This paper is about the relative impact of retirement and social class on individual attitudes towards welfare state policies in advanced industrial democracies. Which factor is more important in explaining individuals' social policy preferences: socio-economic background or retirement? How can...

This paper discusses the management of the crisis in Greece, arguing that it was based on a series of diagnoses that justified fiscal discipline by stigmatizing the Greek economy and society, and that it had a narrow understanding of the reasons for Greece’s deteriorating competitiveness. I...

Der Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, ob eine Systemtheorie, in deren Zentrum die funktionelle Differenzierung steht, einen analytischen Rahmen für eine über die deskriptive Auflistung einzelner Faktoren hinausgehende Erklärung der zu der jüngsten internationalen Krise des...

In this paper, I put the ongoing G20 process of improving the regulation of international finance into a historically informed perspective. To understand the driving forces behind and obstacles to international cooperation in governing finance I combine concepts from international political...

At first glance, the social purpose and the democratic potential of the EU have made progress in the last 15 years. However, this impression is misleading. We argue instead that the social and democratic potentials of the EU are crucially shaped by the heterogeneity of European varieties of...