Financial nationalism and democracy

Dóra Piroska

Chapter 15 in Handbook of Economic Nationalism, 2022, pp 256-274 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Since the global financial crisis, for International Political Economy scholars a core intellectual puzzle is to explain the rise of financial nationalist governments into power and their sustained capacity to pursue financial nationalism in an era when the interconnectedness of global financial markets surpasses any historical level. Financial nationalism is puzzling because of its capacity to redistribute gains from international financial transactions among a larger share of domestic society. This paper, using the example of Hungary, identifies financial nationalism's unexpected achievements through contrasting it with claims of three theories of financial power: structural power of finance, financialization of state institutions, and financialization of everyday life. Specifically, it documents the Hungarian government's achievement to increase domestic ownership of banks, to importantly enlarge the scope of central banking, and to significantly reduce the credit exposure of a large segment of the Hungarian population. At the same time, it also describes underemphasized critical conditions of financial nationalism's advancement, at each examined policy domain, namely the diminishing democratic oversight of major financial transformations. Finally, the Hungarian example does not suggest that financial nationalism inherently leads to democratic decline, only that its many impressive economic achievements should be understood within its political context.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781789909043/9781789909043.00025.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:19365_15

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().