This article examines the ways in which the care-indifferent and gendered character of much political egalitarian theory has contributed to a disregard for the care-relational dimensions of social injustice within the social sciences. It demonstrates how the lack of in-depth engagement with affective relations of love, care and solidarity has contributed to an underestimation of their pivotal role in generating injustices in the production of people in their humanity. While humans are political, economic and cultural beings, they are also what Tronto has termed homines curans. Yet, care, in its multiple manifestations, is treated as a kind of ‘cultural residual’, an area of human life that the dominant culture neglects, represses and cannot even recognize for its political salience. If sociology takes the issue of relational justice as seriously as it takes issues of redistribution, recognition and political representation, this would provide an intellectual avenue for advancing scholarship that recognizes that much of life is lived, and injustices are generated, outside the market, formal politics and public culture. A new sociology of affective care relations could enhance a normatively-led sociology of inequality, that is distinguishable from, but intersecting with, a sociology of inequality based on class (redistribution), status (recognition) and power (representation). It would also help change public discourse about politics by making affective in/justices visible intellectually and politically, and in so doing, identifying ways in which they could be a site of resistance to capitalist values and processes.

This article examines the ways in which the self-responsibilized individualism underpinning contemporary concepts of the ideal European citizen, on the one hand (Frericks, 2014), and the inequalities and anti-democratic politics that characterize contemporary neoliberal capitalism, on the other, are co-constituent elements in creating an antipathy to forms of solidarity that are affective as opposed to calculative. The active citizenship framework lacks a full appreciation of the interdependency of the human condition and is antithetical to universalistic, affectively-led forms of solidarity. The deep relationality that is endemic to both social production and reproduction, and that impels an affective, morally-led form of solidarity needs to be recognized academically and intellectually, and politically sustained, if we are to move beyond a narrow, calculative, self-interested vision of solidarity in Europe.

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Through empirical investigation of the Eurozone and Greek debt crisis 2010–12, this article demonstrates how a peak organization of financial firms—the Institute of International Finance (IIF)—was able to mobilize its members transnationally to secure several key political and economic objectives. At the height of the crisis, large European banking firms were threatened by the prospect of a disorderly Greek default, coercive intervention by governments, and, potentially, a regional banking collapse. In this context, representatives from the IIF entered the policymaking process to facilitate concerted private sector action, assisting EU officials with the negotiation of a substantial and orderly creditor writedown, and cooperating with legal action by the Greek government to sideline a minority of financial firms hostile to the deal. The article shows that the IIF’s disproportionate influence over policymaking was a result of their technical expertise, their ability to recruit individuals with long-standing experience of sovereign debt restructuring from the public and private sector, and the operation of elite revolving-door processes. In contrast to recent studies showing that financial actors are able to exercise more power at the national level by remaining collectively inactive, these findings suggest that, at the transnational level, financial actors can be most effective at securing their preferences when they are well organized and when they coordinate politically on the basis of collective interests.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, there has been a major scholarly revival of the topic of financial political power and a refocus on questions concerning democracy, elites, and inequality. Nevertheless, there remains a dearth in the literature regarding the precise nature of the political relationship between the financial sector and central banks. This is problematic given the sharp rise in institutional prominence enjoyed by central bank officials in the post crisis era and their fundamental importance in the governance of financial markets. As a corrective, this paper develops a provisional analytical framework through which the power dynamics between the financial sector and central banks can be fruitfully explored, specifically with reference to the European Central Bank. It does so by identifying four mechanisms through which financial actors potentially influence the policy choices of the European Central Bank – revolving doors, closed policy circles, capital flight/disinvestment, Too Big to Fail – and illustrates their operation empirically in the context of the bank’s organizational functioning and post crisis interventions. The paper illustrates how financial actors enjoy systematic advantages in the domain of central bank policymaking and provides significant evidence that the European Central Bank has been a key ally of the financial sector throughout the Eurozone crisis. The paper calls for a more extensive examination by scholars of the financial sector-central bank relationship as a means to clarify the precise scope of, and limitations to, contemporary financial political power.

For most analysts, Brexit reveals the highly contingent power of finance and the clear limits to its ability to influence crucial policymaking outcomes. By contrast, I contend that UK-EU negotiations demonstrate the unique capacity of finance to secure substantial commercial protections relative to all other business sectors and that the structural sources of the City's political power remain exceptionally robust. Elaborating a notion of 'structural interdependence', the paper demonstrates how policy officials on both sides came to perceive that the future prosperity and stability of their economies relied upon maintaining open trading relations in financial services. This necessitated broad continuity in access to London's deep financial markets for EU firms and preservation of the City's leading role in the UK growth regime. In establishing these claims empirically, I document an extensive range of contingency measures designed throughout December 2018-April 2019 that would function to protect the financial industry from economic disruption in the event of a no-deal Brexit. The outcome illustrates how finance benefits from a form of structural power that does not require instrumental mobilisation, but rather shapes policy decisions on the basis of deeply entrenched and commercially vital cross-border financial entanglements.

This paper contributes to Comparative Political Economy (CPE) by developing an analytical concept of corporate welfare. Corporate welfare—the transfer of public funds and benefits to corporate actors with weak or no conditionality—is a prominent form of state-business relations that CPE scholarship regularly overlooks and misinterprets. Such transfers should be understood as a structural privilege of business in a globalized post-Fordist capitalism, and an increasingly common strategy through which states attempt to steward national economic dynamism within a highly constrained range of policy options. However, without a well-developed concept of corporate welfare—premised upon the key criterion of conditionality—studies that identify a “return” of the state in industrial planning misrepresent these transfers to business as a reassertion of state influence and control, rather than a reflection of state weakness and subordination. The paper provides the analytical building blocks to properly conceptualize transfers to business, works out the core challenges for empirical research, and provides empirical illustrations of this burgeoning phenomenon from the fields of unconventional monetary policy, privatization, and urban political economy.

This paper argues that the Big Four accountancy firms-PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG-operate as key political allies of the financial sector within financial regulatory battles. Leveraging the theoretical notion of "actor plurality" within the policymaking process, I demonstrate how, in the case of the European Union Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) initiative, accountancy professionals offered crucial support for the financial sector. They did so by disseminating key oppositional claims against the FTT proposal, developing tax mitigation and relocation strategies, preparing negative impact assessments, and advising on lobbying tactics. This allied stance of the Big Four is primarily a consequence of the ways in which their commercial priorities have been fundamentally transformed by the provision of consultancy services within the modern global economy. Moreover, the paper shows how accountancy experts are deeply embedded within a network of professional relationships that fosters substantive policy alignment between the Big Four and prominent financial lobbying groups. By highlighting the overlooked role of the major accountancy firms within post crisis regulatory reform, the study illuminates the unequal power relations that permeate financialized societies and contributes to a deeper understanding of how financial preferences continue to prevail within the policymaking process.