Operationalizing Hegemony: How Economic Ideas Shape Attitudes about Growth Models

Sinisa Hadziabdic

While the growth model perspective implicitly assumes that a dominant growth model goes together with a hegemonic discourse justifying and legitimizing its existence, no one has yet provided a convincing explanation of how these hegemonic effects are supposed to operate. The project aims to fill this gap by focusing on the role of public intellectuals, professional economists in particular. It is assumed that economists play a key role in disseminating the dominant economic rhetoric in the public sphere. First, the project will provide a systematic account of the historical evolution of economic discourse and uncover its changing scientific, ideological, and cognitive roots in four countries (Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy) by using mostly automated textual analysis and regression tools. Second, it will empirically explore the mechanisms by which economic discourse is able to influence perceptions about growth model effectiveness through a series of attitudinal experiments. Project duration: March 2020 to February 2023.