Cross-border capital mobility shifts power toward economic-resource holders over labour and voters.

Evidence

The borders of the nation-state traditionally have circumscribed the arena within which distributive processes take place, but it has long been recognized that the international setting is of significance for constellations of power relations and strategies of distributive conflict within nationstates. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, the cross-border mobility of financial assets has been facilitated by various forms of deregulation, thereby opening up new action alternatives for holders of economic power resources. Actors whose main resources are based on labour power and the right to vote have not benefited in the same way from the decreasing significance of national borders. Furthermore, in the Western countries mass unemployment has returned. In combination, these changes have reshaped relations of power, markedly improving the position of actors who control economic resources (cf. — Walter Korpi, The Iceberg of Power below the Surface, 22

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s interest in measuring real structural power deficits versus felt ones — ascription of causal power to exchangeable resources.