Changing the Common Sense: Are populist and anti-establishment movements shifting the UK economic policy paradigm?

My research will ask whether new populist and anti-establishment movements represent a challenge to the dominant UK economic policy paradigm.

My proposed research therefore focusses on understanding the shape and significance of emerging political alternatives to neoliberalism in the UK. There is an emerging body of scholarship on how anti-establishment movements elsewhere (e.g. in Latin America) have challenged the neoliberal paradigm, but these ideas have not yet been forensically applied to emerging populist and anti-establishment movements in the UK.

I will explore whether these movements articulate a coherent new account of how the economy works and what should be done to improve it; and, if so, whether there is evidence of these accounts beginning to permeate the broader societal 'common sense' in a way that could shift the rules of the game.