The politics of major banking crises has been transformed since the nineteenth century. Analyzing extensive historical and contemporary evidence, Chwieroth and Walter demonstrate that the rising wealth of the middle class has generated 'great expectations' among voters that the government is...

The right of governments to employ capital controls has always been the official orthodoxy of the International Monetary Fund, and the organization's formal rules providing this right have not changed significantly since the IMF was founded in 1945. But informally, among the staff inside the...

How have the politics of banking crises changed over the long run? Unlike existing static accounts, we offer a dynamic theory emphasizing how the emergence of voters’ “great expectations” after the 1930s concerning crisis prevention and mitigation reshaped the politics of banking crises in...

Sovereign default is often associated with the downfall of incumbent governments in democratic polities. Existing scholarship directs attention to the relationship between default and domestic politics and institutions rather than the broader international environment wherein repayment and...

Introduction -- Normative change from within -- Capital ideas and controls -- Capital controlled : the early postwar era -- The limits and hollowness of Keynesianism in the 1960s -- Formal change and informal continuity : the reform negotiations of the 1970s -- Capital freed : informal change...