Why do some capitalists in the Global South come to firmly support far-right movements while others do not? This article explores this question by examining divisions among Brazilian industry leaders over the right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro, from 2019 to 2023. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with leaders in Brazil's main industrial association, the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (FIESP), this article argues that distinct relations to the state and varying degrees of economic precarity led FIESP leaders to either remain staunch supporters of Bolsonaro's government or grow critical. Leaders in medium-sized firms from shrinking domestic manufacturing sectors decried their exclusion from policymaking under previous administrations and became some of Bolsonaro's most ardent backers. In contrast, while initially supportive of Bolsonarismo , many leaders from more competitive, internationalized sectors dominated by large firms grew critical of Bolsonaro, particularly following his chaotic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These moderate leaders recognized the structural power they leverage over state actors, while prioritizing gradual reform and a stable political environment. In this way, different relations to state actors led to a politics of moderation or militance. The article concludes by arguing how the political rationalities tying capital to the state shape intraclass cleavages and business’ response to emergent far-right movements.
According to official statistics, the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program is no more. After a 2013 federal court ruling declared the program unconstitutional, recorded stop-and-frisks fell from a peak of nearly 700,000 in 2011 to fewer than 10,000 by 2020. We demonstrate that this portrayal of the program's demise is more fiction than reality—a simulation sustained through underreporting and reclassification of pedestrian stops into categories that draw less attention. The simulation persists not through deception but through a working consensus involving police, politicians, media, and even advocacy groups. These actors tacitly accept the statistics despite countervailing evidence, allowing each to hold otherwise incompatible positions: officials proclaiming stop-and-frisk outmoded even as the same stops continue under new labels, advocates celebrating its end even as the communities they represent report no real change. Our analysis shows how mechanisms designed to ensure government accountability can become instruments that enable highly scrutinized agencies and programs to evade reform.
There is general sentiment that insecurity is on the rise across countries. However, some groups are likely to be more vulnerable to shocks than others, indicating that we may not expect insecurity to be equally distributed across the population. In this article, we examine how subjective insecurity is distributed and then turn to the question of whether welfare states can reduce potential gaps in subjective insecurity. Using multilevel models with cross-national data for about 35,000 individuals in twenty advanced democracies from two waves of the OECD's Risks That Matter (RTM) survey (2020 and 2022), we find that the poor are more insecure and that, in general, welfare state schemes have the capacity to reduce overall subjective insecurity. However, welfare state interventions do not meaningfully reduce the subjective security gap between income groups. With regard to the subjective insecurity gap between women and men, welfare policies similarly have only a very small effect. We complement this with national, over-time survey data from Denmark. We not only see that subjective insecurity has increased over time, but also that there is a growing subjective security gap, echoing the cross-national findings.
How does access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) impact labor unrest? In Brazil, strike activity has increased since around 2013, coinciding with the rapid diffusion of smartphones and mobile internet. To explain this shift, I combine qualitative interviews with subcontracted service workers and quantitative analysis of private sector strikes (SAG-DIEESE dataset). Interviews show that ICTs facilitated strike coordination for workers dispersed across small, spatially isolated workplaces. Statistical patterns are consistent with this mechanism: Since the period of ICT diffusion, strike growth has been steeper in industries with highly dispersed workforces; moreover, higher internet access within industry categories is associated with more strikes, especially in categories with higher dispersion. However, strike increases were sharper for lower-risk strikes over employment violations than for higher-risk strikes demanding better contracts. The findings suggest that ICTs expanded workers' capacity to coordinate labor protest, especially in spatially fragmented industries, but riskier action still depends more on traditional labor organizations.
After decades of market fundamentalism, the resurgence of industrial policy worldwide marks a major shift in economic governance. In the United States, this turn accelerated under the Biden administration, which enacted a series of landmark laws that put industrial policy squarely back at the center of national economic strategy. But to what extent did this wave of state activism mark a true departure? Skeptics have argued that "Bidenomics" marked a continuation of pro-business policies that merely "derisked" private investment. A second camp contends that US industrial policy never disappeared but persisted in "hidden" forms. This article advances a different interpretation. It contends that Bidenomics represented a fundamental reconfiguration of state-market relations and signaled the emergence of a twenty-first-century American developmental state. Three features distinguished this shift: directionality, targeting strategic sectors, regions, and communities; conditionality, linking corporate support to broad social objectives enforced by state discipline; and politicization, as industrial policy became a "visible" site of political contestation. Using policy analysis, expert interviews, and media sources, the article traces how this strategy has reshaped the architecture of state-market relations in the post-neoliberal era.
This article advances the debate on the agency of political actors in Comparative Political Economy (CPE) theories, focusing on Growth Model Theory (GMT). GMT expects stable coalitions around dominant economic sectors, which support growth strategies through lobbying and ideological influence. Despite the explicit goal to account for the domestic politics of growth models, GMT has not developed a politics model that captures agency, uncertainty, and conflict. It thus retains the core problems of the structuralist approaches common in CPE: the reification of policy processes as "blocs" or "coalitions," a presentism that infers preferences from outcomes, and a narrow focus on economic interests. We propose an alternative politics model based on cultural schemas nondeterministically guiding actors through uncertainty. This model can incorporate conflicting motives, interpretive frameworks, and cognitive limitations in the formation of growth strategies, while also accounting for these strategies' potential persistence. We illustrate our criticism through a case study of Germany's political debate on the European Economic and Monetary Union. Historical evidence reveals deep divisions among policymakers, shaped by uncertainty, geopolitics, national-identity concerns, and short-term opportunism in response to intraparty and electoral threats.
Industrial policies are resurging across the world in response to climate change and geopolitical challenges. Current scholarship predominantly argues that state capacity for industrial policy depends on nationally oriented features, such as bureaucratic efficiency, financial resources, and expertise. However, the increasing uncertainties in globalized industrial supply chains mean that today, industrial policies must often expand into other countries to be successful. We propose complementing the domestically oriented dimension of state capacity with an internationally oriented one, drawing from the international political economy literature on state power. To demonstrate the merit of this approach, we analyze China's and the United States' state capacity and actions to internationalize their electric vehicle industrial policies, in order to secure critical minerals. We find that both countries use their large market shares of global trade, while China leverages its powerful state bureaucracy and the United States its dominant military and macrofinancial regime. Thus, we argue that in order for a country to internationalize its industrial policy, a country must combine market dominance with capacities that are likely to be highly specific to their own comparative advantage.
This article offers a critique of both the overall focus and key substantive arguments associated with growth model analysis and, in particular, of Baccaro and Pontusson's account of how and why governments adopt policies favourable to the promotion of particular growth models. Our critique centres upon two arguments. First, existing work downplays the role of the state in the politics and governance of growth models and, conversely, overstates the significance of producer coalitions and business actors. Second, we introduce a life cycle account of growth models and argue that current growth model analysis focuses almost exclusively upon the functioning of existing and established growth models, neglecting two other stages in their life cycle relating to their initial establishment and eventual decline or termination. We argue that the relations between producer groups and states vary across these different stages of growth model dynamics. Our ‘state-centric relational’ account emphasises how state actors, while they may sometimes find it in their interests to work with business interests, should not, by default, be viewed as being subservient to them.
This article explores the origins and implications of a new cloud business model that is powering the advance of AI. We document how this model emerged within a handful of the most dominant IT firms whose reach into all corners of the economy makes them a powerful node or "choke point" in the political economy as a whole. We then elaborate how the features of the cloud business model differ from the traditional platform model out of which it grew, as it evolved from asset-light to asset-heavy, from hierarchical organization to semivertical integration, from domination over to collaboration with partner firms, and from embracing consumer- to enterprise-facing strategies. A final section considers the technological, political, and distributional impacts of the rise of this new business model-showing how the current race to artificial general intelligence (AGI) has reinforced and accelerated its underlying dynamics (above all, intensifying the drive for scale and ever-greater asset intensity), analyzing the new techno-nationalist alliance between industry leaders and the state that the model's development has inspired, and considering the new power-distributional dynamics this model has produced.
This article reviews how some social scientists have transcended disciplinary boundaries in their scholarship on wage formation and proposes specific pathways for further trespassing. It contends that an interdisciplinary political economy should connect power to prices. This means that economists should bring power-including political influence and social status-into the heart of their analysis of wage formation, and sociologists and political scientists should extend their analysis of social structure and power dynamics to their endpoint in wage levels. The article concludes with suggestions for how to integrate political and/or sociological perspectives with economic models, both in theory and in empirical research.
Organizations are surrounded by systematic suspicion and exposed to disclosure by activists, journalists, whistleblowers, etc. This reflects an ambiguity in contemporary democracies: that we are profoundly dependent on organizations, yet do not fully trust them. Every day, consequential decisions are made by organizations that operate outside the visibility of lawmakers and administrators. Our suspicion mirrors that condition: The more power organizations have, and the less we think that they are under democratic control, the more suspicious we become of them. This is an old story with deep roots in the modern experience. There are, however, strong reasons to rethink it in the present context of Big Tech and their algorithm-based production. Algorithms have potentially negative democratic implications because they combine a distinct set of characteristics: (a) They increasingly shape sociality and communicative infrastructures; (b) this impact is driven by profit logics, where considerations such as relevance, ethics, balance, and tone become secondary; (c) their effects and operations are surrounded by considerable opacity, secrecy, and inaccessibility and therefore difficult to regulate politically. The article offers a historical-sociological reading of this condition by situating Big Tech in a wider democratic history of suspicion and organizational wrongdoing. To achieve this, it engages sociological thinkers such as Niklas Luhmann, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Jeffrey Alexander. The aim of these discussions is to foster a sensitivity to change and continuity. Such an approach is necessary if we want to capture the full range and depth of Big Tech's democratic implications.
Can leaders' use of social media contribute to democratic backsliding? Extant research concludes that political leaders use social media mostly as a broadcasting tool and to engage in limited substantive dialogue. In this article, we propose a supply-side theory of how social media may contribute to the processes associated with democratic backsliding. We argue that incumbents use Twitter (X), among other purposes, to dynamically discover the political costs of eroding democracy and consolidating power. Social media provides important information from three key actors: (1) institutional gatekeepers, (2) the opposition, and (3) the leader's base. The reactions from these actors to proposed policies determine the costs of pursuing them further. We use advanced natural language processing approaches and data from Donald Trump's personal Twitter account to test our argument. We find that his Twitter behavior appeared responsive to reactions from key Republican leaders and to signals of support from his citizen base, suggesting that Twitter may have served as one input in shaping political strategies.
This article conducts a microhistorical sociological analysis of land grab in the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer of northern Palestine during the British Mandate, examining purchase and coercion that functioned as mechanisms of settler colonization. Drawing on original archival research in local colony and national movement archives, it reconstructs how socialist Zionist settlers from the Hashomer Hatzair movement, in coordination with land-purchasing institutions and the British imperial government, displaced indigenous peasants who held long-standing usufruct rights. Assessing the dialectical processes between settlers and the indigenous population, the article traces how the protracted colonization of fertile lands and villages unfolded in rural Palestine, culminating in the gradual transfer of territorial sovereignty to the Zionist movement. Challenging dominant Zionist narratives centered on the 1948 war, it foregrounds an extended settler colonial process, showing how village destruction and land seizure took place both before, during, and after the Nakba. It highlights how indigenous removal and elimination are central to the settler colonial logic, operated through violent, legal, and administrative means, while also attending to indigenous local resistance as a key feature of the evolving settler colonial landscape.
With the rapid expansion of digital technologies in recent years, the "attention economy" has attracted the interest of academics and policymakers. At the same time, the rise of the neo-Brandeisian approach to antitrust has caused regulatory bodies to investigate the market power of technology companies. This article analyzes the role of antitrust in the attention economy. First, it defends user autonomy as the standard for antitrust regulation, and second, it argues that facilitating competition must not be the orienting goal for regulating markets of attention that threaten user autonomy. Enhancing competition without restraints on the practices of technology companies within those markets is not only insufficient to address the fundamental harms to user autonomy that results from the attention economy, but may, in practice, exacerbate these harms. To address the problems of the attention economy, regulators must establish meaningful ex ante restrictions on the practices of technology companies within the digital economy, and legislation that centers the autonomy of the user.
Why do governments facing economic crises sometimes engage organized producer groups in policymaking through social concertation, and sometimes proceed unilaterally? I argue that governments' choices to exclude or include unions and employers' organizations from policymaking can be underpinned by a motivation overlooked by prior corporatist theory: reassuring the markets. Under conditions of financialized globalization, international economic actors-creditors, credit rating agencies, investors, and international institutions-acquire a novel role as audiences to which policymakers seek to send signals to abate intensity of exogenous economic pressures. The article puts forward a novel theoretical account to explain governments' choice of signaling strategy-concertation or unilateralism-for the purpose of reassuring the markets. The argument is substantiated through a comparative analysis of policymaking in labor market, industrial relations, and pensions policy in Portugal, Italy, and Ireland during the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis (2010-14), drawing on seventy-three qualitative interviews and in-depth process tracing.
Political struggles are entwined with the freedom of assembly, yet the latter is construed in entirely incompatible ways in both theory and practice. This article reconstructs three distinct concepts of freedom of assembly, their content and complex interrelations. This typology integrates these diverging perspectives on the freedom of assembly into a single coherent theoretical framework. The three concepts of the freedom of assembly are liberal, associative, and radical. In the liberal understanding, freedom of assembly is one right among others in the catalog of individual rights such as freedom of speech, religion, and association, guaranteed by the state. In the associative understanding, freedom of assembly is the precondition for the establishment of civil society organizations and interest group representation. Freedom of assembly in the associative understanding is the precondition for creating associations capable of negotiating and compromising with the state. In the radical understanding, freedom of assembly names a form of action able to destabilize existing regimes and institute new political constitutions. In this radical understanding, freedom of assembly is neither a constituted power (as in the liberal understanding) nor a negotiating power (as in the associative understanding), but a constituent power capable of creating new political forms.
Here, I propose a novel conceptualization of American climate politics as a form of status politics, where contestation around climate can be partly viewed as a struggle over the symbolic worth of educational credentials and academic knowledge in American society. Environmental activists have cast climate action as a matter of deference to scientific experts at the same time as educational attainment increasingly divides partisan groups, with the Democratic Party becoming the party of highly educated Americans. In this environment, I argue contestation over the status value of education has emerged historically to shape public attitudes and discourse around climate. As initial evidence, I find educational polarization around climate has increased over time in time-series survey data, driven by divergence between high-education Democrats and low-education Republicans ( N = 13,138). Additionally, analyzing nationally representative survey data from 2020, I find evidence suggesting the relationship between Americans’ educational identities and their climate attitudes can be partly explained by their feelings about educated elites and experts ( N = 6,720). This work calls attention to educational identity as an emotionally charged site of disagreement in the climate debate, with implications for other political debates as well.
The antagonism between far right and new left parties has transformed West European politics through increasing sociocultural conflict. We ask what this new cleavage implies for the politicization of inequalities. We contrast two diverging theoretical expectations. The first expects a tradeoff between sociocultural and socioeconomic inequalities, with new left voters emphasizing the former over the latter, and vice versa for far right voters. The second predicts a single dimension of inequality attitudes, from new left “universalists” being inequality averse to far right “particularists” being more inequality tolerant. Evidence based on survey data from Germany supports the second perspective. Even new left voters in the educated middle classes are more averse to all dimensions of inequality than (far) right voters. This implies that a successful new left agenda can simultaneously target various inequalities. However, in contexts of polarized party competition, divisive sociocultural conflicts may crowd out attention to traditional, less divisive socioeconomic inequalities.
This article examines the growing backlash among conservative activists and politicians in the United States against the use of ESG (environmental, social, governance) investment criteria by large asset management companies. It also examines the theoretical implications of the backlash for the growing literature on asset manager capitalism that has often viewed their promotion of ESG—at least in the United States—as mainly performative. To explain why the backlash has been so intense, it argues that we need to reexamine the different forms of power exercised by the Big Three asset managers and why they came to be viewed as a significant threat by the fossil fuel industry. It further argues that, in examining the impact of these different forms of power, it is necessary to make a distinction between the origins of the backlash with the fossil fuel industry and its subsequent acceleration among conservative politicians and activists.
Socioeconomics designates the interdisciplinary attempt to provide an alternative to mainstream economics, involving economic sociology, political economy, and heterodox economics. While Polanyi’s work largely informs this endeavor, his theory is also ambiguous, and scholars have interpreted it in opposing ways. The notion of the always-embedded economy is by now widely accepted, but this perspective potentially undermines the critique of (neoliberal) capitalism. In this article, I develop a coherent framework for socioeconomics built on three pillars. The first pillar affirms that the economy is always embedded in cultural, sociopolitical, and ecological frameworks. The second pillar asserts that the power over socioeconomic issues can be more or less privatized. The third pillar involves a commitment to a “real” democracy, whereby the economy is subordinated to social-ecological needs. This political ideal was not only Polanyi’s own vision: it is also central for contemporary societies—and socioeconomics itself can contribute to its realization.
