Fashions and fads in finance: contingent emulation and the political economy of sovereign wealth fund creation. IHS Political Science Series No. 131, July 2012

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), government-owned or managed investment vehicles, have proliferated at a remarkable rate over the past decade, even as political controversy has surrounded them. Why? The extant literature depicts the process of SWF creation as driven by functional imperatives associated with “excess” revenue and reserves accumulated from commodity booms and large current account surpluses. I argue that SWF creation also reflects in large part a process of contingent emulation in which first this policy has been constructed as appropriate for countries with given characteristics, and then when countries took on these characteristics, they followed their peers. Put simply, fashions and fads in finance matter for policy diffusion. I assess this argument using a new dataset on SWF creation that covers nearly 80 countries from 1984 to 2007. The results suggest peer-based contingent emulation has been a crucial factor shaping the decision of many countries to create a SWF, especially among fuel exporters. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 2 – 5 September 2010. The author would like to thank Eric Neumayer for his many suggestions and comments on previous versions of the manuscript. The author would also like to thank Zachary Elkins for sharing data. Finally, the author would like to acknowledge the research assistance of Natali Bulamacioglu and Christopher Gandrud.

Bridging qualified majority and unanimity decision-making in the EU. IHS Political Science Series No. 132, February 2013

The EU has tried to bridge decision making by qualified majority and unanimity over the years by expanding qualified majorities (consensus) or by making unanimities easier to achieve. I call this decision-making procedure q-“unanimity” and trace its history from the Luxembourg compromise to the Lisbon Treaty, and to more recent agreements. I analyze the most recent and explicit mechanism of this bridging (article 31 (2) of the Lisbon Treaty) and identify one specific means by which the transformation of qualified majorities to unanimities is achieved: the reduction of precision or scope of the decision, so that different behaviors can be covered by it. I provide empirical evidence of such a mechanism by analyzing legislative decisions. Finally, I argue that this bridging is a ubiquitous feature of EU institutions, used in Treaties as well as in legislative decision-making.

An Exercise in Legal Honesty: Re-writing the Court of Justice and the Bundesverfassungsgericht. IHS Political Science Series No. 136, February 2014

At a time of crisis – a true state of emergency – both the Court of Justice of the European Union and the German Federal Constitutional Court have failed the rule of law in Europe. Worse still, in their evaluation of the ersatz crisis law, which has been developed in response to financial and sovereign debt crises, both courts have undermined constitutionality throughout Europe. Each jurisdiction has been implicated within the techocratisation of democratic process. Each Court has contributed to an incremental process of the undermining of the political subjectivity of European Citizens. The results are depressing for lawyers who are still attached to notions of constitutionality. Yet, we must also ask whether the Courts could have acted otherwise. Given the original flaws in the construction of Economic and Monetary Union, as well as the politically pre-emptive constraints imposed by global financial markets, each Court might thus be argued to have been forced to suspend immediate legality in a longer term effort to secure the character of the legal jurisdiction as a whole. Crisis can and does defeat the law. Nevertheless, what continues to disturb is the failure of law in Europe to open up any perspective for a return to normal constitutionality post crisis, as well as its apparent inability to give proper and honest consideration to the hardship now being experienced by millions of Europeans within crisis. This contribution accordingly seeks to reimagine each Judgment in a language of legal honesty. Above all, this contribution seeks to suggest a new form of post-national constitutional language; a language which takes as its primary function, proper protection of democratic process against the ever encroaching powers of a post-national executive power. This contribution forms a part of an on-going effort to identify a new basis for the legitimacy of European Law, conducted jointly and severally with Christian Joerges, University of Bremen and Hertie School of Government, Berlin. Differences do remain in our theoretical positions; hence this individual essay. Nevertheless, the congruence between pluralist and conflict of law approaches to the topic are also readily apparent. See, for example, Everson & Joerges (2013).

The European Union as a System of Differentiated Integration: Interdependence, Politicization and Differentiation. IHS Political Science Series No. 137, 10 July 2014

This paper conceptualizes the European Union (EU) as a system of differentiated integration characterized by both variation in levels of centralization (vertical differentiation) and variation in territorial extension (horizontal differentiation) across policy areas. Differentiation has been a concomitant of deepening and widening and has increased and consolidated as the EU’s powers, policy scope, and membership have grown. Turning to explanation, the paper attributes the pattern of differentiated integration in the EU to the interaction of interdependence and politicization. Differentiation among the member states (internal differentiation) results from supranational integration under conditions of high interdependence and politicization. By contrast, external differentiation (the selective policy integration of non-member states) occurs in highly interdependent but weakly politicized policy areas. These constellations are illustrated in case studies of differentiation in the internal market, monetary union, and defence.

Between violent and non-violent action strategies: a study on extreme-right organizations in Italy and Spain. IHS Political Science Series No. 130, July 2012

This paper focuses on the different forms of action adopted by extreme right organizations (both political parties and non-party groups) in Italy and Spain during their recent mobilization and links them to the environmental conditions and internal organizational factors which might affect them. With particular attention paid to the actors’ perceptions of reality, the macro-level factors (such as the favourable or unfavourable political opportunities of the context, the availability of allies in power, the degree of repression by authorities, etc.) as well as the meso-level factors (such as the internal characteristics of extreme right groups and their dynamics) will be explored in order to understand the action strategies of extreme right organizations and their recourse to violence. This paper, drawing on a combination of qualitative and quantitative research techniques, will be based on 20 semi-structured interviews with extreme right representatives of the main right wing organizations in Italy and Spain as well as a protest event analysis of newspapers dating from 2005 to 2009.