Money Politics After the Global Financial Crisis: An Analysis of Monetary Reform Movements in Switzerland and the UK

Despite increased public and political discourse about economics following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the topic of money and its creation continues to be quiet. Seeking change, social movements for monetary reform attempted to bring noise to this topic around the world. However, such campaigns have so far failed to achieve policy success, nor have they been able to trigger sustained discourse around money and how, and by whom, it is created. This research represents the first study of monetary reform campaigning after the financial crisis by providing a comparative analysis of social movements in the simple polity of the UK and the compound polity of Switzerland. By focusing on outcomes, this research uses process tracing to explore the challenges faced by the British campaign, Positive Money, and its Swiss counterpart, Monetäre Modernisierung, as they campaigned for a monetary reform called sovereign money. Sovereign money would remove the ability of private banks to extend credit beyond their reserves, and instead transfer this role to national central banks – who would become the only institution with the power to ‘create money’. With a focus on the role of ideas and discourse in policy change and competition, this research adopts as its conceptual framework discursive institutionalism. This is complemented by a theoretical framework comprised of modern social movement theories, the political process model and the framing model. While the political process model focuses on external opportunities and challenges as a means to understand social movement outcomes, the framing model reiterates the vital role that framing plays in determining outcomes. This research contributes not only to social movement research but also to political economy and studies of discourse and draws attention to the challenges of campaigning within technical or complex policy fields.