Democracy Challenged
@democracychall.bsky.social
An international, interdisciplinary team based at University College Dublin, we conduct research at the intersection of corporate tax avoidance, wealth distribution, and democratic institutions. Learn more at: https://democracychallenged.com/
Aidan Regan: Fuel protests show you cannot do climate policy without doing class politics @businesspost.bsky.social www.businesspost.ie/analysis-opi...
Aidan Regan: Fuel protests show you cannot do climate policy without doing class politics
businesspost.ie
In a world that rewards speed, doubt is a luxury few can afford, and exactly what we need. In this post we explore how the logic of #immediacy reshapes the way we form opinions, and why #academia should resist that pressure. The Unexpected Virtue of Doubting democracychallenged.com/2026/04/24/t...
The Unexpected Virtue of Doubting
Understanding how individuals shape their preferences and opinions is central to understanding how habits turn into political preferences, and political preferences into votes. In our project, we s…
democracychallenged.com
China Won the Green Race While the West Priced Carbon democracychallenged.com/2026/04/22/c...
China Won the Green Race While the West Priced Carbon
While European politicians debate whether a carbon tax is politically survivable, and American ones dismantle the Inflation Reduction Act, the decisive question of the green industrial revolution h…
democracychallenged.com
#Ireland 's #fuel protests show you cannot do #climate policy without doing class politics democracychallenged.com/2026/04/21/i...
Ireland’s fuel protests show you cannot do climate policy without doing class politics
Half the country’s fuel supply locked behind blockades, the Defence Forces called in, and the government writing a €505 million cheque in the hope that the problem would go away. It won’…
democracychallenged.com
How International Tax Cooperation Is Being Dismantled Under Trump II democracychallenged.com/2026/04/17/h...
How International Tax Cooperation Is Being Dismantled Under Trump II
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act rewrote the rules of the game for US multinationals. When it passed in 2017, the TCJA was sold as a large-scale repatriation, a measure that would put a damper on profit s…
democracychallenged.com
Prof. Aidan Regan talks about our project and his own research in a recent episode of The Observer Effect, hosted by @shanedbergin.bsky.social open.spotify.com/episode/6tRv...
A fair society: Why Aidan Regan is focused on wealth inequality
open.spotify.com
#Europe is financing everybody else's industrial revolution. It is time to finance our own. democracychallenged.com/2026/04/14/e...
Europe is financing everybody else’s industrial revolution. It is time to finance our own.
The question Europe keeps asking itself is whether it can afford the green industrial revolution. It is the wrong question. The right question is why Europe is financing everybody else’s. Six…
democracychallenged.com
The Unfinished Project: #Habermas, Political #Economy, and the Defence of Democracy democracychallenged.com/2026/03/16/t...
The Unfinished Project: Habermas, Political Economy, and the Defence of Democracy
In 2006, while studying for a masters in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, I took a module with Prof. Ruth Sonderegger that involved a close reading of both volumes of Jürgen Habermas̵…
democracychallenged.com
Out today: @aidanregan.bsky.social's co-authored new book: Growth, Democracy, or Climate Action? The New Trilemma of Advanced Capitalism @edinburghup.bsky.social @agendapub.bsky.social #Degrowth for workers, green growth for the rest is how you lose democratic consent for #climate action. 👇
Who counts as middle class? And why the answer matters for democracy democracychallenged.com/2026/02/16/w...
Who counts as middle class? And why the answer matters for democracy
The squeezed middle is real, but our measures are designed to miss it Everyone agrees the middle class is under pressure. Few agree on who the middle class actually is. And almost nobody talks abou…
democracychallenged.com
How the Fall in Corporate Tax Supercharged Wealth — and Hollowed Out Democracy democracychallenged.com/2026/01/07/h...
How the Fall in Corporate Tax Supercharged Wealth — and Hollowed Out Democracy
One fact should sit at the centre of debates about inequality and democratic decline: corporate profits are extremely concentrated, and taxes on those profits fall overwhelmingly on the super rich.…
democracychallenged.com
Winners Take All: How Corporate Tax Cuts Weakened the Anchor of the Top 0.001% democracychallenged.com/2026/01/05/w...
Winners Take All: How Corporate Tax Cuts Weakened the Anchor of the Top 0.001%
3.5 min read This post argues that the erosion of the corporate income tax (CIT) has quietly removed one of the main fiscal constraints on extreme wealth accumulation in the United States. As we mo…
democracychallenged.com
Ireland’s GDP Is a Mirage — Household Living Standards Tell the Real Story democracychallenged.com/2025/12/17/i...
Ireland’s GDP Is a Mirage — Household Living Standards Tell the Real Story
Eurostat’s new figures expose the gulf between Ireland’s sky-high GDP and the ordinary consumption levels experienced by households. Every year Eurostat publishes two quietly revealing numbers. One…
democracychallenged.com
When Law Becomes Wealth: Why Political Science Must Take Accounting Seriously democracychallenged.com/2025/12/10/w...
When Law Becomes Wealth: Why Political Science Must Take Legal-Accounting Power Seriously
Political science tends to analyse the institutions we can see — elections, tax systems, welfare states, central banks. Yet the most consequential layer of power today operates beneath public debat…
democracychallenged.com
Winner Takes All: How Corporate Tax Policy is Manufacturing Billionaire Wealth democracychallenged.com/2025/12/09/w...
Winner Takes All: How Corporate Tax Policy is Manufacturing Billionaire Wealth
Over the last quarter-century, billionaire wealth has exploded. Global billionaire wealth has grown faster than GDP, faster than wages, and faster than median household net worth. The top 0.01% now…
democracychallenged.com
Ireland’s Profits Look Extraordinary — But It’s the Balance Sheet, Not the Real Economy, Doing the Work democracychallenged.com/2025/12/05/i...
Ireland’s Profits Look Extraordinary — But It’s the Balance Sheet, Not the Real Economy, Doing the Work
Profit shares are supposed to tell a simple story: when a business produces something, how much of the value created ends up as profit rather than wages? It’s a basic income-distribution measure, c…
democracychallenged.com
How Corporate Tax Really Works: Allocating Income Along the Global Wealth Chain democracychallenged.com/2025/12/02/h...
How Corporate Tax Really Works: Allocating Income Along the Global Wealth Chain
Understanding how global multijurisdictional groups (MJGs) are taxed today begins with tracing how they allocate income across their global wealth chains. These chains are the legal and organisatio…
democracychallenged.com
The MANTA-7: How Seven Tech Giants Became Bigger Than Nations democracychallenged.com/2025/11/12/t...
The MANTA-7: How Seven Tech Giants Became Bigger Than Nations
Seven U.S. tech giants now dominate global markets like nation-states, reshaping capitalism—and democracy—in their image. Between 2014 and 2024, seven American giants—Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Tesl…
democracychallenged.com
The Politics of the AI Profit Mirage democracychallenged.com/2025/11/12/t...
The Politics of the AI Profit Mirage
America’s technology giants have found a new way to make artificial intelligence look profitable: change the maths. Between 2022 and 2024, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle each extended t…
democracychallenged.com
The Economics of War: How the Global Arms Trade Turns Conflict Into Profit democracychallenged.com/2025/11/07/t...
The Economics of War: How the Global Arms Trade Turns Conflict Into Profit
In early 2022, as Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border and Western allies scrambled to respond, stock prices in the global defense sector quietly surged. Investors anticipated what poli…
democracychallenged.com
Liberalism Collapsed Under the Weight of Its Own Contradictions democracychallenged.com/2025/10/17/l...
Liberalism Collapsed Under the Weight of Its Own Contradictions
The post-war promise that markets would sustain democracy has collapsed into a system of concentrated wealth, eroded trust, and geopolitical fragmentation. The world is living through a rupture, no…
democracychallenged.com
Is the National Economy Too Small to Study? Regan and Blyth argue that Growth Model research in Comparative Political Economy is ontologically biased towards the national level.Their solution? Zoom in on the city-regional level. Full article: doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwaf003 #SER @OxfordJournals
There is more to national economies than the national economy: extending the Growth Model research programme in comparative political economy
Abstract. This article argues that the Growth Model (GM) research programme in comparative political economy has an ontological and methodological bias tow
doi.org
The '25 #Nobel in #Economics: Innovation drives growth through creative destruction. Today, #innovation seems less about destroying the old - and more about accumulating power within the same firms. tinyurl.com/4v8hftjr
From Creative Destruction to Winner Takes All – A Commentary on the Nobel Prize and the Role of the State in Innovation
Earlier this week, Philippe Aghion, together with Joel Mokyr and Peter Howitt, won the Nobel prize in economics. In their research, the laureates show that growth results almost entirely from techn…
tinyurl.com
Profits, Taxes and the Accumulation of Billionaire Wealth democracychallenged.com/2025/10/09/p...
Profits, Taxes and the Accumulation of Billionaire Wealth
In 2025, Forbes counted 3,068 billionaires controlling a combined fortune of $17 trillion — more than the total output of the five largest economies in Western Europe and roughly equivale…
democracychallenged.com
Why taxing corporate profits isn’t just about revenue — it’s about counter-power. Think of it as antitrust by other means: clipping the wings of monopolies before their rents harden into dynastic wealth and political dominance. democracychallenged.com/2025/09/22/t...
Tax as Antitrust: Why Corporate Profit Taxation Is the Real Wealth Tax
Debates about inequality often revolve around wealth taxes. The argument runs that if the top 1% hoard an ever-larger share of global wealth, then the way to fund a social state is to skim a portio…
democracychallenged.com
#Intangible #Capitalism: How Accounting Turns Licences Into Assets democracychallenged.com/2025/09/12/i...
Intangible Capitalism: How Accounting Turns Licences Into Assets
Capitalism in the twenty-first century runs on intangibles: patents, software code, algorithms, brands. Yet what really matters is not the ideas themselves, but how they are recorded in the books. …
democracychallenged.com
The era of #tax arbitrage has narrowed. #Tariffs and rules of origin are now doing the work of industrial policy. For #Ireland, the challenge is ensuring its #pharma sector remains more than a paper hub in the eyes of both #Washington and the #OECD. democracychallenged.com/2025/08/29/w...
Why the EU–US Trade Truce Puts Ireland’s Pharma Model at Risk
The EU–US trade truce leaves generics untouched but puts branded drugs—the core of Ireland’s export engine—at risk, with multinationals ready to shift production and tweak transfer pricing to prote…
democracychallenged.com
The age of neoliberal hands-off economics is giving way to state-led tech geopolitics. Silicon Sovereignty: Industrial Policy and the Post-Neoliberal Turn democracychallenged.com/2025/08/28/s...
Silicon Sovereignty: Industrial Policy and the Post-Neoliberal Turn
The age of neoliberal hands-off economics is giving way to state-led tech geopolitics. For decades, neoliberal orthodoxy insisted that governments should stay out of the business of building indust…
democracychallenged.com
Corporate profits in the US are more concentrated than ever. These figures (see in the blog post) show a structural shift: competition is giving way to #oligopoly #capitalism. What does this mean for policy, #taxation, and #democracy? democracychallenged.com/2025/07/24/w...
Winner Takes All: How the Top 1% of Firms Capture the Profits
The US corporate landscape has morphed into a winner-takes-all economy, where a handful of multinational firms control the lion’s share of profits and market power. The data is stark. Across all US…
democracychallenged.com
We are delighted to share that @ucdlibrary.bsky.social have ingested a new collection into the Repository - Democracy Challenged, an @erc.europa.eu funded project led by @aidanregan.bsky.social. Find out more: dri.ie/news/new-col...
