ABSTRACT
The most prominent institutional Schumpeterian democrats, such as Adam Przeworski and Ian Shapiro, are motivated by justifiable worries about domination, and indeed understand democracy as a means of countering domination. Contemporary Schumpeterians’ fundamental commitments unquestionably position them as foes of such political movements. Scholars such as Adam Przeworski and Ian Shapiro are Schumpeterian and institutional because they favour a minimalist understanding of democracy as just an arrangement of political institutions that promotes electoral competition for power. The critical analysis of behavioural Schumpeterianism converges with that of institutional Schumpeterianism. The contemporary institutional branch, in focusing so narrowly on the state as a potential site of domination, deflects attention from dominating social and economic relations. Some of the most pronounced strains in both behavioural and institutional Schumpeterianism arise from forgetting this, and attempting to bind elements of Schumpeter’s thought to democratic commitments and aims he did not share.
