Suchergebnisse

Defence date: 6 June 2017 ; Examining Board: Professor Sven Steinmo, European University Institute (Supervisor); Professor Mark Blyth, Brown University; Professor Philipp Genschel, European University Institute; Professor Leonard Seabrooke, Copenhagen Business School ; For all its powers, we know little about how the European Central Bank (ECB) makes its decisions and why. In light of its ever-increasing importance in European governance and the criticism this has attracted, this is particularly regrettable. Often a welcome scapegoat, the ECB has been accused of doing first too little, then too late. Compared to other major central banks, the ECB has indeed long been a laggard – regarding both conventional interest rate policies and unconventional balance sheet operations. Why? I argue that central bankers' policy experiments after the financial crisis are a prime example of policymaking under conditions of Knightian uncertainty. Faced with an unprecedented situation, central bankers were unable to draw on historical experience and had to resort to their beliefs about how the economy works instead. Based on a survey among 422 central bank economists, I quantify these different ways of thinking. My survey data shows a) that certain beliefs matter for policy preferences and b) that both are unevenly distributed among central banks. In particular, the ECB leans more towards orthodox beliefs and hawkish inflation preferences than the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England. It is considerably more conservative. Within the Eurosystem, different national central banks are clustered regarding both beliefs and preferences, revealing a dividing line in economic philosophy between core and periphery. This suggests that the frequently surfacing conflicts inside the ECB's Governing Council reflect a battle of ideas rather than a conflict of interests between creditor and debtor states. Proponents of activist monetary policy at the ECB had to overcome enormous resistance from within before they could follow the examples set by others. I argue that this is why the ECB first did too little to support the economy, and only changed its orthodox stance very late.

As the guardian of the euro, the European Central Bank (ECB) oversees a prime example of differentiated integration. Against the backdrop of the multiple crises of the euro's second decade, this contribution asks how the ECB has dealt with differentiation. It analyses both the historical development of the ECB's relationship with euro outsiders – discerning between 'old' opt-outs and 'new' accession countries in the context of EU enlargement – and how differentiation affects ECB policymaking across its various tasks. Specifically, we analyze three logics of 'deepening' and 'widening': (1) Is the ECB encouraging euro membership among the 'outs'? (2) Does it seek to reduce the impact of differentiation by keeping the 'outs' on board as much as possible? (3) Or does the ECB further cement differentiation by excluding the 'outs' from decision-making or deepening integration among the 'ins' only? We find that, in the past, the ECB has been hesitant to support 'more Europe'. When the sovereign debt crisis posed a potentially existential threat, however, the ECB started adopting a more proactive role through both monetary policies and discursive acts. The COVID-19 crisis appears to confirm that the ECB has shed its narrow technocratic focus in order to provide political leadership in the EU. Yet, in our view, this does not suggest that the ECB is a competence maximizer 'hardwired' to ever closer union. Rather, the evidence suggests that it merely accepted greater powers and a deepening of integration to avert the threat of (differentiated) disintegration.

AbstractThe euro crisis has sparked changes in the EU's economic governance framework and a crisis of legitimacy across the union. While the institutional repercussions of the crisis have been studied before, the democratic impact at the national level has received much less attention. This paper aims to fill this gap, focusing on the procedural changes that the EU's new economic governance (NEG) framework has brought to national budgetary decision‐making. Building upon the Varieties of Democracy framework, the paper adds empirical nuance and conceptual clarity to the notion of 'throughput legitimacy' and its components: openness, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability. Detailed case studies of post‐crisis Austria, Italy and Portugal show that the NEG improved access to national budgetary decision‐making and enhanced executive scrutiny, while excessive complexity remains the Achilles' heel of EU fiscal rules. We submit that these procedural changes are too meaningful to be overlooked in post‐crisis debates about EU democracy.

As Brexit removes the Nordic countries' most powerful ally from the EU, what does this imply for their approach to European affairs? The literature on small states within the EU suggests that they can counterbalance limited bargaining capacities by entering two types of alliances: strategic partnerships with bigger member states and institutionalised cooperation on a regional basis. Against this backdrop we ask whether, by significantly raising the costs of non-cooperation for Nordic governments, the Brexit referendum has triggered a revival of Nordic political cooperation. We scrutinise this conjecture by analysing Nordic strategies of coalition-building on EU financial and budgetary policy, specifically looking at attempts to reform Europe's Economic and Monetary Union and proposals to strengthen the EU's fiscal powers. We find that Nordic governments have successfully collaborated on these issues in the context of new alliances such as the 'New Hanseatic League' or the 'Frugal Four.' Yet, their coalition-building strategies rely on relatively loose and issue-specific alliances rather than an institutionalisation of Nordic political cooperation, implying that this revival of Nordic political cooperation hardly involves the institutions of 'official' Nordic cooperation. We argue that this reflects lasting differences among the Nordics' approach to the EU as well as electorates' scepticism about supranational institution-building, implying that 'reluctant Europeans' are often also 'reluctant Scandinavians.'

As Brexit removes the Nordic countries' most powerful ally from the EU, what does this imply for their approach to European affairs? The literature on small states within the EU suggests that they can counterbalance limited bargaining capacities by entering two types of alliances: strategic partnerships with bigger member states and institutionalised cooperation on a regional basis. Against this backdrop we ask whether, by significantly raising the costs of non-cooperation for Nordic governments, the Brexit referendum has triggered a revival of Nordic political cooperation. We scrutinise this conjecture by analysing Nordic strategies of coalition-building on EU financial and budgetary policy, specifically looking at attempts to reform Europe's Economic and Monetary Union and proposals to strengthen the EU's fiscal powers. We find that Nordic governments have successfully collaborated on these issues in the context of new alliances such as the 'New Hanseatic League' or the 'Frugal Four.' Yet, their coalition-building strategies rely on relatively loose and issue-specific alliances rather than an institutionalisation of Nordic political cooperation, implying that this revival of Nordic political cooperation hardly involves the institutions of 'official' Nordic cooperation. We argue that this reflects lasting differences among the Nordics' approach to the EU as well as electorates' scepticism about supranational institution-building, implying that 'reluctant Europeans' are often also 'reluctant Scandinavians.'

AbstractThe literature on the comparative political economy of taxation often links consumption taxation to the welfare state. It argues that the expansion of consumption taxation paid for the expansion of welfare states and that bigger welfare states therefore tax consumption more heavily. We challenge this perspective by looking at the introduction of the Value Added Tax (VAT) in the European Economic Community in 1967, the breakthrough of this form of consumption taxation. Studying the crucial case of Germany, and complementing it with the shadow case of the Netherlands, we demonstrate that political struggles about this reform did not center on a conflict between supporters and opponents of welfare state expansion. Instead, the VAT was primarily a tool to foster market integration in Europe by reducing barriers to trade. As we show, the coalition in support of the VAT only succeeded after it won the backing of important export interests.

In 2010 the European Semester was created to better coordinate fiscal and economic policies within Europe's Economic and Monetary Union. The Semester aims to tackle economic imbalances by giving European Union (EU) member states country-specific recommendations (CSRs) regarding their public budgets as well as their wider economic and social policies with a view to enabling better policy coordination among Euro Area member states. In this article we develop a method to assess the way in which the CSRs have been addressing coordination and offer a systematic analysis of the way they have been formulated. We offer a way to code CSRs as well as one to analyse progress evaluations. Furthermore, we seek to use our results to address one of the reoccurring questions in the literature: whether the EU is pursuing a 'one size fits all' approach to economic policy making in the Euro Area? The findings indicate that different types of market economies and welfare states – different 'varieties of capitalism' – among the Euro Area members obtain different recommendations regarding different policy areas