Governance Without Democracy? Analysing the Role of Parliaments in European Economic Governance after the Crisis: Introduction to the Special Issue

Political alternatives under European economic governance: evidence from German budget speeches (2009–2019)

“…Through the European Semester, national governments prepare a national reform plan that is evaluated by European institutions. On the basis of a series of reports, in turn these institutions develop the CSRs that national governments need to take into consideration when preparing the upcoming budget (Maatsch & Cooper, 2017). In the Semester's process, national budgets receive a European input from the CSRs, and the CSRs receive a national input from the national reform plans.…”

“…The reform of European Economic Governance (EEG) that was agreed between 2009 and 2013 brought substantial changes to the ways in which national political decisions are taken, particularly in the sphere of socio-economic policies (Laffan, 2014;Maatsch & Cooper, 2017). More than before, EU member states are now subject to tighter fiscal rules (Doray-Demers & Foucault, 2017), and through the process of the European Semester they must also increasingly coordinate their policies with European institutions (Verdun & Zeitlin, 2018).…”

“…While in the traditional scheme national budgetary policy was primarily an affair between national governments and parliamentswith international and European rules serving merely as benchmarks that could be violated (e.g., Karremans & Damhuis, 2018)today finance ministers must increasingly negotiate the direction of their policies at the European level (Maricut & Puetter, 2018). This raises new questions about the current locus of political decisionmaking, and about the extent to which the political preferences of democratically elected governments are still relevant for the direction of socio-economic policies (Crum, 2018;Maatsch & Cooper, 2017;Mair, 2013).…”

“…Consequently, the relevance of governments' preferences for EEG obliges EU scholars to bring into the picture the alternation in government between different political forces, and to raise (again) the question of whether and how the alternation in government between different parties generates different political alternatives for socio-economic policy-making. Answering this question is not only relevant for a better understanding of the inner workings of EEG, but also for the assessment of the quality of national democracies under the newly reformed EEG (Crum, 2018;Maatsch & Cooper, 2017).…”

Free Trade versus Democracy and Social Standards in the European Union: Trade-Offs or Trilemma?

“…The autonomy of Member States to decide their fiscal and economic policies has been drastically curtailed….Second, the Eurozone has become equipped with the means to extend credit to its Member States through the European Stability Mechanism….The granting of aid is closely tied to the so-called 'economic conditionality'….The conditionality is supposed to ensure that states are capable of sustaining the 'stability' of financial markets, which must not be upset by the state not back paying on either interest or principal debt. (Somek, 2015, p. 341) Others have argued in a similar vein that the EU, especially in what I have termed its "crisis mode" (Wiesner, 2019), is in a state of emergency (Maatsch & Cooper, 2017;White, 2015;see in detail Wiesner, 2019). In a slightly less dramatical tone, Claus Offe has highlighted that the crisis emphasised a discrepancy between executive dominance and governance of crisis measures and decreasing citizen support for the EU (Offe, 2015).…”