Suchergebnisse

How do political parties respond to a major economic shock? This
article studies this question in the context of the eurozone crisis. Specifically, I
analyze the partisan appeals made by German politicians in the run-up to the
2013 federal election in Germany. Contrary to existing models of party
responsiveness, I argue that enacting quick crisis resolution mechanisms is not
always the main concern of reelection-seeking politicians. Instead, officials
may have incentives to deliberately withhold emergency measures in an
effort to win a mandate for more comprehensive policy solutions later. The
findings have implications for notions of democratic accountability.

AbstractIn this paper, we model the interactions between Greece and its creditors as a costly signalling game. The main argument is that a costly exchange of information can improve the recipient's incentives to comply with conditionality. If creditors can credibly signal that suspending financial assistance is a viable option, they will be able to extract concessions from the recipient. Conversely, if the feasibility of the outside option is in doubt, threats to withhold financial support will be toothless. Our contribution is to highlight the role of information exchanges during crisis bargaining. Such signalling mechanisms are central to understanding the outcomes of the Greek debt drama, but are absent from existing accounts.

How do European Union (EU) member states decide whether soft or hard law instruments better serve their interests? We address this question in the context of financial supervision. In the past years, financial supervision has changed dramatically from soft co-ordination (2009) to a banking union based on hard law (2012/13). This article draws on insights from the hard/ soft law distinction, the informal governance literature and personal interviews to analyze what factors precipitated change, which actors were central to it and how it occurred. Our main argument is that member states' power, perceptions of uncertainty, distributive conflict, as well as the interests of the domestic banking industry, have shaped the choice of soft or hard law instruments in financial supervision. Our analysis suggests that we need to theorize more rigorously about the sources of member state preferences over formal and informal co-ordination mechanisms in the EU. Adapted from the source document.

ABSTRACTWhy do German policymakers support some aspects of a single European pension market, but not others? This article argues that the German government's preferences towards European Union (EU) pension directives are best explained by combining historical institutionalism (HI) and domestic discourse analysis (DA). Each approach by itself is insufficient to account for the observed variation between 1991 and 2007. Arguments based on party ideologies offer less explanatory power. HI explains why all governments – Kohl, Schröder, and Merkel – protected employer-sponsored book reserve pensions, a cornerstone of Germany's coordinated market economy, from the scope of EU directives. DA allows us to grasp how interests were reframed. While the status quo stance of the Kohl government succeeded in delegitimizing supporters of alternative pension security concepts, the Schröder administration imposed an economically efficient pension reform without much public support. The grand coalition, in turn, abandoned Chancellor Merkel's initial plan to expand second-tier pensions in the light of rising pressures that the Left Party posed for the Social Democratic coalition partner.

This article asks why the EU member states were able to agree on an EU pension fund directive in 2003 whereas they had failed to do so in a previous attempt (1991). The main argument is that a single pension market was a desirable project before 2003, but bargaining inefficiencies prevented its realisation. This is because bargaining over integration in this sector requires credible signalling between Bismarckian and Beveridgean pension regimes. The co-ordination of divergent welfare and financial regimes depends on the ability of governments to send costly signals that only a limited range of outcomes are considered legitimate in their home state. In turn, the capacity to signal and the costs of bluffing hinge on international pressure for pension reform (Economic and Monetary Union) and the magnitude of changes governments have to make to their respective welfare finance arrangements.