Shareholder Values: Financial Market Expansion and “Popular Neoliberalism” in the Contemporary United States

• In Event: 355 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 11. Neoliberalism and Finance

Abstract

The American economy has been transformed in recent decades, with finance largely replacing manufacturing as its centerpiece. Among other things, this transformation has entailed vastly broadened financial market participation, with a majority of American households owning stocks for the first time in U.S. history. The "financialization" of American life, as this process has been dubbed, has coincided with an equally dramatic reconfiguration of American politics, specifically the rise to dominance of neoliberalism. This paper empirically explores the
relationship between financialization and neoliberal politics by exploring the consequences of broadened financial market participation for Americans’ political orientations. To do this, we analyze data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), investigating the relationship between owning stock and individuals’ political attitudes. We find that, controlling for relevant predictors, stockowners are significantly more to take a range of quintessentially neoliberal positions than are non-stockowners. This suggests that stock ownership may be concrete a social mechanism linking financialization to the rightward turn in American politics.

Authors

• Jonah Stuart Brundage, University of California-Berkeley

• Katherine Christina Hood, University of California-Berkeley