state theory

Neoliberalism changed many things in Australia. Unions are weaker. Inequality is higher. But exactly what changed is often surprising. The state did not shrink. Social spending did not decrease, nor did it become less redistributive. Household wealth has increased rapidly, but largely due to changes in social policy rather than rising productivity.

The relationship between liberalisation and the welfare state is both more central and more complicated than we often imagine. In Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation I sought to move beyond a lament for declining egalitarianism, and to instead learn from the political strategies that have mitigated and even reduced inequality in hard times.

The book examines case studies from three forms of liberalisation – targeting benefits, marketizing services and financialising the life course. Through each I highlight different models of reform that are broadly consistent with liberalisation (means-testing benefits, facilitating private service providers or using asset-debt relations), yet have different political and distributional consequences.

Ruth Dukes and Wolfgang Streeck’s Democracy at Work: Contract, Status and Post-Industrial Justice is a welcome contribution to a new wave of thinking about industrial democracy, one that will hopefully help us reverse the historical trend and meaningfully implement industrial democratic principles into our political economy.

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In my book, World Statehood: The Future of World Politics, I develop a new processual understanding of world statehood. I pose questions about world political integration, especially (1) whether and to what degree elements of world statehood exist today, (2) whether the development of further elements and functions of world statehood can be seen as a tendential direction of history, and (3) whether, and under what conditions, a world political community could be viable? These questions imply that the existence of a “world state” is not a categorical yes-or-no question, but rather we must carefully specify the elements and functions that can be associated with stateness.

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COVID-19 temporarily re-made fiscal politics. States responded to the health threat by enacting a sudden and far-reaching contraction of the private sector, partly compensated by an unprecedented expansion of the public sector. The moves proved temporary, with a swift return to fiscal and monetary constraint. However, the COVID response potentially provides lessons for understanding broader changes in capitalism.

In part I of our post, we used Schumpeter’s theory of the tax state to trace how changes in the organisation of capitalism had their ‘fiscal reflection’ in changing fiscal accounting practices. In this part II of our discussion of the tax state, based on a journal article recently published in Critical Perspectives on Accounting, we identify a new set of ‘hybrid’ fiscal tools, built prior to, but used during COVID, that could point to a more enduring shift in fiscal politics beyond neoliberalism [...]

Political economists often place the state at the centre of explanations of change in capitalism. The emergence of a ‘welfare’ or ‘nation building’ state during the twentieth century reflects the advance of democratic movements and Keynesian inspired macroeconomic management. More recently neoliberalism is associated with fiscal austerity enforced through the rise of corporate and financial power. Shifts in state finances, and how states finances are accounted for, were central to these broader political-economic shifts.

In a recent open access article published in the journal Critical Perspectives on Accounting, as part of a forthcoming special issue on ‘the future of the state’, we bring state theory into conversation with critical accounting literature to explore the relationship between fiscal accounting and capitalist change. Drawing on Joseph Schumpeter’s fiscal sociology and his concept of the ‘tax state’, we connect changes in fiscal practice to turning points in the reorganisation of the state’s role within capitalism [...]

We are delighted and very grateful to receive the 2022 AIPEN Richard Higgott Prize for our article “COVID-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regulatory state,” published in the journal, Review of International Political Economy. It is getting harder to remember just how extraordinary, and extraordinarily awful, the response to COVID-19 was in so many countries, and the sense of shock and disbelief that accompanied every step towards lockdowns and closed borders in the early months of 2020.

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