Does neoliberalism create more harmful societies?

In recent years interest has grown in the concept of social harm as a form of interdisciplinary enquiry that can provide accurate and systematic analyses of injury in capitalist societies. This methodological lens offers a sophisticated picture of social injury, enabling us to understand the interrelated nature of harm, its social patterning, and how its impacts accumulate across one's life course. A principal motivation for this work has been to document the purported harms caused by the neoliberal restructuring that has reshaped advanced industrialised societies since the late 1970s. A key - yet largely untested claim of the social harm approach is that neoliberal reforms have eroded the ability of states to regulate market activity and weakened public institutions designed to protect populations from socioeconomic harms - creating more harmful societies.

To date, this analysis remains theoretical and qualitative in nature, and these claims are largely untested. A few studies map the association between aspects of neoliberal reform and rising social harms; yet these focus on a limited number of variables and utilise cross-sectional designs that are unable to capture causal links between these phenomena. Moreover, even a more limited number of experimental studies exist that address causal relationships between neoliberalism and factors that could be defined as social harms. Therefore, there is a significant gap in the literature requiring quantitative methods capable of measuring causality between multiple features of neoliberalism and social harms.

Firstly, this research project will address this gap by making a significant contribution to the operationalisation of the social harm definition and the development of aetiological models of harm production. It will utilise Pemberton's threefold definition of social harm: autonomy harms (the inability to lead a life of own choosing; e.g. poverty, insufficient leisure time), relational harms (the inability to maintain positive relationships with others; e.g. social isolation, misrecognition) and physical/mental health harms (ill-health, e.g. high blood pressure, depression). The empirical application will allow further refinement of these concepts, which will provide a significant contribution to the current literature. The causal models for this study will be built from the extant political economy literature that defines neoliberalism as the re-ordering of social and economic relationships to promote the market and competition as the most effective means to organise society.

Secondly, this project will adopt a multi-method approach and longitudinal quasi-experimental research design to investigate whether features of neoliberalism cause social harms, and if so, which features are more damaging. This will be executed by employing advanced quantitative methods and utilising secondary longitudinal data provided by Understanding Society, EQLS, Eurostat, ILO, OECD, World Bank, etc. This project will also collect primary data in the form of an experiment which will aim to determine whether neoliberalism causes social harms. This will be determined by using analysis of variance and presenting two groups of individuals with hypothetical but realistic scenarios, in which neoliberal features will be modified across two scenarios, whilst maintaining the remaining content constant. Lastly, this project will also investigate which demographic groups experience more social harms caused by neoliberalism.

The purpose of this research is to promote a structural change - the identification of harmful features will inform policy on what features of neoliberalism should be designed out of our societies to minimise the occurrence of social harms. Moreover, this research project will inform policy on which demographic groups may require the most protection from the social harms created by neoliberalism.