Leah Downey and Stefan Eich
Calls to “democratize finance” abound today. Yet this apparent consensus obscures sharply divergent conceptions of both democracy and finance. This article maps these demands along two axes, distinguishing between access- and power-based conceptions of democracy, and between three dimensions of finance: payment, capital markets, and banking. We then develop three normative claims. First, we argue that conceptions that reduce democratization to expanded market access are not merely insufficient but, when applied to speculative capital markets, amount to predatory inclusion. Second, thicker accounts of democratization as equal inclusion are normatively more promising but internally unstable, as their democratic commitments generate pressures toward power sharing. Third, the most plausible conceptions of democratizing finance are power-centered and involve greater public control over credit creation and allocation. Rather than defending a single institutional solution, the article assesses a range of reform proposals while specifying a normative threshold for evaluating what it would mean to democratize finance.
Πηγή: American Political Science Review