1st Edition

Financial Democracy Comparative Political Economy of Banking

By Kurt Mettenheim, Olivier Butzbach Copyright 2026
300 Pages 88 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

300 Pages 88 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Elaborating a new approach to the comparative political economy of banking, Financial Democracy presents evidence of both the recent return to traditional bank management and the resurgence of alternative banks with social and public policy missions. The book begins with a critique of contemporary approaches to banking, finance, and money in political economy, financial economics, and, indeed,... Read more

Lists of figures and List of tables

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Banks as diverse institutions of financial democracy

2 The multiple monetary moral economies of alternative banks: A long-term historical view

3 From de-financialization to financial democracy in the US

4 The variegated fate of financial democracy in advanced capitalism: European alternative banks since the 2008 financial crisis

5 Financial democracy and reversals in Brazil

6 Commanding depth: Democratization and banking in India

Conclusion

References

Biography

Kurt Mettenheim taught as Professor at the Fundação Getulio Vargas Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo, as University Lecturer in Brazilian Studies at Oxford, and previously at the University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, with further visiting posts at the Universidade de São Paulo, Universidade de Brasília, Sciences Po in Paris, the Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin as a German Marshall Fund Fellow, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre. He has published extensively on democratization, the design of political institutions, politics and banking, and comparative historical political economy while providing consultancy to major banks and corporate clients on Brazil and emerging markets.

Olivier Butzbach is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli” (Italy) and a Fellow of the Humboldt University’s Center for British Studies (Germany). His research interests lie in the fields of comparative political economy of finance, historical institutional analyses of contemporary capitalism, and the study of not-for-profit banks in historical context. He is the author and co-author of several books and dozens of publications in these areas, which have appeared in top international academic journals such as Organization Studies, Business History, the Global Management Journal and Accounting, Economics and Law: A Convivium.