Many political scientists and economists have addressed the implications of the public sector's sheltered status on their unions' wage strategies vis-à-vis the government. Since the public sector is a monopoly provider of necessary and price inelastic services, conventional wisdom suggests that...

This paper conducts an ontological inquiry into the identity of the European Union, and seeks to establish whether its core identity is of a cultural or political nature through looking at the debate generated by Turkey's application for EU membership. The concepts of ‘the other,' the...

Are 'modern societies' necessarily democratic societies and capitalist (or: market) societies? This is what most of the social sciences of the post-Second World War period have assumed, while only some strands of critical, often Marx-inspired approaches contested this connection. This essay...

Most accounts of business coordination assume historically given conditions for this to emerge. Business coordination is therefore difficult, perhaps impossible, to construct endogenously. This paper examines a process of 'endogenous coordination' through an analysis of reindustrialization and...

Theoretical work on state formation and capacity has focused mostly on early modern Europe and on the experience of western European states during this period. While a number of European states monopolized domestic tax collection and achieved gains in state capacity during the early modern era,...

The European Monetary Union (EMU) has removed crucial instruments of macroeconomic management from the control of democratically accountable governments. Worse yet, it has been the systemic cause of destabilizing macroeconomic imbalances that member states found difficult or impossible to...

Choice and competition policies in public services are popular reform strategies in the member states of the European Union (EU). The European choice agenda is based on the view in the EU of, "social policy as a productive factor," and the need for, "modernisation," of the EU welfare states....

This paper explores the extent to which current reforms of the euro-zone's governance remain encased in the constraints of the Maastricht Treaty - the narrowness of its underlying paradigm; the gaps and imbalances of its design – and the implications for the future of the euro. With a model of...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, governments in the western world resumed policy instruments from the immediate post-war period's mixed economies. These instruments had all been abandoned in the liberalizing market economies of the last decades. How do we interpret these developments in...

Under the budgetary strain of the economic crisis, many European governments have introduced spending cuts in higher education. As a consequence, universities increasingly have to rely on tuition fees and private sources of funding to sustain themselves. This development fits in with a broader...