1,721,001 research outputs found
The Politics of Eurozone Reforms
No full textRecent Eurozone reforms mark the most profound deepening of European integration since Maastricht. The Politics of Eurozone Reforms analyses how member states formed preferences in the politics of these reforms, and how preferences translated into policy outcomes on the European level. The chapters summarize insights on the role of different actors and institutions from four datasets based on 200 expert interviews, the analysis of 5000 policy documents and constitutional court cases in all EU member states. The findings confirm some common wisdom, dispel some myths, and provide insight into mechanisms facilitating further reforms. While quantitative analyses show that ‘Northern' and ‘Southern' member states were deeply divided, case study chapters provide a more refined view. Empirical data also indicates that reform decisions were dominated by governments and EU institutions but dispel the notion that Germany alone imposed its preferred policy. This book goes further and unpacks the legacies of the EMU crisis that make future reforms dependent on the reduction of financial sector risks, which is a necessary condition for rebuilding trust and restarting the gradual convergence of Eurozone reform preferences
The Politics of the Eurozone: Analyses of New Data from Multiple Methodological and Theoretical Perspectives
No full textPolicy diffusion and european public policy research
No full textThe vast and growing policy diffusion literature analyzes how policy-making in one jurisdiction—be it a country or a subnational unit—is influenced by prior policy decisions in other jurisdictions. Rather surprisingly, Europe remains an understudied area in the recent policy diffusion literature. This comes as a surprise because the European governance structure provides an ideal setting for applying the theories and methods of diffusion, given that policy-making in Europe is embedded in a vertically and horizontally integrated network of jurisdictions. This chapter explores the overlaps and distinctions between the scholarships on policy diffusion and European public policy and discusses how the advances of the more recent policy diffusion literature could stimulate further European public policy research. Particularly, the approach of diffusion scholars to study the mechanisms of interdependent policy-making with data on the connectedness between jurisdictions has great potential for improving our understanding of European public policy-making
The cooperative capacity of Swiss federalism
No full textThe federal structure is a defining feature of the Swiss polity. According to the disenchanted hypothesis, which argues that the Swiss political culture of accommodating competing interests has come under pressures, we should expect that cooperation among the cantons and between the federal and cantonal governments has deteriorated over the last 25 years. However, inter-cantonal coordination has increased substantially. In addition, the successful negotiation of the NFA shows that the federal and cantonal governments can reach comprehensive agreements. This study provides empirical analyses of the NFA reform and of inter-cantonal tax competition. The NFA analysis shows that the cantons successfully coordinated their interests vis-a-vis the federal government, and the findings of the spatial econometric tax competition investigation suggest that inter-cantonal coordination in the NFA had an attenuating effect on tax competition. Overall, the problem-solving capacity of the Swiss federal system is remarkably high--not disenchanted
Weshalb war das Rahmenabkommen hochumstritten, wenn es doch von der Schweiz selbst initiiert wurde?
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International Interactions / Global diffusion, policy flexibility, and inflation targeting
Full text linkA diverse group of over 30 countries located all over the world—such as the UK, Colombia, and Ghana—introduced inflation targeting, which is a monetary policy that seeks to control inflation through a pre-announced target. Fully institutionalized democracies adopted the policy first because the core features of inflation targeting are consistent with the principles of a liberal democracy. But why was inflation targeting also introduced by less-democratic countries? This article develops the argument that decision makers of less-democratic countries became more likely to adopt inflation targeting when they observed that nearby countries increased the flexibility of the policy. The statistical analysis of data from 76 countries between 1989 and 2013 supports this hypothesis. The finding that the change of a policy toward a more flexible framework drives its global spread addresses a blind spot in the more recent policy diffusion literature
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