The paper examines why, and under what conditions, certain interest groups adopt positive positions on international economic issues. It provides a case study of how UK trade unions formed their preferences on membership of the EMU. Previous explanations of this have tended to emphasise the...

By focusing on the near-term campaign in the 2014 European elections analysts have tended to over-look a series of longer-term trends that were jointly and inexorably leading to the Spitzenkandidaten (lead candidate) process and to some at least of the subsequent structural reforms to the...

This paper investigates the causes of, and reactions to, the Eurozone crisis, focusing in particular on the institutional foundations of the four Southern European Eurozone countries that have encountered an acute sovereign debt crisis. Applying the basic arguments featured in the Varieties of...

Many advanced economies around the world have recently witnessed a notable rise in populism stirring severe political unrest and social instability. This paper addresses the apparent academic confusion regarding the origins of this phenomenon and combines politico-economic analysis with...

Recent wave of mass popular dissent reminds us that it is necessary to understand social dynamics also from the perspective of social exclusion. Landauer (1900) inquired how to create alternative community with “the inclusion of the excluded as excluded” (Agamben, 1999). Antisystem movements...

The crisis since August 2007 provides an opportunity to observe the workings of good governance institutions under an extreme stress test and in radically different political settings. Institutions such as independent central banks, fiscal rules and regulatory oversight of public finances were...

Excessive fiscal spending is commonly cited as a primary cause of the current European sovereign debt crisis. We develop an alternative hypothesis which better accounts for systemic differences towards EMU countries' exposure to market speculation: the rise of competitiveness imbalances which...