A second double movement? Polanyi and shifting global opinions on neoliberalism

Karl Polanyi’s theory of the ‘double movement’ has gained great currency in recent years to explain the global growth of contemporary social movements resisting neoliberalism. However, there has been no statistical research demonstrating whether these protest movements represent a more general trend of growing discontent with ‘disembedding’ markets from public control. This article uses questions from the World Values Survey to construct an ‘embeddedness’ index measuring public opinion on the desired relationship between states and markets. Focusing on public opinion in 20 countries during the 1990s, the analysis poses three questions: First, is there evidence of increasing global support for ‘re-embedding’ markets? Second, how does such opinion vary across regions of the world? Finally, what is the class and gender composition of this latent countermovement? The results provide substantial evidence of an emerging countermovement in public opinion over the 1990s with complex class, gender, and geopolitical variation.