Neoliberal Hegemony and the Post-Democratization of the Public Sphere. An analytical framework to evaluate the democratic quality of political discourse

Abstract The paper offers an analytical framework to evaluate the democratic quality of public discourses in Western democracies and discusses the consequences of a post-democratization of the public sphere. Referring to Colin Crouch, Jacques Rancière and Sheldon Wolin it arguesthat the gradual transformation of western democracies to “post-democracies” is marked by neoliberal hegemony, which strengthened the influence of economic elites and decreased the political power of the citizenry without being accompanied by institutional change. As it is argued in the paper, it also leads to a structural transformation of the public sphere. By analyzing these changes we can even test the post-democratic assumptions empirically and evaluate the impact of neoliberal hegemony on public discourse. Resumen El presente artículo ofrece un marco de análisis para evaluar la calidad democrática de los discursos públicos en las democracias occidentales y expone las consecuencias de la post-democratización de la Esfera Pública. Parte de los postulados de Colin Crouch, Jacques Rancière y Sheldon Wolin, y defiende que las transformaciones graduales de las democracias occidentales en “post-democracias” están marcadas por la hegemonía neoliberal, que refuerza la influencia de las elites económicas y limita el poder de la ciudadanía, sin que se acompañe de un cambio institucional visible. Se argumenta que tal proceso produce un cambio estructural en la esfera pública. Mediante el análisis de estos cambios resulta posible probar empíricamente las hipótesis post-democráticas y evaluar el impacto de la hegemonía neoliberal en el discurso público. Keywords Post-Democracy, Public Sphere, neoliberalism, hegemony Palabras clave Post-democracia, Esfera Pública, neoliberalismo, hegemonía Neoliberal Hegemony and the Post-Democratization of the Public Sphere. An analytical framework to evaluate the democratic quality of political discourse Hegemonia Neoliberal y la Post-Democratización de la Esfera Pública: marco de análisis para evaluar la calidad del discurso democrático Claudia Ritzi (Helmut-Schmidt-University) [[email protected]] E-ISSN: 2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 2014, 11, pp. 167 - 187 Recibido: 15/06/2014 Aceptado: 06/08/2014 Claudia Ritzi 168 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 167-187] E-ISSN: 2173-1071 Summary 1. Introduction 2. “Post-Democracy” and Neoliberal Hegemony 2.1 Colin Crouch: The post-democratization of liberal democracies 2.2 Jacques Rancière: Post-Democracy as neoliberal de-politicization 2.3 Sheldon Wolin: Post-Democracy and inverted totalitarianism 2.4 Post-democracy and neoliberal hegemony 3.Neoliberal hegemony and discourse analysis 3.1 The indirect rule of neoliberal hegemony 3.2 Analytical Perspectives 4. Conclusion: Neoliberal hegemony – an actual threat to Western democracies? Sumario 1. Introducción 2. “Postdemocracia” y Hegemonía Neoliberal. 2.1 Colin Crouch: La postdemocratización de las democracias liberales 2.2 Jacques Rancière: Post-Democracia y depolitización neoliberal 2.3 Sheldon Wolin: Post-Democracia y totalitarismo inverso 2.4 Post-democracia y hegemonía neoliberal 3. Hegemonía neoliberal y análisis del discurso 3.1 El mando indirecto de la hegemonía neoliberal 3.2 Perspectivas analíticas 4. Conclusión: La hegemonía neoliberaluna amenaza actual para las democracias occidentales? selecta NEolIbERal HEgEmoNy aNd tHE PoSt-dEmoCRatIzatIoN of tHE PublIC SPHERE 169 E-ISSN: 2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 167-187] 1. Introduction The critique of the state of democracy has always been an important part of Political Science, especially of Political Theory, and each period seems to have had its favorite theory or theories of crisis53. In the 1960’s William Kornhauser (2008) described the development of “mass societies” as a danger for modern democracy. In the 1970’s Juergen Habermas (1975) and Claus Offe (1975) became influential, mainly among leftist scholars. Their writings on the “legitimacy crisis” were based on Critical Theory and focused on problems of modern capitalism (“Spaetkapitalismus”). At the same time, conservative thinkers started to fear new democratic challenges, which in their opinion were expected to result from “overload” and “un-governability” (e. g. King 1975; Crozier/Huntington/Watanuki 1975). Just a few years later, concerns about the challenges that social movements, other new forms of political participation, and changed attitudes towards politics and politicians emerged (e.g. Inglehart 1977; Verba/Nie/Kim 1978). And in the 1990’s Robert Putnam (1995) warned of decreasing Social Capital. So when in 2004 the British sociologist Colin Crouch claimed the rise of neoliberal hegemony and the establishment of a “post-democratic” society, many political scientists tended to perceive his concept as “just another trendy pre-fix debate” (Hennig 2010), lacking “empirical proof” (Richter 2006) and, much more important, relevance (Buchstein/Nullmeier 2006). However, Crouch’s writings opened a lively debate on de-politicization and changing power relations in Western democracies, which led to a revival of Gramscian political thought on hegemony (Gramsci 2011; Laclau/Mouffe 1985) and of Foucault’s analysis of the rise of neoliberalism (Foucault 2004a; 2004b). “Post-democracy”, reinforced by theoretical contributions of radical democratic authors like Jacques Rancière and Sheldon Wolin, developed to become one of the most influential discourses in contemporary political science. Since the collapse of Lehmann Brothers Inc., which led to the current financial and economic crisis, it seems to be widely accepted that Western democracies under the influence of neoliberalism in recent years have lost control over the economy – and therefore also suffered a loss of democratic quality (see e.g. Offe 2008; Streeck 2013). So on the one hand, the consequences of the economic and financial crisis show the potential relevance and importance of the critique that Crouch, Rancière and Wolin articulated long before the first bank’s breakdown. On the other hand, some of the claims made in the discourse on post-democracy are considered 53 For a short overview see Kaase/Newton (2002: 17ff). Claudia Ritzi 170 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 167-187] E-ISSN: 2173-1071 controversial. Most importantly, the assertion that a neoliberal hegemony has been established in Western democracies from the 1970’s on, made by Crouch, Wolin and Rancière and supported by a range of authors such as Wendy Brown (2003, 2006), Chantal Mouffe (1993, 2007), and David Harvey (2007), has not yet been convincingly proven. Up to now, only certain possible consequences of neoliberal attitudes have been identified, such as processes of privatization, deregulation and the growing number of politically disenchanted citizens (see e.g. Crouch 2004, 2011). Also the war in Iraq (see Wolin 2008; Brown 2006) can be interpreted as a neoliberal project, which mainly served the interest of influential economic actors (e.g. oil companies). But the hegemony itself, that is constituted by complex changes in the way people think, communicate, and evaluate their lives up to now has not been analyzed in an all-encompassing manner. Therefore it is not surprising, that a number of critics still doubt the existence of a neoliberal hegemony in the Gramscian or Foucauldian sense, and refuse to acknowledge that neoliberalism is the main cause of today’s democratic crises (see e. g. Joerke 2010; Wilke 2003). They argue that the guarantee of civil rights, like freedom of speech, as well as the multiplicity of information sources available in the digital age, let the establishment of any hegemony appear as a highly unrealistic – if not impossible – development. Also they doubt the empirical validity of the post-democratic diagnosis and believe that Crouch’s, Rancière’s and Wolin’s thinking is driven by a romantic and unrealistic perspective on democratic processes after the Second World war. They don’t share the opinion that democratic quality was substantively higher in the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s than it is today (see e.g. Richter 2006; Joerke 2010; Hennig 2010). Against this background, the following paper offers a new analytical framework to discuss and analyze neoliberal hegemony. It argues that neoliberal hegemony in contemporary democracies must go along with certain changes in the structure of political discourses and makes a proposal of how to empirically analyze whether neoliberal thinking has become hegemonic in the past 40 years. Therefore, it first gives a short overview of the main aspects of post-democratic crisis theory (section 2). Building on these findings, it argues in section 3 why the hegemony of neoliberal thinking in democratic states necessarily has to influence public discourses in certain, characteristic ways. Therefore, by analyzing whether or not a structural change of the public discourse – similar to the changes Habermas (1991) described for the late 19th century – has taken place, we can evaluate the impact of neoliberalism on contemporary societies. Based on these elaborations an analytical framework is developed, which further explains the characteristics of a well-functioning democratic, in contrast to a post-democratic, public sphere and that enables us to empirically analyze processes of post-democratization from a selecta NEolIbERal HEgEmoNy aNd tHE PoSt-dEmoCRatIzatIoN of tHE PublIC SPHERE 171 E-ISSN: 2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 167-187] new perspective. At the end of the paper (section 4) some concluding remarks discuss the practical challenges of the presented analytical framework and the relevance of further research on post-democracy. 2. “Post-Democracy” and Neoliberal Hegemony 2.1 Colin Crouch: The post-democratization of liberal democracies Without any doubt, since he first published his well-known essay “PostDemocracy” in 2004, in which he criticizes the huge and growing influence of economic interests on political decision-making, Colin Crouch is the most famous spokesman of the discourse on neoliberal hegemony. Even though he was not the first one to use the term post-democracy (Jacques Rancière already spoke of post-democracy in a lecture in 1992), his work initiated the debate on the state of modern democracies. In “Post-Democracy” (2004), Crouch describes four main developments, which have been transforming formerly democratic systems into post-democratic ones since the 1970’s. (1) While democratic institutions formally stay intact, they de facto have been losing influence on the political decision-making process, which is more and more strongly dominated by a small number of (mostly economic) elites. (2) A “degeneration of political parties” has been taking place, which is turning political parties into “mere vote catching apparatus”, unable to develop meaningful agendas and mainly steered by information from opinion research. (3) The media do not fulfill their democratic functions sufficiently anymore; as well as the parties they have been victims of marketization and today focus on profit orientation instead of on political information and education. (4) Finally, Crouch criticizes the citizen’s passiveness and political disenchantment. Crouch identifies the rise of neoliberal thinking to a hegemonic paradigm as the ultimate cause of these post-democratic developments. The neoliberal ideology that has been politically influential in Europe since the election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister in the UK, paved the way for the mentioned developments, which significantly diminished the democratic quality of contemporary Western democracies54. 54 Thatcher enforced political reforms, which were strongly oriented towards economic wealth and interests – and that substantially decreased as well the unemployment rate as inflation in Great Britain. Her account was so successful that even leftist or social-democratic governments in different countries (e.g. president Clinton in the U.S. or Gerhard Schroeder in Germany) later adopted similar measures and so directly supported the rise of neoliberal hegemony (see Streeck 2013). Claudia Ritzi 172 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 167-187] E-ISSN: 2173-1071 2.2 Jacques Rancière: Post-Democracy as neoliberal de-politicization The French political philosopher Jacques Rancière (e.g. 2003: 1, 1999: 107) perceives neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology that has been harming democracy in Western states, even though his conception of democracy is in some respects quite different from Crouch’s. Being a radical democratic theorist, equality is the starting point as well as the aim of Rancière’s political thinking. One of his basic assumptions is that democracy is not much more than a society’s permanent struggle to achieve equality, and therefore so called “democratic” institutions are not the distinctive feature of democratically organized political communities. Instead, the disagreement between people who perceive themselves as equal for him is the main characteristic of democracy. A society where no disagreements become visible for Rancière is an “apolitical” and therefore necessarily undemocratic one. So, political institutions one the one hand mirror the democratic struggle for equality (e.g. the guarantee of basic rights, the establishment of courts), on the other hand they tend to solve disagreements or even to hinder conflicts from emerging. Therefore they always are accompanied by a tendency to depoliticize. To mark this tendency, Rancière describes the institutional part of modern democracies – often critically – as “the police” while “politics” or the “political” are marked by conflict and disagreement, and seen positively. Rancière (2001) explains: “The police says that there is nothing to see on a road, that there is nothing to do but move along. It asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in transforming this space of ‘moving-along’ into a space for the appearance of a subject: i.e., the people, the workers, the citizens: It consists in refiguring the space, of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein.” The political, not the police in Rancière’s sense allows people to act as equal subjects in the democratic process55. For him, democracy is a permanent and endless process of emancipation that goes along with conflict and disagreement that neither can nor should be resolved. Post-democratization in this understanding is a process of depoliticization, which goes beyond the “usual” tendency of the police to oppress conflicts within the citizenry. Neoliberal hegemony has been creating a new form of de-politicization by supporting the increasing the influence of economics on all spheres of life, especially on the political one. “Postdemocracy is the government practice and conceptual legitimization of a democracy after the demos, a 55 So his political thinking turns explicitly against institutional as well as consensus-oriented understandings of democratic politics such as Habermas’ deliberative theory. selecta NEolIbERal HEgEmoNy aNd tHE PoSt-dEmoCRatIzatIoN of tHE PublIC SPHERE 173 E-ISSN: 2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 167-187] democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state mechanisms and combination of social energies and interests. Postdemocracy is not a democracy that has found the truth of institutional forms in the interplay of social energies. It is an identifying mode, among institutional mechanisms and the allocation of the society’s appropriate parts and shares, for making the subject and democracy’s own specific action disappear” (Rancière 1999: 102). So post-democracy here is perceived as a political practice that reduces plurality in the political sphere and therefore stands in opposition to Rancière’s normative ideal of politics. Processes of post-democratization may appear in many shapes, but they always diminish what Rancière calls “the political”. Evidence for post-democratization is arguably witnessed in Western democracies on a daily basis: e.g. there are numerous statements of politicians who deny the contingency of political decision-making and therefore turn down disagreement or conflict (for example Thatcher’s famous term “there is no alternative” (the so called TINA-rhetoric), which she used more than once to denounce alternative policies as out of question and to emphasize the relevance of economic wealth). Rancière also criticizes the rising influence of experts on politics: in his opinion, politics dominated by experts fundamentally undermines the idea of equality. A third example is the downsizing of the state: the post-democratic longing for a minimal state mirrors the idea of politics as a government technique and contradicts the political as a permanent struggle and unsolvable dispute. 2.3 Sheldon Wolin: Post-Democracy and inverted totalitarianism The third important theorist of post-democracy is the political scientist Sheldon Wolin. In many respects his idea of democracy corresponds to Rancière’s. Wolin, like Rancière, criticizes neoliberalism and values “political moments”, when the existing order is taken into question, as “truly” democratic moments, and he is afraid of a post-democratic constellation where hardly any political moments occur anymore. Also as in Rancière’s understanding, for Wolin democracy is not guaranteed by the establishment of certain institutions, like free elections, equal political rights or freedom of the press. It rather is fugitive, what means it appears only in short political moments and then disappears again. It does not have a pregiven or stable shape – it is build on change and on the non-predictable interaction of people Referring to Tocqueville, Wolin states that democracies have an inherent tendency to degenerate: “What is crucial […] is the virtual disappearance of the culture of participation and its replacement by a culture of privatism, isolation Claudia Ritzi 174 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 167-187] E-ISSN: 2173-1071 and, what Tocqueville could not have foreseen, consumerism” (Wolin 2001: 570). Talking about post-democracy, he believes that at the end of the 20th century, in addition to the decline of democratic values within the citizenry, neoliberalism appeared and “set the norm for all practices concerned with significant stake of power, wealth or status” (Wolin 2004: 564). The coincidence of a weak democracy and neoliberalism lead to a postdemocratic constitution of the political sphere. Wolin here speaks of “inverted totalitarianism”: “While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a ‘master race’ (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the ‘ideal’” (Wolin 2004: 591). By comparing postdemocracies to totalitarian regimes, Wolin tries to identify and contextualize characteristic features of the transformation process he believes to be occurring, and he wants to warn people of its possibly grave consequences: “An inversion is present when a system, such as democracy, produces a number of significant actions ordinarily associated with its antithesis” (Wolin 2008: 46). Such an inversion, in his opinion, is taking place regarding the citizen’s engagement and power resources in contemporary democracies. No matter whether one likes or dislikes the parallels he draws between totalitarian states and negative developments in modern democracies, it is striking that Wolin’s conception of the democratic crisis is the only one which critically discusses the citizen’s role in the process of post-democratization. Totalitarianism is a buzzword, but Rancière and Crouch also do not expect post-democracy to resemble anarchy, but rather to resemble a regime type that is marked by limited freedom. Wolin also emphasizes, even more strongly than Rancière, the value of the public sphere for democracies. Without a lively public discourse, democracy is necessarily instable. Therefore, changes in the public sphere are of special relevance for democratic quality. 2.4 Post-democracy and neoliberal hegemony So all three concepts of post-democracy developed in Political Theory are based on the notion that a neoliberal hegemony has been established in Western democracies at the end of the 20th century – even though neoliberalism is not exactly defined by Crouch, Rancière or Wolin56. Referring to England and Ward (2007) we can distinguish four kinds of use of the term neoliberalism in the Social Sciences: Neoliberalism as an ideological hegemonic project”; “Neoliberalism 56 Crouch’s, Rancière’s and Wolin’s conceptions of post-democracy are by far the most influential ones in the discourse. An alternative conception was recently published by Ingolfur Bluehdorn (2013) who describes post-democracy as “simulative democracy” and believes processes of post-democratization to be hardly inevitable in post-modern societies. selecta NEolIbERal HEgEmoNy aNd tHE PoSt-dEmoCRatIzatIoN of tHE PublIC SPHERE 175 E-ISSN: 2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 167-187] as policy and program”; “Neoliberalism as state form”, and “Neoliberalism as governmentality”). In the discourse on post-democracy neoliberalism without any doubt is perceived primarily (but not exclusively) as an ideology and (referring to Foucault’s understanding) as a governmentality profoundly changing political decision-making processes, and standing in opposition to core democratic values – even though its hegemony does not necessarily lead to institutional change57. As Bob Jessop and others have shown, it contradicts democratic values not because it connects the linked spheres of economics and politics, but because it leads to a “capture” of political logic by economic logic. Values such as equality or justice (which are supposed to be as inherent to the political as economic logic), lose influence on political thinking, arguing and decision-making under a neoliberal hegemony 58. This constriction of the political is anti-democratic, because Crouch, Rancière and Wolin conceptualize democratic politics not as an institutional setting but as a sphere of societal life which cannot and should not be “managed” by applying fixed rules or in recourse to expert knowledge but which is based on conflict and interaction between equal people. So neoliberalism is the starting point of processes of post-democratization and therefore also the cardinal point of this crisis theory. Nevertheless, none of the three authors has comprehensively explained what characterizes neoliberal hegemony, described its mode of operation, or tried to prove its existence. While they do try to justify their assumption of neoliberal hegemony by referring to certain developments that can be interpreted as consequences of ideological change (e.g. the people’s acceptance of growing inequality, policies that lead to privatization and deregulation), their work lacks a clear analytical perspective on neoliberalism as well as reference to data or studies that sufficiently prove the expected omnipresence of neoliberal logic. To fill in that blind spot, in the following article an analytical framework is presented. It is based on discourse analysis, and aims at investigating the marks neoliberalism has left on public communication. 57 A different understanding of neoliberalism (and as well of liberalism) of course can be found in economics. Here neoliberalism usually is understood as a concept that challenges Keynesianism after the economic crisis in 1928 and was meant to offer a reformulated and revitalized liberal perspective of Adam Smith (see Hayek 1976; Walpen 2004). The first interpretation of neoliberalism as an ideology was formulated by Foucault and typically is used by social scientists and philosophers. 58 Ideally, according to Crouch, Rancière and Wolin no hegemony exists in a truly democratic society – even though they realize that this ideal is counterfactual. Their assumptions suggest that they perceive Western de-mocracies in the 1960’s and 1970’s as less dominated by a single ideology than they are today. Neoliberalism in their opinion has become hegemonic, while 40 years ago different modes of rationality were competing more strongly in the political sphere. Claudia Ritzi 182 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 167-187] E-ISSN: 2173-1071 many contemporary liberal thinkers deny that in free, democratic society such a situation is a realistic scenario for political action. Three further changes can be expected with reference to the conceptions of Crouch and Wolin. For them public discussions are the more ideal the more rational they are (which means the more arguments are uttered in them, and the less emotional, personalized and scandalized they are)61. First, the number of arguments stated in public discourses declines in the process of post-democratization. Second, instead of rational discourses, more one-sided articulations can be found in cases of neoliberal hegemony. In particular the share of economic arguments rises in the course of post-democratization processes, because this perspective is dominant in times of neoliberal hegemony. Finally, Crouch and Wolin argue that characteristics of tabloidization can be observed more and more often in the media coverage as a sign of neoliberalization. By testing these expectations empirically, we can find out whether and to which degree a neoliberal hegemony, in the way it is described in the discourse on post-democracy, has established itself in the political public since the 1970’s. From the perspective of a radical democratic and equality-oriented understanding of democracy, this approach enables us to determine the discursive quality of political discourses, and in combination with institutional indicators it could be the basis for an all-encompassing instrument to evaluate the democratic quality of contemporary media discourse. 4. Conclusion: Neoliberal hegemony – an actual threat to Western democracies? In this paper it has been argued why neoliberal hegemony might lead to an erosion of democratic (discourse) quality in Western political systems – and therefore is a fundamental part of the post-democratic critique authors like Colin Crouch, Jacques Rancière and Sheldon Wolin have uttered regarding the state of democracy at the beginning of the 21st century. The paper also presents an analytical approach that relates post-democratic hypotheses to discourse structures, which helps us not only to understand the post-democratic developments in a more all-encompassing manner, but it is also able to explain how neoliberal hegemony provokes a new form of democratic decline that is taking 61 Rancière, whose conception of equality forbids him to set standards on discourse quality than cannot be fulfilled similarly by all members of a political society, would not articulate these last three assumptions. Instead, he explicitly perceives all kinds of political communication (also emotional and non-argumentative ones) as of equal democratic value (Rancière 2009). selecta NEolIbERal HEgEmoNy aNd tHE PoSt-dEmoCRatIzatIoN of tHE PublIC SPHERE 183 E-ISSN: 2173-1071 IC – Revista Científica de Información y Comunicación 11 (2014) [pp. 167-187] place without institutional change. So it builds on the notion that if a neoliberal hegemony has been established in the past 40 years, such a structural change would have had to appear in the political public. This approach leads us to a research framework that offers not only a new theoretical perspective on neoliberal hegemony and post-democratization, but also proposes an innovative way to enhance the empirical relevance of the discourse on post-democracy, and to test its main assumption: the post-democratic developments that have been characteristic for Western democracies over the past 40 years were caused by the establishment of a neoliberal hegemony, which erodes fundamental democratic principles in, amongst other things, the public discourse and therefore threatens the democratic quality of these states without provoking institutional change. The framework instructs the empirical investigation of the extent to which, and over what time-span, neoliberal hegemony has changed the democratic quality of contemporary Western societies. Referring to the assumptions of scholars, who have been closely analyzing neoliberalism (e. g. Brown 2003, 2006, 2011; Harvey 2007; Foucault 2004a, b; England/Ward 2007) we can expect the process of neoliberalization to have started in the early 1970’s. Its gradual development went on until the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008 – though potentially (as Colin Crouch claims in his book “The strange non-death of neoliberalism” (2011)) neoliberal hegemony has persisted even over the last five years. But to gain the necessary data to test the post-democratic assumptions in an all-encompassing manner, a demanding discourse analysis will have to be designed that analyses changes on the three dimensions equality, openness and discourse rationality over a time-span of forty years. Even if one limits such a study on rather small samples and only small number of media-sources, the project will have to be analyzing a huge sample of coverage and is therefore quite ambitious. But given the relevance of a functioning public sphere in contemporary democratic societies, the effort of performing this kind of research seems to be worthwhile. Also, semi-automatic text-mining tools seem to be a promising and innovative way to gain such data – even though they also will have to be adapted closely to fulfill the needs of the presented analytical framework62. The analytical design presented in this paper is meant as a first step to do such empirical work. Hopefully, a close empirical examination will follow soon. Because only if we investigate theory and practice of neoliberal hegemony will we be able to determine the relevance of the analyses of theorists like Crouch, Rancière 62 For a short description of the state of research see Miner et al. (2012: 53ff.), for elaborations on the semi-automatic analysis of neoliberalism see Wiedemann et al. (2013). 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