Project

Rebalancing democracy and capitalism

The REBALANCE project investigates how large companies have contributed to past and present threats to democracy and how these powerful actors can adopt alternative organisational forms that support, instead of jeopardising, democratic processes in European liberal democracies and in post-Soviet countries.

Nadia Bernaz, Olena Uvarova, Chiara Macchi and Kacper Zajac at the LAW Group are responsible for Work Package 3, ‘Past and present threats to democracy: how business organisations shape democratic institutions and values’.

Background

Democracy is under threat from capitalism. Transnational companies are undermining democratic processes both at home and abroad through excessive lobbying, violations of human rights, and collusion with repressive governments. The growing power of large companies is a concern for policy in many countries and, especially, in contexts where the institutional apparatus has proven unable to safeguard the interests and rights of the local population and has privileged companies’ rent-seeking objectives.

But businesses and their leaders can also help promote democracy by exercising a positive influence on governments, contributing to protect the rights of minorities, or even produce democracy-enhancing products and services.

While some economic actors are experimenting with alternative models supporting sustainability and an alternative “democracy-conforming capitalism”, there is currently a dearth of interdisciplinary research on these matters, with legal, political science and management research largely operating in silos.

Project description

The REBALANCE project will fill this gap by investigating how large companies:

  1. have contributed to past and present threats to democracy;
  2. can promote future democracy-enhancing business models and alternative organisational forms.

The aim is to formulate suggestions for new evidence-based policies and business models to re-balance the power relationships between democratic societies and the business sector. The project will investigate how transnational corporations can, instead, become agents of positive change toward empowering citizens as participants in democratic processes.

The project will identify:

  • The most effective regulatory control of economic actors, which avoids anti-democratic distortions and reveals human rights violators, and what makes large firms accept or resist such control;
  • Ways to tackle (self-)exclusion from the democratic participation of victims of business-related human rights infringements and other marginalised categories, relying on empowerment-centered partnerships between firms and other entities (e.g.. NGOs);
  • Whether and how companies respond to populisms, and how alternative organisational forms such as social enterprises might embed and foster democracy.

Led by the University of Pisa, the project is a collaboration between seven European universities and an international NGO.

The LAW Group will contribute to the project through the team’s long-standing expertise in business and human rights, international human rights law and rule of law research. Leading the project’s WP3, the WUR team will have the main task to identify the strategies used by the political institutions of democracy in selected countries to exercise control over the activities of economic actors.

The team will produce academic publications and workshops and it will organise one international conference and a summer school on the themes of the project.