^{Image: “The Museum of Neoliberalism, Lee” by Loz Pycock licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.}

Political Economy and Illiberalism

The Political Economy and Illiberalism Initiative charts the material and intellectual connections between illiberalism and the political-economic context that it emerges from, most poignantly its connection to neoliberalism broadly construed. At the causal level, illiberalism is a reaction to a political-economic status quo that is floundering. But this reaction needs to be complexified and understood in depth; while in the past, bodies of literature were dedicating to dichotomizing economic and cultural explanations for its rise, new frontiers in illiberalism research conceptualize these causes as co-constitutive, or at a minimum deeply entangled. With illiberal parties increasingly finding success and even entering government, it has also become important to study the effect that these parties have on the neoliberal status quo when they achieve power. Is illiberalism a break with neoliberalism, or merely a cruder handmaiden of it? This initiative puts these themes and questions into play, working toward a better understanding of the political economy that creates and is created by illiberal movements and actors in our world today.