Advanced capitalist democracies have adopted macroeconomic policy rules (MPRs) – “fiscal rules” and “inflation targets” - since the 1980s. MPRs’ basically aim to “tie the hands” of elected governments and thereby restrain the influence of popular preferences on macroeconomic policymaking. But what if the adoption of MPRs not only restrains popular preferences, but also reshapes them? We hypothesize that despite being described by their advocates as politically-neutral, MPRs have encouraged a more conservative and technocratic media coverage of macroeconomic policies. We further hypothesize that since individual perceptions are affected by media coverage and framing, such change in media coverage has enhanced conservative and technocratic perceptions among individuals. We examine these hypotheses through several work packages which include computerized text analysis and qualitative content analyses of long-term media coverage of macroeconomic policies as well as a set of survey experiments.
What explains the resilience of neoliberal policies after the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) even when their political dominance was eroded by significant social and political powers that challenge them? I suggest that one important factor which supports neoliberal policies is the ideational-institutional depoliticization of economic policymaking, which has been based on neoliberal ideas of government: economic ideas that focus on appropriate decision-making processes rather than on appropriate policies per se. I argue that ideational-institutional depoliticization has restrained the ability and willingness of powerful social and political actors to change neoliberal policies. This argument is demonstrated through a process-tracing analysis of three case studies in which neoliberal policies were challenged, which took place in Sweden (2014–2018) and Israel (2011–2019). [download working paper]
Government credibility is crucial for promoting social and environmental goals. But in recent decades governments adhered to neoliberalism and promoted only one type of credibility - market credibility. This research project aims to define and conceptualize additional types of government credibility - not least social credibility and environmental credibility - and to examine how the institutionalization of one type of government credibility affects other types of credibility-enhancing institutions. Ultimately the questions on which we focus is which types of government credibility our governments should adhere to and how should we prioritize and strike a balance between them.
Industrial relations in Israel have been characterized by a process of economic professionalization - an enhanced involvement of professional economists in collective bargaining. What are the drivers of this process and what are its consequences? We argue that previous stages of liberalization of industrial relations contribute to such economic professionalization. Specifically, processes of decentralization and marketization have increased the complexity of industrial relations and weakened the power of unions, thereby encouraging trade unions to rely on economists’ expertise and advice. We further contend that economists not only assist unions in achieving their traditional goals but also seek to affect how unions define their preferences and the ways to achieve them. Specifically, professional economists tend to promote the depoliticization of industrial relations and market-friendly adaptations of collective agreements. We corroborate these arguments through an in-depth analysis of the case study of Israel, based on some 30 semi-structured interviews with union leaders and economists involved in industrial relations.
An in-depth analysis of the Israeli paradigmatic case of economic liberalization suggests that a crucial factor behind economic liberalization during the 1980s was the political power accumulated by liberal economists in academia and the public sector. Based on this finding we argued that the political influence of ideas depends on the power resources held by ideational entrepreneurs who carry and disseminate them. I further show how the persistent ideational influence of liberal economists was supported by their ability to institutionalize their political influence through governmental changes that empowered state bodies like the central bank and the treasury. These governmental changes, which effectively turned economists from policy advisors to policymakers, were justified and guided by NIGs – liberal economists’ theories on the inherent pitfalls of democratically-managed economic policymaking. In other words, this set of my studies demonstrates that the ideational influence of liberal economists was, on the one hand, conditioned on their political power, while, at the same time, those economists and their theories have actively enhanced their power. This set of in-depth case study analysis is complemented with a quantitative analysis that shows that treasury economists, in comparison to their colleagues, are characterized by technocratic tendencies, meaning that they indeed seem to internalize NIGs and see their role as policymakers.
In recent years, I utilized my findings on NIGs and the institutional changes that they have informed to explain the immediate policy responses to the Great Recession and the longer-term political-economic effects of the 2008 financial crisis. While many comparative political economic studies tend to focus on the variation of policy responses to crises, I show in that a crucial characteristic of the macroeconomic responses of advanced economies to the Great Recession was their similarity. I explain how this similarity was affected by critical influence of the same NIGs and the institutionalization of a very similar decision-making architecture. I argue that these factors have brought about to the adoption of a very similar mix of highly expansive monetary policy and restricted fiscal policy. I also show, together with Tami Oren, that these factors have brought about to the adoption of a historically unique pattern of “depoliticized interventionism” in virtually all advanced economies and produced a series of evolutionary changes in post-2008 economic policies. I further suggest that NIGs and their institutionalization have also contributed to the resilience of the neoliberal political-economic regime after its seeming failure in 2008; in my current project, I analyze how these factors have mitigated and even prevented efforts to implement new forms of economic interventions in countries like Israel and Sweden.
One of most prominent neoliberal phenomena is financialization – the growing dominance of financial logics, actors and markets – not least of our everyday lives. In Israel, neoliberal technocrats at the Israeli Ministry of Finance have promoted the financialization of redistributive child allowances to prevent their decommodifying effect, especially on ultraorthodox and Palestinian recipients, and at the same time to encourage the engagement of common citizens in financial markets. My co-authored studies this case study of financialization, with Amit Avigur-Eshel and Zeev Rosenhek, offer novel theoretical contribution to the literature on neoliberalism and financialization by showing how welfare state financialization can be utilized as means of ‘redistribution without decommodification’ and how a welfare policy can operate as a ‘model experience’ through which neoliberal elites promote common financialized behavior.
As various studies have shown, political-economic reforms and economic liberalization reforms in particular are in many cases the result of long-term gradual processes. My co-authored studies of privatization of social services in Israel, with Michal Koreh and Ilana Shpaizman, demonstrate how gradual institutional changes, due to their incremental and long-term characteristics, lend opportunity to their opponents to block and even reverse them. At the same time, and against that, we argue that these gradual change processes also tend to reinforce themselves by making the institutional context more susceptible to further change.
A general analysis of Israel’s political economy and its historical transformations can be found in several of my studies, including a co-authored chapter, with Michael Shalev, on the evolution of Israeli Neoliberalism in the Oxford Handbook of Politics and Society in Israel and a co-authored chapter, with Gidi Rahat, on the diminishing links between unions and left-wing parties in Israel. One of these transformations – the all-encompassing privatization of government services and utilities – is thoroughly analyzed in a book I co-edited with Amir Paz-Fuchs and Itzhak Galnoor.