Thursday 8 September 2022, 10am-5pm. Manchester Metropolitan University, All Saints Campus, Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6BH.

Politicians today can call upon an enviable range of radical yet popular policy proposals – such as investment in climate sustainability and the creation of green jobs, redistributive fiscal policies to ameliorate the cost-of-living crisis and combat regional inequality, devolution of decision-making to local and regional government, and proactive regulation of market power in the digital sector and beyond. Yet often these policies come across as discrete transactional offers to voters, rather than as expressions of a compelling socioeconomic analysis and political narrative.

While it is easy for politicians to dismiss the
vision thing as irrelevant to voters, who are supposedly preoccupied with more bread-and-butter issues, narratives play a valuable role in improving the consistency of political messaging and enhancing the credibility of politicians’ promises. By contrast, their absence invites voters to fill in the blanks themselves, informed by targeted social media campaigns that portray them as either too radical or too reactionary, whichever is worse in the eye of the beholder.

The purpose of this workshop is to ask what contemporary economic ideas, political narratives and social analyses have the potential to underpin, join up and influence novel policies (and policy messages) across a range of different domains. What do these theories have to say about the respective limits of governments and markets? About technology, automation and the future of work? About future sources of growth? About how to empower employees, consumers and citizens relative to capital? About the relationships between the local, the national and the global? About the economic and geopolitical threats and opportunities that confront developed democracies in the world today?

The answers to these questions might come from heterodox economics (modern monetary theory; demand-side approaches; post-Keynesian economics) or from more empirically-informed mainstream research (grappling with the realities of imperfect markets, monopolistic and monopsonistic practices, links between higher levels of equality and higher levels of productivity/output, the prevalence of economic rents, the risks of catastrophic climate externalities, and so forth). They might come from outside the economics profession entirely, from other social scientific disciplines and/or involving other forms of social inquiry.

Submissions to the workshop might examine the political positioning of progressive parties and movements; the deeper theoretical case(s) underpinning individual progressive policy proposals; how certain ideas might link novel policies across a range of domains (economic growth, climate change, cost-of-living, housing, health, education, etc.); how they build upon and/or contest previous progressive narratives (e.g. the Third Way/the social investment state); how they speak to (or against) received wisdom and established interests among policy elites, media gatekeepers and wider civil society; as well as what these analyses tell us about broader questions such as the relationship between state and market, regional and national, and/or present and future challenges facing developed democracies.

If you are interested in attending this workshop, please contact Nick ODonovan at [email protected].

A limited number of travel bursaries will be available to attendees from outside Greater Manchester who are unable to arrange alternative funding. Remote presentations may also be possible on request.