Democracy Challenged

When Law Becomes Wealth: Why Political Science Must Take Legal-Accounting Power Seriously Political science tends to analyse the institutions we can see — elections, tax systems, welfare states, central banks. Yet the most consequential layer of power today operates beneath public debat…

When Law Becomes Wealth: Why Political Science Must Take Accounting Seriously

democracychallenged.com/2025/12/10/w...

Winner Takes All: How Corporate Tax Policy is Manufacturing Billionaire Wealth Over the last quarter-century, billionaire wealth has exploded. Global billionaire wealth has grown faster than GDP, faster than wages, and faster than median household net worth. The top 0.01% now…

Winner Takes All: How Corporate Tax Policy is Manufacturing Billionaire Wealth
democracychallenged.com/2025/12/09/w...

Ireland’s Profits Look Extraordinary — But It’s the Balance Sheet, Not the Real Economy, Doing the Work democracychallenged.com/2025/12/05/i...

How Corporate Tax Really Works: Allocating Income Along the Global Wealth Chain
democracychallenged.com/2025/12/02/h...

The MANTA-7: How Seven Tech Giants Became Bigger Than Nations Seven U.S. tech giants now dominate global markets like nation-states, reshaping capitalism—and democracy—in their image. Between 2014 and 2024, seven American giants—Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Tesl…

The MANTA-7: How Seven Tech Giants Became Bigger Than Nations democracychallenged.com/2025/11/12/t...

The Politics of the AI Profit Mirage democracychallenged.com/2025/11/12/t...

The Economics of War: How the Global Arms Trade Turns Conflict Into Profit In early 2022, as Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border and Western allies scrambled to respond, stock prices in the global defense sector quietly surged. Investors anticipated what poli…

The Economics of War: How the Global Arms Trade Turns Conflict Into Profit
democracychallenged.com/2025/11/07/t...

Liberalism Collapsed Under the Weight of Its Own Contradictions The post-war promise that markets would sustain democracy has collapsed into a system of concentrated wealth, eroded trust, and geopolitical fragmentation. The world is living through a rupture, no…

Liberalism Collapsed Under the Weight of Its Own Contradictions

democracychallenged.com/2025/10/17/l...

There is more to national economies than the national economy: extending the Growth Model research programme in comparative political economy Abstract. This article argues that the Growth Model (GM) research programme in comparative political economy has an ontological and methodological bias tow

Is the National Economy Too Small to Study?
Regan and Blyth argue that Growth Model research in Comparative Political Economy is ontologically biased towards the national level.Their solution? Zoom in on the city-regional level.
Full article: doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwaf003
#SER @OxfordJournals

From Creative Destruction to Winner Takes All – A Commentary on the Nobel Prize and the Role of the State in Innovation Earlier this week, Philippe Aghion, together with Joel Mokyr and Peter Howitt, won the Nobel prize in economics. In their research, the laureates show that growth results almost entirely from techn…

The '25 #Nobel in #Economics: Innovation drives growth through creative destruction.

Today, #innovation seems less about destroying the old - and more about accumulating power within the same firms.

tinyurl.com/4v8hftjr

Profits, Taxes and the Accumulation of Billionaire Wealth democracychallenged.com/2025/10/09/p...

Tax as Antitrust: Why Corporate Profit Taxation Is the Real Wealth Tax Debates about inequality often revolve around wealth taxes. The argument runs that if the top 1% hoard an ever-larger share of global wealth, then the way to fund a social state is to skim a portio…

Why taxing corporate profits isn’t just about revenue — it’s about counter-power. Think of it as antitrust by other means: clipping the wings of monopolies before their rents harden into dynastic wealth and political dominance.

democracychallenged.com/2025/09/22/t...

Intangible Capitalism: How Accounting Turns Licences Into Assets Capitalism in the twenty-first century runs on intangibles: patents, software code, algorithms, brands. Yet what really matters is not the ideas themselves, but how they are recorded in the books. …

#Intangible #Capitalism: How Accounting Turns Licences Into Assets

democracychallenged.com/2025/09/12/i...

The era of #tax arbitrage has narrowed. #Tariffs and rules of origin are now doing the work of industrial policy. For #Ireland, the challenge is ensuring its #pharma sector remains more than a paper hub in the eyes of both #Washington and the #OECD.

democracychallenged.com/2025/08/29/w...

The age of neoliberal hands-off economics is giving way to state-led tech geopolitics.

Silicon Sovereignty: Industrial Policy and the Post-Neoliberal Turn

democracychallenged.com/2025/08/28/s...

Winner Takes All: How the Top 1% of Firms Capture the Profits The US corporate landscape has morphed into a winner-takes-all economy, where a handful of multinational firms control the lion’s share of profits and market power. The data is stark. Across all US…

Corporate profits in the US are more concentrated than ever.

These figures (see in the blog post) show a structural shift: competition is giving way to #oligopoly #capitalism. What does this mean for policy, #taxation, and #democracy?

democracychallenged.com/2025/07/24/w...

A man presenting to an audience, gesturing as he explains his topic to the engaged group of listeners.

We are delighted to share that @ucdlibrary.bsky.social have ingested a new collection into the Repository - Democracy Challenged, an @erc.europa.eu funded project led by @aidanregan.bsky.social.

Find out more: dri.ie/news/new-col...

New collection in DRI - Democracy Challenged - Digital Repository of Ireland The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is proud to announce the addition of the Democracy Challenged blog series to its ever-growing archive of socially significant collections. This collection, prod...

We are very happy that our project got added to @dri.ie.

Browse our repository here: repository.dri.ie/catalog/0v83...

Read the DRI's post about us: tinyurl.com/3fhs6pwv

The G7’s Corporate Tax Escape Hatch: Fuelling Inequality and Killing Trust in Democracy In June 2025 the G7 quietly unraveled one of the boldest tax reforms ever attempted. The OECD global minimum tax was designed to curb profit shifting. A single clause now exempts United States mult…

The G7’s Corporate Tax Escape Hatch: Fuelling Inequality and Killing Trust in Democracy

democracychallenged.com/2025/07/03/t...

Reminder: Today at 4pm CET (3pm Irish time) @aidanregan.bsky.social will moderate this virtual session for the 2025 @sasemeeting.bsky.social conference.

Venetian Billionaire: How Amazon Built the Empire That Made Jeff Bezos one of World’s Richest Men As the world’s richest guests descend on Venice for Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s lavish wedding, the scene is already drawing protest. And rightly so. Behind the €40 million party, the security …

Jeff #Bezos is throwing a $40M wedding—but the real story is how #Amazon made $3.6T (2014–2024) and paid just 9% U.S. #tax on $197B profit. IP tricks, transfer pricing, and tax laws made him rich - and let him stay that way.

tinyurl.com/yw7f6xef

Tesla’s Tax Machine: How Musk’s Empire Grows While U.S. Revenues Shrink Between 2014 and 2024, Tesla generated more than $34 billion in global pre-tax profit. In most jurisdictions, that would translate into a meaningful tax contribution. In Tesla’s case, it produced a…

Tesla’s Tax Machine: How Musk’s Empire Grows While U.S. Revenues Shrink

democracychallenged.com/2025/06/17/t...

How Ireland became the Saudi Arabia of siphoned-off global profits The Emerald petro-state is riding high off tech and pharma—for now

Recent the @economist.com piece highlights insights from @aidanregan.bsky.social on Ireland's multinational profits vs. real economic activity.

Worth reading both:
Economist article 👉 tinyurl.com/yv9r2wk3
Aidan’s post 👉 tinyurl.com/347b4mhw

The Billion-Dollar Battle Over IP and Tax Power When a U.S. tech giant charges its Irish subsidiary a fee to use pre-existing software, that charge which is called the “buy-in payment” can shape where billions in profits end up,…

The Billion-Dollar Battle Over IP and Tax Power democracychallenged.com/2025/06/13/t...

Save the date! @aidanregan.bsky.social will moderate a round table discussion at this year's @sasemeeting.bsky.social conference. Participation is possible online.

Vanishing Act: Strip Out Pharma and Ireland, and Over 40% of the EU’s U.S. Trade Surplus Disappears The transatlantic trade relationship is often framed in terms of a stark imbalance: in 2024, the European Union ran a €198.2 billion goods trade surplus with the United States. On the surface, this…

Repost due to typo:

The pharma industry is a cornerstone of EU-US trade — and Ireland plays a key role at the heart of it. 🇪🇺🇺🇸💊🇮🇪

Vanishing Act: Strip Out Pharma and Ireland, and Over 40% of the EU’s U.S. Trade Surplus Disappears

democracychallenged.com/2025/05/29/v...

#Trade #Pharma #Ireland

A Primer on Intangible Capital – What’s There to Know? with Aidan Regan In recent weeks, we’ve repeatedly discussed intangible assets and their role in the complex tax strategies of multijurisdictional corporate groups (MJGs). Intangibles were central …

We’ve written a lot about intangible assets in our case studies. Time to step back and ask: what makes intangibles special - and how are they reshaping modern capitalism?

A Primer on Intangible Capital - What’s There to Know?
@linusze.bsky.social

democracychallenged.com/2025/05/26/a...

The Mirage of Substance: The Legal Scaffolding Behind Ireland’s Corporate Tax Boom Since the closure of the Double Irish scheme in 2015, nearly $1 trillion in IP-related assets have been shifted into the Irish subsidiaries of US multinationals. This transfer has driven an extraor…

The Mirage of Substance: The Legal Scaffolding Behind Ireland’s Corporate Tax Boom democracychallenged.com/2025/05/19/t...

Ireland’s Phantom Prosperity: The GDP Mirage and the Real Economy Ireland’s economic success story is, on the surface, dazzling. The country’s GDP — the broadest measure of economic activity — reached €510 billion in 2023, making it one of the richest countries i…

Ireland’s Phantom Prosperity: The GDP Mirage and the Real Economy democracychallenged.com/2025/05/14/i...

From Brave New World to Apple vs. Brussels: How Media Fragmentation Shapes Our Reality with Lakshmi Menon and Aidan Regan What happens when one tax ruling sparks six national narratives? From Orwell’s censorship to Huxley’s information overload, Apple’s €13B showdow…

From Brave New World to #Apple vs. #Brussels: How Media Fragmentation Shapes Our Reality

New blog post by Oscar Barrera-Rodríguez, Lakshmi Menon and @aidanregan.bsky.social. They unpack the reactions sparked by last year’s landmark #tax ruling.

democracychallenged.com/2025/05/13/f...