Reopening the Black Box of Capitalist Dictatorship: Indicators and Aggregate Indexes for OECD Countries
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Reopening the Black Box of Capitalist Dictatorship: Indicators and Aggregate Indexes for OECD Countries Milan Zafirovski1 Accepted: 6 June 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper centers on the problem of capitalist dictatorship or its equivalents. It first constructs an aggregate index of capitalist dictatorship by combining its multiple indicators and proxies. Next, it calculates aggregate indexes of capitalist dictatorship for 36 OECD countries and rank these in these terms and conversely in respect of economic-political democracy. In addition, it estimates the effect of groups of contemporary societies or types of capitalism on capitalist dictatorship. Based on the findings of an exploratory analysis the paper infers that Western and comparable societies show large and systematic variations in their degrees of capitalist dictatorship. It concludes that the societal type of uncoordinated and inegalitarian, including oligarchic and plutocratic, capitalism is the man determinant and predictor of capitalist dictatorship today. The paper intends to contribute to understanding and predicting recent as well as long-term economic, political and other social processes among contemporary capitalist societies. Keywords Capitalism · Capitalist dictatorship · Democracy · OECD · Power · Wealth
1 Introduction ‘[There is a need for] outgrowing […] capitalist dictatorships’—Mancur Olson (2000). As the opening citation suggests, some scholars plead for ‘outgrowing communist and capitalist dictatorships’ in contemporary societies (Olson 2000; Sandler 2001). Since communist dictatorships are essentially defunct in Europe and Western and comparable societies, this plea continues to be relevant primarily for ‘capitalist dictatorships’ that these and other scholars identity or envision in such and related comparative settings. In theoretical or analytical terms, the above plea suggests overcoming the societal foundations of ‘capitalist Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1120 5-020-02407-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Milan Zafirovski [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 76203, USA
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dictatorships’ and by implications exploring and identifying their social indicators and constructing and computing their aggregate indexes, which is what the present study attempts to do. In general, the preceding proposes and reestablishes the concept and problem of ‘capitalist dictatorships’ and other ‘noncommunist dictatorships’ (Lindbeck 1971)—just as confirms that of dying ‘communist dictatorships’—in the social science literature (also, Bourdieu 1998; Dahrendorf 1979; Wright 2013). German sociologist Karl Mannheim while experiencing first-hand the rise of fascism in Europe during the 1920–1930s already introduces the concept of capitalist dictatorship to the sociological literature. Mannheim (1936) does so by observing that ‘dictatorsh
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