more disadvantaged social classes; the actors of the two houses of the two systems can finally make joint decisions by consensus. According to my conception, the dualist political system may largely equalize the political power of the more advantaged and more disadvantaged social classes, and the more disadvantaged social classes can also efficiently participate in forming the society. By realizing the dualist system, the society can become a more democratic social formation, which leads to a significant decrease in social inequalities and the improvement of social efficiency
Over the past 30 years, border scholars have written extensively on what borders are, where they are located, and how they operate, not just to critically understand their changing role, but also to criticise and denounce their violence and discrimination. Yet borders continue to proliferate, in particular as a response to alleged crises affecting Europe. If borders have always constituted markers of social and cultural identity, the more recent process of European re-bordering, I argue, constitutes a challenge for the democratic system as a whole. Implemented by left-wing and right-wing parties alike, this process seems indeed to have been taken away from public discourse and treated as a technical necessity to solve the crises. Far from being neutral or non-political, however, it has disclosed new forms of racial discrimination, political and economic power, and colonial violence. In order to substantiate my argument, I will 1) provide a brief examination of the recent changes in the concept and practice of democracy, as well as their interrelations with the process of European re-bordering, 2) investigate the socio-political and economic conditions under which the current process of European re-bordering has come about, with particular attention to the increasing role of media and political discourses in shaping public opinion, and 3) discuss the repercussions of the process of European re-bordering on the democratic system. The article will conclude by inviting scholars, civil society members, and any interested party to open up a more open and democratic debate around the unequal and discriminatory practices of bordering.
E cikkben először rámutatok arra, hogy a mai demokratikus politikai rendszer főleg az előnyösebb helyzetű társadalmi osztályok, különösen a hatalmi társadalmi hálózat politikai érdekeinek az érvényesítését szolgálja, és csak ezen érdekeknek alárendelve nyújt megvalósítható lehetőségeket a hátrányosabb helyzetű társadalmi osztályok politikai érdekeinek az érvényesítésére. Ezt követően javaslatot teszek a demokratikus politikai rendszer alapvető átalakítására, az úgynevezett dualista politikai rendszer kialakítására. A dualista politikai rendszerben egymástól viszonylag elkülönült képviseleti rendszere van egyrészt az előnyösebb helyzetű társadalmi osztályoknak, másrészt a hátrányosabb helyzetű társadalmi osztályoknak, és a két rendszer két házának a szereplői végül megegyezéssel hozhatnak közös döntéseket. Felfogásom szerint a dualista rendszer működése révén nagyrészt kiegyenlítődhet az előnyösebb helyzetű és a hátrányosabb helyzetű társadalmi osztályok politikai ereje, és a hátrányosabb helyzetű társadalmi osztályok is hatékonyan részt vehetnek a társadalom alakításában. A dualista rendszer megvalósításával az adott társadalom demokratikusabb társadalmi alakulattá válhat, ennek eredményeként a társadalmi egyenlőtlenségek jelentős csökkentésével és a társadalmi hatékonyság javításával.
How has mainstream academic economic discourse evolved to regain its epistemic authority after the financial crisis of 2008 revealed serious blind spots in economic modelling that shattered the profession’s claim to be able to predict and control macroeconomic variables? To answer this question, we combine content with bibliometric analyses of nearly 70,000 papers on macroeconomics and finance published in academic journals from 1990 to 2019. These analyses reveal how a structural rapprochement between macroeconomics and finance created the new subfield of macro-finance. We show that contributions by central bank economists, driven by central banks’ newly acquired macroprudential mandate, were key to its establishment. Acting within the space of regulatory science, they connected macroeconomic and financial knowledge to satisfy their employers’ administrative needs, while also helping to bridge the gaping hole in economic discourse, thereby taking on an important stabilizing role for the epistemic authority of economics.
The electoral base of the Democratic Party has been transformed over the past generation. Democrats have lost ground in rural America while adding strength in cities and, more recently, suburbs. A major consequence of this shift has been the creation of a “U-shaped” Democratic voting base, with both poorer metro voters and affluent suburbanites siding with the party. This spatial alliance overlays a multi-racial one, as Democrats rely more heavily on voters of color than any other major party in American history. Many analysts have argued that the Democratic Party has managed this sea change by shifting from economic to cultural and identity appeals. This claim is consistent with leading models of two-dimensional party competition, as well as a fair amount of cross-national research on parties of the left and center-left in contemporary knowledge economies. However, we find little evidence for this claim in national Democrats’ messaging (via party platforms and on Twitter), nor, more important, in their actual policy efforts. Instead, we show that even as Democrats have increasingly relied on affluent, educated voters, the party has embraced a more ambitious economic agenda. The national party has bridged the Blue Divide not by foreswearing redistribution or foregrounding cultural liberalism, but by formulating an increasingly bold economic program—albeit one that elides important inequalities within its metro-based multi-racial coalition. Understanding how and why Democrats have taken this path is central to understanding not just the party’s response to its shifting electorate, but the way parties manage coalitional change more broadly.
Research shows that opposition to policies that redistribute across racial divides has affected the development of the American welfare state. Are similar dynamics at play in Western Europe? For many scholars, the answer is yes. In contrast, we argue that researchers’ understanding of the political economy of redistribution in diversifying European countries is too incomplete to reach a conclusion on this issue. First, existing evidence is inconsistent with the assumption—ubiquitous in this line of research—of a universal distaste for sharing resources with people who are culturally, ethnically, and racially different. Second, important historical and institutional differences between the United States and Europe preclude any straightforward transposition of the American experience to the European case. We discuss what we see as the most promising lines of inquiry going forward. (JEL D64, H23, J15, J68, K37, Z13)
The decline of the centre-left and centre-right people’s parties is arguably the most poignant feature of the crisis of democracy in Western Europe today. To understand why, this book explores the striking parallels between the life of democracy and that of the people’s parties over the course of the past century. It offers a transnational window on the history of democracy since 1918 by weaving together three epochs which are often studied apart: democracy’s troubled history in the Interwar era; the trente glorieuses after the Second World War; and the period since the 1970s. The book shows that democracy was only stabilized and legitimized when people’s parties emerged that managed to balance between facilitating popular participation from below, bridging divisions between social groups, and practising the politics of compromise. Ideas for such parties existed already in the first decades of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, Socialist and Catholic mass parties failed to transform into people’s parties, which was essential for the crisis (and breakdown) of democracy in the Interwar era. This was a traumatic experience which contributed to the unexpected stabilization of democracy after 1945 as party leaders transformed their organizations into broad-based people’s parties that embraced compromise and responsibility. However, this stability did not last, and paradoxically their transformation also harboured the seeds of democracy’s more recent problems. Over the past decades, people’s parties have struggled to connect to an individualizing society while having become increasingly absorbed by their governing responsibilities.
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