Abstract
This chapter finds the indebted democratic state in a trapped position trying to satisfy conflicting interests of domestic and global actors, and tries to assess it from the institutionalist political economy perspective. The discussion on the possible ways of creating new alliances among the players would require much deeper elaboration and actually is a promising strand of new research to be embraced in the future.
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Notes
- 1.
We borrow this concept from Michał Kalecki, who in his famous paper on full employment (Kalecki 1943) mentioned that a ‘state of confidence’ is a very promising way of keeping governments in check by ‘captains of industry’. He remarked that capitalists had ‘a powerful indirect control over government policy: everything which may shake the state of confidence must be carefully avoided because it would cause an economic crisis. (…) The social function of the doctrine of ‘sound finance’ is to make the level of employment dependent on the state of confidence’ (p. 325). Analogous mechanism works today.
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Ząbkowicz, A., Czech, S. (2018). The Contemporary State and Interests: A Framework of Analysis. In: Vliamos, S., Zouboulakis, M. (eds) Institutionalist Perspectives on Development. Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98494-0_3
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