Democracy without choice: Citizens’ perceptions of government autonomy during the Eurozone crisis

In this article it is argued that citizens take into account the degree of a government's political autonomy to implement particular policies when expressing their views on satisfaction with democracy (SWD) but, in order to do so, they need to perceive it. When citizens directly observe the external constraints that reduce their government's autonomy, then variations in levels of regime satisfaction may no longer be exclusively about government performance – as widely argued by political economists – but also about democratic choice. The argument develops after comparing the existing scenarios in the Eurozone before and after the Great Recession. Citizens only began to perceive their own lack of choice to decide between policy alternatives when the sovereign debt crisis broke out in May 2010, the date of the first Greek bail‐out. It is then when citizens started to update their beliefs about the functioning of democracy as a system in which alternative policies can be adopted as bail‐out deals were signed between national governments from the Euro periphery and the Troika. This updating process towards the way democracy works explains the increasing gap in the levels of SWD between bailed‐out economies and the rest of the countries in the Eurozone. Empirical confirmation for this claim is found after analysing Eurobarometer surveys from 2002 to 2014 and using a two‐step difference‐in‐difference analysis that combines individual and aggregate data.     

Power and changing modes of governance in the euro crisis

Which European Union actors are most powerful in the governance of the euro crisis? The euro crisis has reignited the classic debate between intergovernmentalists, who tend to stress the coercive power of dominant member states in the European Council, and supranationalists, who maintain that through the use of institutional power, the Commission, and the European Central Bank turned out the “winners” of the crisis. This article argues that euro crisis governance is best understood not just in terms of one form of power but instead as evolving through different constellations of coercive, institutional, and ideational power that favored different EU actors over the course of the crisis, from the initial fast‐burning phase (2010–2012), where the coercive and ideational power of Northern European member states in the European Council was strongest, to the slow‐burning phase (2012–2016), when greater influence was afforded supranational actors through the use of ideational and institutional power.     

Preferences for International Redistribution: The Divide over the Eurozone Bailouts

Why do voters agree to bear the costs of bailing out other countries? Despite the prominence of public opinion in the ongoing debate over the eurozone bailouts, voters' preferences on the topic are poorly understood. We conduct the first systematic analysis of this issue using observational and experimental survey data from Germany, the country shouldering the largest share of the EU's financial rescue fund. Testing a range of theoretical explanations, we find that individuals' own economic standing has limited explanatory power in accounting for their position on the bailouts. In contrast, social dispositions such as altruism and cosmopolitanism robustly correlate with support for the bailouts. The results indicate that the divide in public opinion over the bailouts does not reflect distributive lines separating domestic winners and losers. Instead, the bailout debate is better understood as a foreign policy issue that pits economic nationalist sentiments versus greater cosmopolitan affinity and other‐regarding concerns.     

The Contested Politics of Public Value

The emerging field of public values helpfully focuses on the norms and government policies that serve the public interest, but its analysis neglects the barriers to actually creating public value in contemporary America. Chief among these barriers are contending strains of public beliefs and opinions, the disproportionate influence of affluent individuals and business and professional associations, as well as governing structures predisposed toward inaction and drift. This article contrasts the expectations of the public values field with research on American politics to identify barriers to advancing the public interest under current conditions. Although public values scholars offer an analysis of American public life that is inadequate, they do raise challenging questions about how a public‐regarding agenda can be “designed in” to politics and policy. The article concludes by suggesting feasible reforms to improve the conditions for pursuing the public interest.     

The Contested Council: Conflict Dimensions of an Intergovernmental EU Institution

Recent research has tried to uncover the political space in which the Council of Ministers of the European Union decides. Rather than the left-right conflict or a cleavage between governments with national and supranational attitudes, this article shows that a redistributive dimension, decisively shapes the interactions in this most important legislative body of the European Union. In contrast to extant studies, we employ ex ante rather than ex post preference data and rely on correspondence analysis as a means to identify the underlying dimensions of contestation. The article concludes with an empirical investigation of how enlargement will affect the emerging political space within the European Union. Our quantitative analysis suggests that the gulf between net-contributors and net-receivers will further deepen.     

Maximizing shareholder value: a new ideology for corporate governance

The decade-long boom in the US stock market and the more recent boom in the US economy have fostered widespread belief in the economic benefits of the maximization of shareholder value as a principle of corporate governance. In this paper, we provide an historical analysis of the rise of shareholder value as a principle of corporate governance in the United States, tracing the transformation of US corporate strategy from an orientation towards retention of corporate earnings and reinvestment in corporate growth through the 1970s to one of downsizing of corporate labour forces and distribution of corporate earnings to shareholders over the past two decades. We then consider the recent performance of the US economy, and raise questions about the relation between the maximization of shareholder value and the sustainability of economic prosperity.     

区域治理:地区主义视角下的治理模式

冷战结束以来国际社会所发生的一系列重大变革似乎预示着一个治理社会的来临 ,治理被成功地运用于国际关系的实际操作领域。区域治理则是治理模式与地区主义进程的巧妙结合 ,而欧洲联盟通常被认为是区域治理的一个成功模式。本文分析了地区主义与区域治理的互动关系 ,介绍了欧盟的治理模式 ,并以此为基础 ,展望了未来区域治理的发展趋势     

Sustainable intensification and ecosystem services: new directions in agricultural governance

Reconciling environmental objectives for land use with the need to produce more food is a prominent concern of scientific and policy discourses on sustainable agriculture. The idea of sustainable intensification has emerged as one prominent framing of this challenge. In this paper we elaborate this idea from an ecosystem services perspective to natural resource management, with particular reference to developments in the UK. The paper considers the general origins and attributes of the perspective and how the challenge of sustainable intensification would be conceptualized and approached through it. While efforts to link analysis of ecosystem services to policy development and delivery in the UK are revealed as consistent with prevailing, and often long standing, approaches to sustainable agriculture, the marketization of environmental assets is highlighted as a distinguishing feature of current policy applications. The character and limitations of this facet of the ecosystem services agenda are discussed. The need to animate ecological issues of sustainable intensification through frames of reference other than those of economic valuation is emphasized.     

The new randomised controlled trials (RCT) movement in public policy: challenges of epistemic governance

Since 2012, a new movement of government departments, think tanks and high-profile individuals within the UK has sought to promote the increased usage of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in public policy. They promote RCTs as an evidence-based corrective for the inappropriate certainties of experts. Recent government reports and public debate around this initiative are reviewed and analysed within a framework for epistemic governance: normative insights into how knowledge for policymaking should be understood and governed drawn from science and technology studies and the policy sciences. The legitimacy of RCT evidence within policymaking is found to rest on the recognition of three key features: (1) how multiple meanings of evidence limit generalisability, (2) ensuring a plurality of evidence inputs, including those from other forms of research and expertise, and (3) building institutions for governing the use of RCTs in the public interest. Producing evidence for policymaking is a hybrid activity that necessarily spans both science and politics. Presenting RCTs as naively neutral evidence of what policy interventions work is misleading. The paper concludes by calling for more work on how the new RCT movement might engage with its own history in social and policy research on the value of experiments for policymaking.     

Lack of European Identity and the Failure of the Eurozone

Since late 2007, the Eurozone has been embroiled in a crisis that has seen GDP per capita stagnate, public debt soar, and unemployment reach record levels. This article argues that the Eurozone crisis will inevitably force fundamental changes in the structure of the EU. The only way to make the Eurozone work is through deeper fiscal integration of Eurozone economies. Yet wholesale fiscal integration cannot be achieved in the near term, due to the fact that EU citizens continue to identify more with their own nationalities than with Europe as a whole. The Eurozone economies of southern Europe will, therefore, continue to flounder, leading to further anti‐EU sentiment. Anti‐EU sentiment may eventually increase up to the point where one or all of these countries leave the Eurozone or the EU altogether. These propositions are supported with arguments from economic theory, and are bolstered by evidence from surveys and opinion polls.     

The resource curse revisited: governance and natural resources

The paper analyzes the impact of natural resource abundance on selected governance indicators. We use a panel data set with observations on a large number of countries over an extended period of time and employ an instrumental variable technique to account for endogeneity. The results show that exports of natural resources have, above all, led to an increase in corruption. This result is robust to both different model specifications and an alternative indicator for natural resource abundance. For other governance indicators, such as law and order and bureaucratic quality, we either find no results or results that lack robustness.