How Financialization Undermines Democracy

Health Care Reforms, Power Concentration, and Receding Citizen Participation

“… 18 That can potentially undermine democracy. 19 Secondly, though this political-administrative interface promotes vertical control by the hierarchy, it led to conflicts between the state technocracy (eg, the Ministry of Health, the Regional Health Agencies, the Welfare elite), the operating core (eg, hospital physicians), and frontline workers (eg, nurses). In June 2019, 95 EDs (213 in August 2019) were on strike to protest against a shortage of resources.…”

Towards New Approaches of Understanding the Greening of Capital Markets

“…Firstly, an understanding of finance as not only autonomous of-rather than subservient to-the productive economy but also as increasingly able to influence and even dominate realms of society. Secondly, financialization scholars share a negative assessment of these financializing developments which is then respectively funneled into various forms of critique, be those loss of democratic accountability (Karwowski, 2019a;Pagliari & Young, 2020), social precarity (Lapavitsas & Powell, 2013), or macroeconomic instability (Dafermos et al, 2021). Thirdly and lastly, the stance that finance cannot just be an economic issue (Mader et al, 2020b, p. 5) as evidenced by the array of scholarly disciplines dealing with this phenomenon.…”

“…Generally understood, green bonds, as part of financialized transition responses, may advance the emergence of a 'financial monoculture' (Hall et al, 2018), which is not resilient to crises. Low-carbon transitions would thus be exposed to the boom and bust investment cycles and the volatility of international markets (Karwowski, 2019a(Karwowski, , p. 1467, see also Dafermos et al, 2021). Gabor (2018), similarly, cautions against globalizing debt provision by opening up domestic capital markets, as transnational credit provision may crowd out credit creation for the development of local productive capacities (see also Elsner et al, 2021).…”

Centralization of health policy decisions, conversion to austerity, and public defiance in contemporary France

“…In response and under pressure from international institutions (della Porta, 2019), French central authorities recentralized funding decisions, The attribution of supranational loans often depended on the decision to implement a specific set of reforms that demand greater fiscal discipline. These international corporate influences have the potential to weaken the wider public interest (Tunney & Thomas, 2019) and to undermine democracy (Karwowski, 2019), despite new and inclusive forms of participation (Boulanger, 2017; Le Roy & Ottaviani, 2017). Outcomes were below expectations: restructuring the entire state apparatus, including agencies and municipalities, generated little savings.…”