Neoliberal democracy vs neoliberal authoritarianism: Capitalism and democracy’s global contest in the twenty-first century

In the contemporary Neoliberal world order, the issues that define the age-old debate about the relationship between capitalism and democracy have become more nuanced and critical. In the 21st C, the democracy-capitalism conundrum that Joseph Schumpeter grappled with in the 20th century (Schumpeter, 2008) has become a debate about the relationship between two paradigmatic processes referred to as “neoliberal democracy” and “authoritarian neoliberalism”. Using the two concepts to frame the discussion, the chapter explores five dimensions that shape the relationship between capitalism and democracy reflected around the world in practice in the contemporary global world order. First is the authoritarian regime that strategically leverages neoliberal globalism to achieve newly industrializing development. A second strand stems from transitioning democracies - considered low intensity democracies - that are seen to impose neoliberal economic regimes on their citizens to sustain development goals. In the least developed regions of the world, low intensity neoliberal democracies emerge as choiceless democracies imposed by international finance institutions on aid recipient developing world countries; this presents a third relationship. A fourth relationship resists neoliberalism through progressive populist regimes while a fifth occurs primarily among Western liberal democracies where the crisis of neoliberalism produces the crisis of liberal democracy. We apply all five models to case events that illustrate contemporary political-economic transformations in the UK, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the US, and that examine democratic impact, change, and transformation. The chapter concludes that authoritarian neoliberalism (Bruff, 2013, 2019) has emerged as a dominant regime type around the world whose impact has been to increasingly destabilize liberal democracy in the West and to stunt the substantive consolidation of democracy in the Global South.