NEOLIBERALISM, INEQUALITY AND DEMOCRACY: A DISCUSSION BASED ON ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COUNCILS

This article seeks to connect the economic and political context of the second half of the twentieth century to the discussion of democracy and social participation in order to analyze institutional arrangements like the economic and social councils as a social dialogue alternative. The neoliberal policies implemented in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have led democracy into a crisis of representation and legitimacy. One of the alternatives often aimed at solving or alleviating this crisis is to expand social participation through institutionalized forms of social dialogue. Based on the experience of the economic and social councils, this paper questions these entities as a path to overcome the crisis of democracy. The root of the problem seems to lie in neoliberal policies, which reduce state regulation and aggravate social inequality, allowing economically powerful groups to hold sway over political representatives in various ways, thus contaminating spaces for representative democracy and alternative dialogue, as seems to be the case with economic and social councils.