(published in the newsletter of the Political Sociology section of the ASA, Summer 2007)
Does Adversarialism Cause Neoliberalism? Comments on The Politics of Free Markets by Monica Prasad
Isaac Martin
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The Politics of Free Markets (Prasad 2006) is a major contribution to political sociology. It addresses a central mystery in the field: why did the rich democracies suddenly embrace neoliberal policies in the last decades of the twentieth century—cutting taxes, abandoning welfare commitments, and reducing the state’s control over industry? And it does not pin the blame for neoliberal policies on the usual suspects—globalization, the strength of business, the weakness of labor, or the power of an idea whose time had come—but instead on a most unlikely suspect: democracy. These countries adopted neoliberal policies because those policies proved popular with the electorate. The book displays the results of a prodigious research effort on neoliberal initiatives, including primary textual research and interviews on three policy domains in each of four countries. Prasad follows the efforts of policy makers in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany during the period from 1973 to 1989 to make the tax system more regressive, decrease government control of industry, and cut public spending for major welfare programs. In the
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