This paper undertakes a structured, focused case-study comparison of housing bubbles in Ireland and Spain, based on the selection of two most-different cases that nonetheless share a common outcome of interest. Both countries were exposed to the same set of changes in their international policy...

Since the onset of the sovereign debt crisis, the crisis-stricken countries in Europe have been pushed to take drastic steps to consolidate their finances and reduce their budget deficits. Despite strong public opposition and largely damaging short-run effects, the countries have undertaken many...

This paper adopts a new analytical approach to explaining choices in fiscal politics in Ireland and Spain between 2008 and 2010, in response to international economic crisis. It adopts a comparative cross-national research design to explore why two countries with similar pre-crisis fiscal...

New theoretical approaches to the state have posed challenges for the comparative analysis of the organizational features of states. The analysis of state bodies and state agencies has largely been confined to the sub-discipline of public administration, and has been resistant to the systematic...

The current economic crisis has hit all European countries hard, but some are more severely affected than others. The problems manifest in European peripheral countries that are also members of the Eurozone, that is, Ireland, Spain, and Greece, have roots in domestic policy mistakes. However,...

Ireland has had one of the most catastrophic experiences of financial crisis in the developed world, in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008. Unlike the US or Britain though, Ireland’s enormous banking exposure was almost entirely related to property speculation and to the unchecked...