The Liberal State : The Evolution of Governance and Democracy in a Global Market – LIBSTATE

All major industrialized countries have undergone a powerful wave of market reforms since the 1980s. New patterns of governance emerged at the international level, new laws were enacted at the domestic level to regulate the governance of the corporate sector, and a large part of the public sector was privatized. These moves towards what I call the liberal state have consequences for democratic control, as critics of the “democratic deficit” of globalization and European integration routinely point out. The question of how to ensure the continuing vibrancy of democratic ideals in a global economy has become more pressing. This is paradoxical in view of the historical triumph of liberal democracy over competing ideologies. As democracy spreads over the entire world, the risk is that it becomes more formal and less meaningful. The purpose of this project is to investigate how the liberalization of the economy and the transformation of democratic control are linked. In opposition to those who describe the liberal state as mere acts of democratic delegation and those that denounce globalization as the hegemony of the market, the project traces how elites strategically tie political reforms to new governance mechanisms. By explaining the emergence and diffusion of key components of the liberal state, this project will contribute to the literature on the state, international regimes and democratic governance in a global economy. For this purpose, the project seeks to build an independent research group of three young researchers and one post-doctoral fellow on international political economy at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (Sciences Po Paris). By enabling us to work collectively on these broad questions, the project would ensure our visibility and independence, allows us to connect our work with leading scholars in the United States and Asia and make the research environment for international political economy in Europe attractive for leading young scholars currently working outside of the EU.