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&#8217…

#Ireland 's #fuel protests show you cannot do #climate policy without doing class politics

democracychallenged.com/2026/04/21/i...

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…

How International Tax Cooperation Is Being Dismantled Under Trump II democracychallenged.com/2026/04/17/h...

A fair society: Why Aidan Regan is focused on wealth inequality

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...

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…

#Europe is financing everybody else's industrial revolution. It is time to finance our own.
democracychallenged.com/2026/04/14/e...

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 Habermas&#821…

The Unfinished Project: #Habermas, Political #Economy, and the Defence of Democracy
democracychallenged.com/2026/03/16/t...

Growth, Democracy or Climate Action? Governments are confronted with a tradeoff between growth, liberal democracy and effective climate action. They cannot achieve all three objectives at the same time. The authors consider which one has...

www.agendapub.com/page/detail/...

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...

How the Fall in Corporate Tax Supercharged Wealth — and Hollowed Out Democracy democracychallenged.com/2026/01/07/h...

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…

Winners Take All: How Corporate Tax Cuts Weakened the Anchor of the Top 0.001% democracychallenged.com/2026/01/05/w...

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…

Ireland’s GDP Is a Mirage — Household Living Standards Tell the Real Story
democracychallenged.com/2025/12/17/i...

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…

When Law Becomes Wealth: Why Political Science Must Take Accounting Seriously

democracychallenged.com/2025/12/10/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…

Winner Takes All: How Corporate Tax Policy is Manufacturing Billionaire Wealth
democracychallenged.com/2025/12/09/w...

Ireland’s Profits Look Extraordinary — But It’s the Balance Sheet, Not the Real Economy, Doing the Work democracychallenged.com/2025/12/05/i...

How Corporate Tax Really Works: Allocating Income Along the Global Wealth Chain
democracychallenged.com/2025/12/02/h...

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…

The MANTA-7: How Seven Tech Giants Became Bigger Than Nations democracychallenged.com/2025/11/12/t...

The Politics of the AI Profit Mirage democracychallenged.com/2025/11/12/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…

The Economics of War: How the Global Arms Trade Turns Conflict Into Profit
democracychallenged.com/2025/11/07/t...

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…

Liberalism Collapsed Under the Weight of Its Own Contradictions

democracychallenged.com/2025/10/17/l...

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

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

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…

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

Profits, Taxes and the Accumulation of Billionaire Wealth democracychallenged.com/2025/10/09/p...

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…

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...

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. …

#Intangible #Capitalism: How Accounting Turns Licences Into Assets

democracychallenged.com/2025/09/12/i...

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...

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...

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…

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...

A man presenting to an audience, gesturing as he explains his topic to the engaged group of listeners.

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...

New collection in DRI - Democracy Challenged - Digital Repository of Ireland The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is proud to announce the addition of the Democracy Challenged blog series to its ever-growing archive of socially significant collections. This collection, prod...

We are very happy that our project got added to @dri.ie.

Browse our repository here: repository.dri.ie/catalog/0v83...

Read the DRI's post about us: tinyurl.com/3fhs6pwv

The G7’s Corporate Tax Escape Hatch: Fuelling Inequality and Killing Trust in Democracy In June 2025 the G7 quietly unraveled one of the boldest tax reforms ever attempted. The OECD global minimum tax was designed to curb profit shifting. A single clause now exempts United States mult…

The G7’s Corporate Tax Escape Hatch: Fuelling Inequality and Killing Trust in Democracy

democracychallenged.com/2025/07/03/t...