Conclusion The Contested Politics of Economic Change in a Neoliberal Age

Abstract

This chapter revisits the book’s central empirical and theoretical arguments and summarizes its central narratives about policy outcomes in fiscal policy, labor-market policy, and financial policy in France, Germany, and Italy in the era of transnational neoliberalism and economic austerity since the early 1990s. In each country, trajectories of adjustment have deviated from standard neoliberal prescriptions in favor of alternative political-economic visions deriving from statist liberalism in France, corporate liberalism in Germany, and clientelist liberalism in Italy. It returns to its central contention that the standard analyses of neoliberal reform fail to capture these dynamics, as do conventional institutionalist and interest-based accounts. It then reassesses the implications of its case material for the power of ideas in shaping trajectories of economic adjustment in advanced democracies. It concludes with a brief speculative discussion of the book’s implications for the future of capitalism and political democracy in a neoliberal era.