Learning Outcomes:
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
Critically assess normative debates on democracy, justice, and inequality.
Analyse empirical trends in income, wealth, and carbon inequalities within and between advanced democracies.
Understand the drivers of wealth concentration, housing wealth, and unaffordability.
Evaluate whether and how economic and ecological inequalities undermine democratic legitimacy and market competition.
Analyse public opinion and voting behaviour on inequality, redistribution, and reform.
Examine the mechanisms through which the super-rich and multinationals exert influence over states and policymaking.
Assess how legal and financial architectures enable global profit shifting and tax avoidance.
Understand the political economy of global carbon inequality and elite pollution.
Evaluate the role of the state in enforcing market competition, limiting corporate power, and defending democracy.
Engage with debates on whether defending capitalism and democracy requires rethinking property rights and state-market relations.
Indicative Module Content:
This module critically examines the tensions between capitalism and democracy in the world’s richest economies. As income, wealth, and corporate power become increasingly concentrated, we ask: what levels of inequality are compatible with democratic values? When does the concentration of wealth and capital undermine fair markets and erode democratic legitimacy?
We explore how advanced capitalist democracies have produced—and tolerated—rising inequalities of income, wealth, and housing. We ask why some countries remain more equal than others, and how these inequalities shape voting behaviour, public opinion, and democratic conflict. We examine how housing wealth and unaffordability are reshaping the politics of class, intergenerational conflict, and redistribution.
We also investigate the mechanisms of elite influence over government, the legal architectures of corporate tax avoidance, and the global patterns of profit shifting by multinationals. In doing so, we interrogate how law, finance, and politics sustain new forms of oligarchy.
A critical theme of the module is the ecological dimension of inequality. We examine why the wealthiest groups pollute far more than the rest of society, and how global carbon inequalities intersect with wealth inequalities to deepen both economic and environmental injustice.
The module concludes by asking whether democratic capitalism can renew itself through pro-market, pro-democratic reforms—and whether this will require strong states capable of confronting concentrated corporate, financial, and ecological power.