Zusammenfassung Der Wirtschaftsstabilisierungsfonds (WSF) ist eines von mehreren staatlichen Unterstützungsinstrumenten, die zur Bekämpfung der Folgen der Coronakrise aufgelegt wurden. Der WSF wurde für Unternehmen mit besonderer (volks-)wirtschaftlicher Bedeutung konzipiert. Dabei verfügt der Fonds über ein breites Spektrum an eigenkapitalähnlichen Hybridinstrumenten, wie stillen Beteiligungen und Nachrangdarlehen, wobei im Ausnahmefall auch offene Beteiligungen eingesetzt werden. Trotz der geringen Zahl stabilisierter Unternehmen zeigt sich, dass der WSF ein wichtiger Baustein der Krisenarchitektur ist — dank passgenauer Stabilisierungslösungen konnten wichtige Unternehmen erfolgreich stabilisiert werden.

Macro-economic policy coordination remains a challenge in the EU. The European Semester was designed to help facilitate more coordination. In the area of wage policies, it encourages Germany and the Netherlands to support stronger wage growth, while Italy and Portugal have been told to exercise wage restraint. This paper analyses how domestic interest group politics influence how EU recommendations are received. Reflecting on the different growth models that underpin these four countries, we find that country-specific recommendations meet country-specific obstacles - independent of whether recommendations aim at increasing or reducing wages. Specifically, we observe that domestic actors successfully mobilize against EU recommendations that go against the interests of their constituencies, but are less effective in mobilizing for recommendations aligning with their interests. Hence, we submit that high salience of EU influence poses an obstacle for EU-induced reform in the South while low salience limits EU influence in the North.

The euro crisis has sparked changes in the EU's economic governance framework and a crisis of legitimacy across the union. While the institutional repercussions of the crisis have been studied before, the democratic impact at the national level has received much less attention. This paper aims to fill this gap, focusing on the procedural changes that the EU's new economic governance (NEG) framework has brought to national budgetary decision-making. Building upon the Varieties of Democracy framework, the paper adds empirical nuance and conceptual clarity to the notion of 'throughput legitimacy' and its components: openness, inclusiveness, transparency and accountability. Detailed case studies of post-crisis Austria, Italy and Portugal show that the NEG improved access to national budgetary decision-making and enhanced executive scrutiny, while excessive complexity remains the Achilles' heel of EU fiscal rules. We submit that these procedural changes are too meaningful to be overlooked in post-crisis debates about EU democracy.

In July, EU heads of state and government finally reached agreement on a recovery package to tackle the socio-economic fallout from Covid-19. Daniel F. Schulz writes that although the agreement was unprecedented in its scope, Europe’s recovery strategy will draw heavily on the existing analyses and institutional structures of the European Semester. Ultimately, Europe’s leaders will be betting on the potential of renewable energy and digital services to create millions of jobs across the EU, suggesting that large-scale upskilling programmes may become a prominent feature of member states’ labour market policies.

As Brexit removes the Nordic countries' most powerful ally from the EU, what does this imply for their approach to European affairs? The literature on small states within the EU suggests that they can counterbalance limited bargaining capacities by entering two types of alliances: strategic partnerships with bigger member states and institutionalised cooperation on a regional basis. Against this backdrop we ask whether, by significantly raising the costs of non-cooperation for Nordic governments, the Brexit referendum has triggered a revival of Nordic political cooperation. We scrutinise this conjecture by analysing Nordic strategies of coalition-building on EU financial and budgetary policy, specifically looking at attempts to reform Europe's Economic and Monetary Union and proposals to strengthen the EU's fiscal powers. We find that Nordic governments have successfully collaborated on these issues in the context of new alliances such as the 'New Hanseatic League' or the 'Frugal Four.' Yet, their coalition-building strategies rely on relatively loose and issue-specific alliances rather than an institutionalisation of Nordic political cooperation, implying that this revival of Nordic political cooperation hardly involves the institutions of 'official' Nordic cooperation. We argue that this reflects lasting differences among the Nordics' approach to the EU as well as electorates' scepticism about supranational institution-building, implying that 'reluctant Europeans' are often also 'reluctant Scandinavians.'

The European Union (EU) - and its Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in particular - is often criticized as a predominantly market-oriented project. We analyse to what extent such claims can be substantiated by focusing on one key aspect of the EU's post-crisis framework for economic governance: the country-specific recommendations (CSRs) that the EU has been issuing annually since 2011. Based on an original dataset, we analyse more than 1300 CSRs, which show that the EU does not push uniformly for less state intervention. Rather, the CSRs tend to suggest fiscal restraint and less protection for labour market insiders, while simultaneously promoting measures that benefit vulnerable groups in society. During the second decade of EMU, CSRs have gradually become more permissive of higher public spending and more in favour of worker protection, while the share of recommendations advocating more social protection has stagnated at a high level.

The literature on the comparative political economy of taxation often links consumption taxation to the welfare state. It argues that the expansion of consumption taxation paid for the expansion of welfare states and that bigger welfare states therefore tax consumption more heavily. We challenge this perspective by looking at the introduction of the Value Added Tax (VAT) in the European Economic Community in 1967, the breakthrough of this form of consumption taxation. Studying the crucial case of Germany, and complementing it with the shadow case of the Netherlands, we demonstrate that political struggles about this reform did not center on a conflict between supporters and opponents of welfare state expansion. Instead, the VAT was primarily a tool to foster market integration in Europe by reducing barriers to trade. As we show, the coalition in support of the VAT only succeeded after it won the backing of important export interests.

In 2010 the European Semester was created to better coordinate fiscal and economic policies within Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union. The Semester aims to tackle economic imbalances by giving European Union (EU) member states country-specific recommendations (CSRs) regarding their public budgets as well as their wider economic and social policies with a view to enabling better policy coordination among Euro Area member states. In this article we develop a method to assess the way in which the CSRs have been addressing coordination and offer a systematic analysis of the way they have been formulated. We offer a way to code CSRs as well as one to analyse progress evaluations. Furthermore, we seek to use our results to address one of the reoccurring questions in the literature: whether the EU is pursuing a ‘one size fits all’ approach to economic policy making in the Euro Area? The findings indicate that different types of market economies and welfare states – different ‘varieties of capitalism’ – among the Euro Area members obtain different recommendations regarding different policy areas

The euro’s problem-ridden second decade has made crisis management and economic reform across the European Union (EU) the priority of high politics. Despite the prominence of high-level intergovernmental summits, however, many studies identify EU policymaking elites as influential or even causal factors determining the EU’s crisis response. This commentary therefore reviews the recent literature on EU economic governance which emphasises the role of supranational actors. The focus is on the methodologies and empirical strategies that scholars employ to determine the independent effect of policymaking elites on outcomes. This commentary identifies a renewed interest in actor-centred methodologies as well as a continuing emphasis on process-tracing approaches, primarily based on elite interviewing and document analysis. Finally, it discusses the potential of novel approaches relying on other sources of data such as policymakers’ biographies, their speeches, or publication and citation patterns.

For all its powers, we know little about how the Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) makes its decisions and why. In light of its everincreasing importance in European governance and the criticism this has attracted, this is particularly regrettable. Often a welcome scapegoat, the ECB has been accused of doing first too little, then too late. Compared to other major central banks such as the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England, the ECB has indeed long been a laggard – regarding both conventional interest rate policies and more unconventional balance sheet operations. Why? I argue that central bankers’ policy experiments after the financial crisis are a prime example of policymaking under conditions of Knightian uncertainty. Faced with an unprecedented situation, central bankers were unable to draw on historical experience and had to resort to their beliefs about how the economy works instead. Based on a survey among 422 central bank economists, I quantify these different ways of thinking. My survey data suggests a) that certain economic beliefs matter for preferences and b) that both are unevenly distributed among central banks. In particular, the ECB leans more towards orthodox beliefs and hawkish inflation preferences than the US Fed and the Bank of England. It is considerably more conservative. Within the Eurosystem, different national central banks are clustered regarding both beliefs and preferences, showing a dividing line in economic philosophy between core and periphery. This suggests that the frequently surfacing conflicts inside the ECB’s Governing Council are a battle of ideas rather than a conflict of interests between creditor and debtor states. Proponents of activist monetary policy at the ECB had to overcome enormous resistance from within before they could follow the examples set by others. I argue that this is why the ECB first did too little to support the economy, and only changed its orthodox stance very late. 1 I thank Sven Steinmo, Björn Bremer, Alessandro Giovannini, and Lukas Haffert for their comments on previous versions of this paper. I am also enormously grateful to Richard Portes, whose kind help in designing and disseminating the survey presented was crucial for my data collection. All remaining mistakes are mine. 2 If the tragic and seemingly endless Eurozone crisis knows one ‘winner’, it certainly is the European Central Bank (ECB). Since the crisis began, the ECB has greatly increased its powers and has eventually become the dominant actor in European economic governance. In the eyes of many, it became the only institution left with the capability to act. Compared to other European institutions, which appeared paralyzed by divergent national interests and their intergovernmental decision-making mode, the highly autonomous ECB has proven that it can make and implement policies quickly. However, the ECB did not actively pursue new powers, due to concerns about its independence. It merely accepted them, often rather reluctantly. Nevertheless, it ended up with ever more responsibilities, facing ever higher expectations. Still, the ECB remains a poorly understood institution. For all its powers, we know remarkably little about how – and why – it makes the decisions it does. Shrouded in mystery, the world’s most independent central bank is, at the same time, the least transparent. Deciding behind closed doors and refraining from issuing detailed minutes or voting records of its meetings, the ECB often leaves observers puzzled. Analysts and the financial press are left with no other option than to engage in guesswork when trying to understand why the ECB does what it does. This lacuna restricts our understanding of the ECB’s relatively conservative behavior during the crisis. While central banks around the world reversed the orthodoxy of the past several decades (Davies 2013) and attempted to counter the ‘Great Recession’ by increasing the money supply through a variety of mechanisms, the ECB took a much more cautious approach. Despite record-high unemployment and low inflation rates, it long remained hesitant to adopt the expansionary policies its peers pursued. Or, to state it more bluntly: while others reacted to the crisis by fighting unemployment, the ECB continued to fight inflation. Given the criticism this received, why did the ECB not do more? What kept it from pursuing the extraordinary policies of its peers until 2015? Why did it take so long to change its conservative stance? In order to understand why a supranational central bank does what it does, it is essential to go beyond methodological nationalism. Conventional analyses of ECB policy expect it to reflect the interests and relative power of EMU member states. Such accounts, however, have problems explaining why German officials were overruled in the ECB Governing Council’s most momentous decisions (e.g. its OMT program in 2012 and the QE decision of 2015), while they apparently remained in the driving seat at other times. Another research tradition analyses central bank policy as a function of their mandates, measured through detailed indices of central bank independence. Yet the Maastricht Treaty is “full of artful compromises and deliberate obfuscations” (Cohen 2008: 53), giving ECB officials considerable room for maneuver. If conditions change, the ECB

Bibliographie: Schulz, Daniel: „Die Unbestimmtheit der Demokratie“. Ein Gesprach mit Pierre Rosanvallon, ZPTh, 1-2016, S. 105-119. https://doi.org/10.3224/zpth.v7i1.09

This article attempts to shed new light on prevailing puzzles of spatial scales in multi-level, participatory governance as regards the democratic legitimacy and environmental effectiveness of governance systems. We focus on the governance re-scaling by the European Water Framework Directive, which introduced new governance scales (mandated river basin management) and demands consultation of citizens and encourages 'active involvement' of stakeholders. This allows to examine whether and how re-scaling through deliberate governance interventions impacts on democratic legitimacy and effective environmental policy delivery. To guide the enquiry, this article organizes existing-partly contradictory-claims on the relation of scale, democratic legitimacy, and environmental effectiveness into three clusters of mechanisms, integrating insights from multi-level governance, social-ecological systems, and public participation. We empirically examine Water Framework Directive implementation in a comparative case study of multi-level systems in the light of the suggested mechanisms. We compare two planning areas in Germany: North Rhine Westphalia and Lower Saxony. Findings suggest that the Water Framework Directive did have some impact on institutionalizing hydrological scales and participation. Local participation appears generally both more effective and legitimate than on higher levels, pointing to the need for yet more tailored multi-level governance approaches, depending on whether environmental knowledge or advocacy is sought. We find mixed results regarding the potential of participation to bridge spatial 'misfits' between ecological and administrative scales of governance, depending on the historical institutionalization of governance on ecological scales. Polycentricity, finally, appeared somewhat favorable in effectiveness terms with some distinct differences regarding polycentricity in planning vs. polycentricity in implementation.