Democracy, expertise and globalisation

Teppo Eskelinenteppo.eskelinen@uef.fi

Globalisation theory…

• Spatio-temporal changes• Technology, money and information flows• Capitalist hegemony in disguise: wage

competition• Decreasing significance of politics / new

arenas of politics

The domestic embeddedness of politics

• ”Globalisation” consists of political decisions and new forms of governance rather than lack of them

• Most decisions are taken domestically or require domestic decision-making

• Where does the uniformity of these decisions derive from?

Usual answers

• Pressures of competition• Hegemony of neoclassical economic theory• But also: uniform political priorities / analyses• How is this possible in democracies?

Political struggle

• Democracy / anti-democracy• Highly democratic societies more resilient

against ”big push” strategies• Advances in globalisation: ”crisis capitalism”,

”shock doctrine”, ”state of exception”• Yet ”normal” conditions as important• -> Need to study such ”normal” conditions

Empirical study

• Finnish Ministry of Finance, economic experts, leading consultants

• Most important documents on the necessary future changes and political alternatives / windows of opportunities

Key concepts

• Economic discourse• Institutional entrepreneurship• Production of institutional facts• Speech acts (Searle):• Perlocutionary /illocutionary• Facts concerning actual institutions /

institutional logics

Key findings

• Sustainability gap (crisis of public finances)• Expertise and international credibility:

references to similar economic experts• Stability and confidence: ”the audience” of

the experts not democratic community, but a network of peers

• Relations between the public and private sectors

Economic experts

• Domestically: dictating the realm of ”the political” and ”the feasible”

• International networked experts, reference to each other

• Implications for class analysis?

Conclusions

• An aspect of politics of globalisation is the struggle between networked experts and other political agents, necessarily materialising in domestic arenas.

• Speech acts renew institutional logics, which present as key issue the capacity of experts to produce domestic stability