SASE 2021 Award Winners

The committee writes: Through case studies of Colombia and the United States, and through the lens of economic advisors traversing the two countries from the 1930s to the 1980s, this book blurs the boundaries between the global South and North, the developmental and welfare states, and the post-war and neoliberal eras. The "mixed economy" of the title refers to the continuities across these boundaries, as well as to the unintended consequences of policy activism rooted in one model of the state and economy that intersects and merges with a different model in the process of implementation and negotiation on the ground. Substantively, the book assembles evidence pertaining to a wide range of policy domains, from agrarian reform and poverty alleviation to housing development and higher education; it also moves spatially across rural and urban areas in both Colombia and the United States. The book is fluidly and elegantly written as it follows several key Colombian and American economic advisors and policymakers often working in concert with international organizations such as the World Bank and IMF. Although extensively researched and documented in the mode of historical analysis, the book engages with a large interdisciplinary literature on these topics—in economic sociology, political science, and economics—and thus will be of interest to a broad spectrum of SASE scholars. 

The committee writes: This ambitious book examines the trajectory of neoliberal policies from inception to a later stage of development in which such policies become institutionalized and potentially resistant to opposition on the part of left movements, nationalized and other protected domestic industries, and the public at large. An analytical framework is proposed in which the resilience of neoliberalism is contingent on three dynamics: (1) blocking oppositional groups from political power, (2) creating and solidifying a coalition of supportive political partners, particularly from the financial and export-oriented business community, and (3) enacting constitutional reforms that insulate neoliberal policy and policymakers from democratic interventions and reforms. Using both quantitative and qualitative data and methods, the book offers an in-depth empirical examination of the impact of these factors on exchange rate and industrial policy in two contrasting country cases in Latin America (Chile and Argentina) and Easter Europe (Estonia and Poland), finding compelling support for the proposed framework. In the final chapter, the book considers the extent to which neoliberalism in Chile and Estonia remains resilient in the context of recent events, such as the rise of ethnonationalist populist movements, in comparison to the countries where neoliberalism is less institutionalized (i.e., Argentina and Poland). Taking up central questions facing countries in many regions of the world today, this impressive book will resonate with scholars throughout the SASE community. 

On "The Financialization of Policy Preferences: Financial Asset Ownership, Regulation and Crisis Management," the committee writes: The empirical part is based on the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, completed by a proprietary base called Catalist, in order to look at the support for two major bills that followed the 2008 financial crisis: the Relief Asset Program (TARP), which would help to bailout Wall Street banks and the package of financial regulatory reforms known as the Dodd-Frank Act. The authors test the US Citizens support to these reforms looking at demographic variables (including their race/ethnicity category) and most of all their key explanatory variable of interest is the ownership of financial assets. With impressive multi-analyses, the results confirm the author’s hypotheses that financial asset ownership increases the support for bailouts and decreases the support for financial regulation.

These results are refined with several other questions: they show the importance of the context, in period of financial booms, the identification with financial industry by households who own financial assets is higher than in period of crises. Also, class matters: the emergence of ‘financial culture’ is not even among social groups.

To conclude, this article provides strong results to an important and little explored question. There is no doubt it can be of interest for many readers of the Socio-Economic Review, since it triggers a discussion between political economy and the financialization of everyday life studies. In addition, we want to stress that the writing is exceptionally clear and easy to follow.