Market-Driven Politics: Neoliberal Democracy and the Public Interest

Abstract

...[P]olitics everywhere are now market-driven. It is not just that governments can no longer 'manage' their national economies; to survive in office they must increasingly 'manage' national politics in such a way as to adapt them to the pressures of transnational market Market-driven Politics is an empirical examination of the extent to which politics and policy are conditioned, or even determined, by global economic forces. It is a multi-level study which moves between an analysis of those global forces, through national politics, to the changes occurring week by week in two fields of public life that are both fundamentally important and familiar to everyone - television broadcasting and healthcare. The focus is Britain, but the arguments apply in many other contexts. Public services like health care and broadcasting play an important role, because they affect the legitimacy of the government of the day; in market-driven politics such domains become political flashpoints because they are also targets for global capital. Colin leys agues lucidly that we are witnessing a fundamental shift in the relationship between politics and economics. His original analysis of the key processes of commodification of public services, the conversion of public-service workforces into employees motivated to general profit, and the role of the state in absorbing risk is critically important, not just for an analysis of market-driven politics but also for longer-term defence of democracy and the collective values on which it depends.

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