Is neoliberalism resilient or dying? Some scholars see neoliberalism as highly resilient given its repeated survival of major crises and structural problems that have discredited some of its core tenets. Others argue that we have entered a post-neoliberal era characterised by populism and renewed drives for national political-economic sovereignty. While neoliberalism has yet to be replaced wholesale, there are signs that its influence on policymaking is waning. However, both the extent of this weakening and the process by which a governing paradigm weakens remain unclear. We argue that this uncertainty stems partly from the tendency to treat neoliberalism as an all-encompassing ideological monolith or a set of tightly linked interdependent ideas akin to a Kuhnian scientific paradigm. Instead, we conceptualise neoliberalism as a governing paradigm – as opposed to a narrower policy paradigm – with only loosely linked core tenets. This means that the delegitimisation of one tenet through policy failure or broader cultural change need not undermine the others, allowing the governing paradigm to persist, albeit in weakened form. We further argue that neoliberalism weakens over time through the uneven erosion of its core tenets.
We assess these arguments through an analysis of Australian federal legislation from 1990 to 2025. We find that the influence of neoliberal core tenets on policy is uneven, both across policy domains and over time. Legislative adherence to neoliberal core tenets varies considerably within and between policies, and changes in adherence are similarly uneven across the tenets. Moreover, erosion in policy influence between 1990 and 2025 has been substantially greater for some neoliberal tenets than for others. These findings are consistent with the conceptualisation of neoliberalism as a governing paradigm with loosely linked core tenets that weaken at different rates and at different times. They also suggest that neoliberalism's overall influence on policy has diminished through the uneven erosion of its constituent tenets. More broadly, the findings contribute not only to debates over the trajectory of neoliberalism but also to our understanding of how governing paradigms differ from narrower policy paradigms and how they change over time.
