Financial Democracy: Comparative Political Economy of Banking

Elaborating a new approach to the comparative political economy of banking, Financial Democracy presents evidence of both the recent return to traditional bank management and the resurgence of alternative banks with social and public policy missions.The book begins with a critique of contemporary approaches to banking, finance, and money in political economy, financial economics, and, indeed, the major schools of economics since 1945. In this analysis, traditional banks were expected to be replaced with market-based banking and new types of non-bank entities able to tap market efficiencies. Drawing on a unique combination of participatory democratic theory, comparative political economy, theories and concepts on banking and finance, and the varieties of democracy, democratization, and regime change in political science, the findings of this book are precisely the contrary. Historical-institutional methods and balance-sheet analysis reveal change in the opposite direction: a back-to-the future return to traditional strategies of deposit taking and loan making and public finance at banks. A variety of social reactions of self-defense, especially since 2010, are documented in case studies of six large advanced and underdeveloped economies; reactions against the commodification of credit, finance, and banking caused by the liberalization of domestic markets for credit and banking.This book will be of interest to readers in political economy, banking, finance, and democratization.

About the Author

Kurt Mettenheim taught as Professor at the Fundação Getulio Vargas Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo, as University Lecturer in Brazilian Studies at Oxford, and previously at the University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, with further visiting posts at the Universidade de São Paulo, Universidade de Brasília, Sciences Po in Paris, the Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin as a German Marshall Fund Fellow, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre. He has published extensively on democratization, the design of political institutions, politics and banking, and comparative historical political economy while providing consultancy to major banks and corporate clients on Brazil and emerging markets.

Olivier Butzbach is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli” (Italy) and a Fellow of the Humboldt University’s Center for British Studies (Germany). His research interests lie in the fields of comparative political economy of finance, historical institutional analyses of contemporary capitalism, and the study of not-for-profit banks in historical context. He is the author and co-author of several books and dozens of publications in these areas, which have appeared in top international academic journals such as Organization Studies, Business History, the Global Management Journal and Accounting, Economics and Law: A Convivium.