Financialization

Financialization is understood in political science as a set of profound political-economic transformations in industrialized economies since the 1970s, marked by the growing significance of financial markets, actors, logics, and pract ices on economic, political, and social life.Often described as the "newest phase of capitalism" (Tomaskovic-Devey et al., 2015, p. 543; see also Van der Zwan, 2014), this shift gained visibility during the 2008 global financial crisis, which exposed the pervasive role of finance in capitalist democracies.While scholarly interest predates the crisis, it acted as a catalyst for a significant expansion of interdisciplinary research (Mader et al., 2020).Most definitions converge on the idea that financialization is a historical process-a shift from less finance-driven modes of organization to a capitalist order increasingly shaped by the logics and interests of the financial sector.This shift is closely associated with rising inequality and deepening power asymmetries (Merke l, 2014;Tomaskovic-Devey et al., 2015).