Market Privilege: The Place of Neoliberalism in American Political Development

Abstract

Since the 1970s, the neoliberal worldview has become reflected increasingly in the policy ideas and institutional innovations advanced by both major parties in both countries. This is most obvious in the realm of economic and social policy, but especially evident at the subnational level, particularly in the city. I argue that neoliberalism, as an ideology, a set of policy prescriptions, and institutional designs, is conceptually distinct from liberalism, especially in its “New Deal” form, social democracy, and from conservatism. Moreover, it is having a developmental effect—neoliberal ideas and institutions have proved durable. This article argues that an urban lens most strikingly reveals the presence of a neoliberal political order that has also made its mark on national political institutions, particularly in the American political economy.

Compared to what?: Setting American political development in comparative context

“…She weaves these threads into an account of how both categories of racial classification and the state's efforts to make their populations racially legible developed over time. Weaver (2016) similarly shows how a common set of ideas about markets and their relationship to politics and policy took hold, in different national and local political contexts, and drove the parallel development of neoliberal urban policy in the United States and the United Kingdom. More generally, the collective power of the comparative-APD approachespecially the opportunity to study questions of stability, change, and political development in a comparative contextis that it allows (or even requires) us to ask hard questions about the durable, fixed features of national political systems; temporally or geographically specific configurations of institutions, governing arrangements, or patterns of political behavior that might be causally generative; and critical moments change and the processes that define them (Katznelson 1997;Collier and Collier 1991).…”

“…Teele (2018: 6) summarizes her general case with admirable brevity: “Winning the vote depends on the alignment of interests between elected politicians and suffragists.” Mobilizing both extensive cross-national quantitative data and intricate studies of her three principal national cases, she shows how, in different national political and institutional contexts, suffragists forged strategic alliances with political parties who hoped to gain electoral advantage by supporting expanded voting rights. Similarly, Timothy Weaver (2016, 2021) uses a finely drawn account of the parallel emergence of a certain kind of market fundamentalism in the United States and the United Kingdom across apparent divides of party and ideology to advance a broad argument about the role of ideas in policymaking and to give welcome new conceptual shape to the overused and often sloppy concept of “neoliberalism.”…”