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Abstract
Who holds power when wealth concentrates? Political science has built a precise account of how concentrated wealth is deployed: donated, lobbied, converted into unequal responsiveness. This paper asks how it is produced. I develop the concept of legal-accounting power: the capacity of multi-jurisdictional corporate groups and their professional intermediaries to produce profit through classification, moving value between cost and capital, licence and ownership, asset and expense. It is architectural: no one designed the structure, yet every use is a deliberate, documented decision, so this power, unusually among quiet forms, leaves a paper trail. Using Irish unconsolidated accounts, which reveal what US consolidated accounts conceal, I trace how American intellectual property becomes concentrated corporate profit. The concentration is an antitrust problem in the neoBrandeisian sense, and its invisibility a problem for capitalist democracy. The paper offers political science a new concept and method, forensic accounting as process tracing: balance sheet politics.
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Title
Democracy Challenged
Description
In a world of growing wealth concentration and economic inequality, who truly holds the power? Democracy Challenged brings together an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers from political science, economics, data science and law to address this question.
This ERC-funded project delves into the complexities of multi-jurisdictional corporate tax avoidance, uncovering key strategies, players, and locations involved in global profit-shifting. Our goal is to show how legal-accounting power undermines democracy, contributing to rising wealth inequality and shifting power dynamics.
Our research centers on a deep analysis of legal-technical elites, whose expertise is crucial in shaping the structures of wealth inequality. Additionally, we map major multi-jurisdictional corporate groups to illuminate their profit-shifting strategies and financial structures.
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