Neoliberalism as a Crisis of Democracy

• In Event: Democracy--Crisis, Practice and Paradox

Abstract

The conflict between the market and democracy has been a central theme in political theory and political sciencesince Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation. Three distinct approaches to this issue have emerged in the past three decades, each diagnosing from a different angle the decline of democracy (and the counter-movement to Polanyi’s ‘second movement’, known as neoliberalism) . The ‘golden-straightjacket’ approach warns that global financial markets increasingly place exogenous constraints on the choices democratically elected governments can make through the threat of withdrawing funding from domestic economies and increasingly indebted governments. The ‘party-cartelization’ approach focuses on the endogenous shrinking of democratic choice due to the convergence of mainstream parties on market-friendly policies, severely limiting the menu of choices of the electorate (pushing disenchanted voters into the arms of extremists who provide an illusion of choice). The ‘atomization’ approach emphasizes the erosion of the societal bases of effective mobilization for alternatives to neoliberal policy choices due to the decline in solidarity. Contrary to the received wisdom that attributes the extraordinary success of the neoliberal counter-movement to the transformation of the economy since the ‘trente glorieuses,’ we contend that these three mutually reinforcing aspects of democratic decline are inherently rooted in the neo-Schumpeterian model of democracy that limits democratic control to electoral competition between governing elites, and which has crowded out other forms of democratic mobilization since the 1970s. We therefore question the effectiveness of solutions offered to counter democratic decline and the neoliberal dis-embedding of markets (like Streeck’s return to nation-states or Habermas’s transnational democracy) that do not address the need to actively remobilize citizens to take control of democratic decision-making. Such remobilization must recover the fundamental features of political equality including equality of inclusion in conjunction with equality of effectual political influence and power. In the absence of such a democratic remobilization of citizens, we argue,it is hardly surprising that ethno-nationalist forms of populism would fill the vacuum.

Authors

• Peter D. Breiner, SUNY, University at Albany

• Zsofia Barta, SUNY, University at Albany