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This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

The contribution starts out from the question whether the political legitimacy of the Third Wave democracies has suffered in the wake of the Great Recession. The expectation of a damaging effect of an economic or political crisis on legitimacy is based on Lipset’s assumption that established democracies with a high degree of political legitimacy are better capable of coping with such crises than young democracies. The database includes two surveys of members of parliament conducted in 2007 and 2013 in Sweden, Germany and five Third Wave democracies located in different world regions (Chile, South Korea, Poland, South Africa and Turkey). Waves 5 and 6 of the World Values Survey that were conducted at about the same time were used for comparing the legitimacy beliefs among MPs and citizens. The data show that the scores for all indicators of political legitimacy are higher among MPs than among citizens and that the differences between the two groups of respondents are considerably larger in the five young democracies. Confidence in political parties is fairly low, especially among citizens, while the evaluation of the quality of democracy in the respondents’ country is much higher. Both evaluations have been rather stable over time. In the two established democracies, support for democracy among citizens is nearly as high as among MPs. In the five young democracies, the MP-citizen differential is larger and support for democracy in the population shows a steady increase only in Chile, while it has remained low in Poland and Turkey and even decreased in Korea and South Africa. This indicates that democracy has not taken deep roots in four of the five new democracies included in the study. In Korea and South Africa, the decline in support for democracy started already before the onset of the economic crisis and therefore cannot be attributed to the recession. This is confirmed by the lack of a statistical relationship between political legitimacy on one side and economic evaluations on the other side. A multiple regression analysis shows strong country-specific effects, while individual-level variables have only minor effects.

This study systematically addresses an important yet neglected question pertaining to the potentially time-varying effects of economic development on political democracy. Building on Huntington's insightful observations of alternating “waves” and “reverse waves” of democracy in world history, we deduce research hypotheses subject to empirical falsification and find, through a systematic analysis of the experiences of 87 countries from the 1960s to 1990s, that the impact of economic development on democracy shifted from the well-known U-shaped relationship to an inverted U-curve. These shifts occurred around 1980, a time point that corresponds to Diamond's classification of the end of the “second reverse wave” and beginning of the “third wave” of democratization. The finding thus demonstrates that the “wavy” progression of democracy in the world reflects historically changing dynamics of economic development and their impacts on political democracy over time.

There is a long-lasting debate on the relationship between democracy and economic growth, though it remained inconclusive. On the other hand, corruption is one of the greatest challenges of the contemporary world that lessens the efficiency of a good government, distorts public policy, leads to the misallocation of resources, harms the private sector and particularly hurts the poor. Moreover, the corruption–growth relationship has been shown to be contingent upon the political regime. This chapter has chosen a set of emerging market economies (EMEs), which consists of democratic as well as authoritarian countries, to throw light on democracy–growth relationship through the channel of corruption using a system generalized method of moments estimation of a panel of 27 countries for a period of 2006–2018. Results show that democracy is growth-enhancing but corruption dampens its positive impact to some extent. However, for authoritarian countries corruption can enhance growth.

This article examines relationships between capitalism and democracy as perceived by contending perspectives within the liberal capitalist‐liberal democratic tradition(s). Bentham and the Mills are taken as initiating both this tradition and the core elements of the debate within it. Pre‐Benthamite theories are first reviewed. Then, after discussion of Bentham and James Mill and of John Stuart Mill, Mill's late nineteenth and early twentieth century successors are examined. We then go on to consider hypotheses concerning the “exceptional” quality of relationships between capitalism and democracy in the United States. The penultimate section of the article adumbrates the main contours of mid‐twentieth century pluralist‐elitist theories. We conclude with a summary.

Recent empirical and theoretical developments related to the microprocesses of institutional logics have helped to cultivate a powerful theory of agency. We build on these developments to show how the institutional logics perspective can shed light on important questions related to frame construction and how institutions matter. In particular, we show how the emergence of an economic democracy frame in post-war Sweden generated different efforts to define that frame with concrete ideas and practices linked to different logics – socialism and neoliberalism. We show how socialists tried to define economic democracy as requiring a radical transformation in the nature of ownership and control embedded in the innovative financial practice of wage earner’s funds. In contradistinction, conservatives drew on neoliberal ideas and extant mutual fund practices to construct alternative meanings and practices related to economic democracy that enrolled citizens in Capitalism without challenging extant Capitalist ownership structures. While mutual funds and wage earner’s funds initially existed in a state of parabiosis – existing side by side without much interrelationship – struggles over the meaning of economic democracy led these practices to become competing solutions in a framing contest. Implications for the study of institutional logics, frames and the social organization of society are discussed.

Although the concept of ‘social capital’ is not a new concept, its rise coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. This concept of sociology, left in a controversial and secondary position, was reborn both in the social, political and economic fields and in the scientific world, with the increase of the COVID-19 outbreak cases. Social capital is a form of socialisation and a way of performing social relationships. The COVID-19 outbreak led to the understanding that physical capital and human capital would not be sufficient to sustain social life, and, therefore, social capital started to rise. The expected private earning from social capital is not individual profit, but collective welfare and mutual benefit. In short, social capital is the capital spent on society and is for common good. On the other hand, social capital has a volume in proportion to the density of the capitals in the society. Social capital, with its intensity, has attracted the attention of different disciplines on Corona days and has exceeded the limits of sociology. Another issue to be emphasised in this study is the relationship between social capital and democracy. In societies where tutelary democracy is dominant, civil society cannot become functional enough. In this difficult environment, social capital is shaped as paternal (tutelary) and a healthy social network cannot be functionalised in society. On the one hand, the horrors of the pandemic are experienced, and, on the other hand, a social capital model that is ineffective in healing social wounds emerges.

Existing attempts to assess national development and processes of democratization suffer from conceptual and measurement challenges. This paper proposes a comprehensive concept of democratic development and develops a more inclusive concept of democracy to provide a common set of categories to evaluate its depth and quality.

In order to measure the depth and health of democracy, democratic development incorporates four categories of human progress, each measured by multiple variables. The four categories deemed important for human progress are general development, democratic health, democratic inclusiveness, and human capital. Components of democratic development incorporate existing measures of political and economic development to create a comprehensive and accessible measure of democratic development.

The comparative tables based on multiple goals of development clearly reveal that neither the GDP index nor the HDI are adequate measures of development. Democratic development can be more fully captured by four perspectives: development, democratic inclusiveness, democratic health, and human capital, providing a framework to measure progress in reform, democracy, and development, from public agencies up to the national level. This concept incorporates aspects and orientations of the capabilities approach to create a concept that is amenable to use as a self‐assessment tool and as a basis for comparison of development, broadly conceived.

This inclusive concept is particularly well suited for analyzing citizen satisfaction and democratic stability.

Rather than focusing on singular measures, the approach presented here offers a balanced set of measures aimed at providing a comprehensive view of the gamut of democratic and economic development processes relative to existing models that is more appropriate for self‐assessment/planning purposes than traditional measures, which may be more appropriate for statistical modeling purposes.

The paper examines the relationship between board effectiveness and audit fees for state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Furthermore, given the unique nature of SOEs, the paper assesses country-level influences, such as economic freedom, political democracy and protection of minority shareholders, which can impact board effectiveness and audit fees.

A combination of two-stage and ordinary least squares regression is used to examine the board characteristics-audit fee relationship for SOEs in a multinational setting during the period from 2016 to 2018.

The results indicate that board characteristics that represent a high level of effectiveness are associated with higher audit fees in SOEs. Furthermore, the findings suggest SOE's operating in countries evidencing medium levels of democracy and economic freedom and medium to high levels of protection of minority shareholders may be motivated to reduce agency conflicts by promoting accountability and transparency, thereby demanding increasing levels of corporate governance, monitoring and audit quality, thereby increasing audit fees.

The results provide further support for the OECD (2015) guidelines promoting the use of high-quality external audits in SOEs.

As a result of the scarceness of research in this area, the current study extends the literature by examining the role of corporate governance and audit fees in SOEs, while examining the influence of economic freedom, political democracy and protection of minority shareholders.