DAVID M. WOODRUFF
Associate Professor in Comparative Politics
ABOUT ME
I am a political scientist working in the area of comparative political economy. My particular interests lie in how key capitalist institutions--things like money, property, and private law, and the various organizations and state agencies that manage them--emerge, change, and affect economic policy. For me, the best form of evidence on these matters tends to be well-documented narratives about particular historical episodes. I am presently writing a book on central banking and constitutional democracy. I have also worked extensively on politics and economics in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia. Other interests include the intellectual history of the social sciences, especially the work of Karl Polanyi and Max Weber, and German ordoliberalism.
In addition to academic publications, I have written for the London Review of Books and maintain an occasional blog.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Woodruff, David M. 2016. ‘Governing by Panic The Politics of the Eurozone Crisis’. Politics & Society 44(1): 81–116.
Open access pre-publication version.
The Eurozone’s reaction to the crisis beginning in late 2008 involved not only efforts to mitigate the arbitrarily destructive effects of markets but also vigorous pursuit of policies aimed at austerity and deflation. To explain this paradoxical outcome, I build on Karl Polanyi’s account of a similar deadlock in the 1930s. Polanyi argued that a society-protecting response to malfunctioning markets was limited under the gold standard by the prospect of currency panic, which bankers used to push for austerity, deflationary policies, and labor’s political marginalization. I reconstruct Polanyi’s “governing by panic” theory to explain Eurozone policy during three key episodes of sovereign bond market panic in 2010–12. By threatening to allow financial panics to continue, the European Central Bank promoted policies and institutional changes aimed at austerity and deflation, limiting the protective response. Germany’s Ordoliberalism, and its weight in European affairs, contributed to the credibility of this threat.
In Ordoliberalism, Law and the Rule of Economics, eds. Christian Joerges and Josef Hien. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2017
Though they are seldom paired, there are important points of contact between the thought of ordoliberals like Eucken and Böhm and that of the idiosyncratic social democratic theorist Karl Polanyi. Like Polanyi, the ordoliberals recognised the crucial historical and contemporary role of the state in creating and sustaining market economies, and the consequent emptiness of the laissez-faire slogan. Some of Polanyi’s inter-war analyses of the political use of state power to create monopolies show signifi cant parallels with ordoliberal diagnoses. There were points of contact in moral perspectives as well: both Polanyi and the ordoliberals emphasised that inter-war markets were producing manifestly unjust outcomes, incompatible with any notion of desert. Their reactions, of course, were very different. To put it in Polanyi’s terms, ordoliberals accepted that laissez-faire was planned, and argued it needed to be re-planned: more consistently, with the state mobilised to structure markets in ways that ensured market earnings refl ected desert. Polanyi, for his part, felt that the state structures underpinning any market order made the very idea of individual desert unintelligible and a barrier to clear thought about how society ought to be organised. This chapter will analyse these parallels and distinctions, and discuss the ways in which Polanyi offers significant resources for analysing ordoliberal positions.
Johnson, Juliet, and David M. Woodruff. 2017. ‘Currency Crises in Post-Soviet Russia’. Russian Review 76(4).
Currency crises have been a recurrent feature of Russia's post‐Soviet experience. This article examines three episodes of sudden and sharp ruble depreciation in 1998, 2008, and 2014–16. We examine these crises and their political consequences as iterative episodes in the Russian government's ongoing efforts to deal with its structural dependence on energy revenues and international capital flows. We argue that the 1998 crisis and the Russian government's response to it proved effective in transforming policies and institutions that had contributed to the ruble's collapse, but also paradoxically reinforced the central role of resource revenues and international capital flows in Russia's political economy. Policy decisions after 2008 then represented variations on a theme, leaving the Russian government better able to manage future currency crises while simultaneously maintaining and deepening the state's underlying structural vulnerabilities as well as its patronage‐based political‐economic system. The crisis of 2014–16 may, however, ultimately bring greater shifts in policy as Russia adapts to fundamentally changed international circumstances.
Cornell University Press 1999
Money Unmade charts the origins of the Soviet monetary system in the 1920s and 1930s, how its unique structure contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union decades later, and its legacy for Russia's chaotic transition to capitalism. In the 1990s, Russians saw the rouble steadily lose ground to alternative means of payment such as barter and privately issued quasi-monies. By 1998, industry collected as much as 70 percent of its receipts in nonmonetary form, leaving many firms with too little cash to pay salaries and taxes. This inability to control the nation's currency was not a carry-over from the Soviet past. Instead, barter arose as local authorities tried to protect industry against the destructive effects of price increases and crude tax and accounting systems during the country's pell-mell introduction of a market economy. When businesses fled or were driven from the money economy, provincial governments invented new ways to tax in kind and issued substitutes for the rouble. In turn, the federal authorities, unable to coerce firms either to operate in the money economy or to abandon business altogether, were forced to make accommodations to barter and to rouble alternatives. This led to enormous fiscal difficulties and intense political battles. Money Unmade not only chronicles key economic difficulties shaping Russian politics in the 1990s, but analyzes the administrative capacity and political support demanded by monetary consolidation—the process whereby a state gains a monopoly over the definition of money, which is a neglected but crucial aspect of capitalist statebuilding more generally.
Table of Contents (pdf) - Preface (pdf) - Review by The Economist