The role of politicians in inciting financial markets to attack the eurozone. EuropEos Commentary No. 4, 21 June 2010

While acknowledging that the sustainability of sovereign debt is a serious issue that must be confronted, this EuropEos Commentary finds that financial markets have blown the problem completely out of proportion, leading to a full-scale confidence crisis. The authors present evidence suggesting that politicians’ public disagreements and careless statements at critical junctures may have added oil to incipient fire. By creating the impression that domestic political interests would take precedence over orderly management of the Greek debt crisis, they raised broader doubts about their ability to address fundamental economic divergences within the area, which are the real source of debt sustainability problems in the medium term.

Competitive Representative Claimsmaking: Party Politicians and Institutional Factors in the Case of EU Budget Negotiations

This study provides an empirical comparative case study of representative claims-making in EU budget negotiations. Two questions are addressed in this paper. First, the paper asks what the role of elected or appointed partisan politicians is in comparison to other representatives. This question is relevant given the reported increasing importance of non-elected representatives. Secondly, the paper asks what the influence of institutional factors is on the practice of representative claims-making. As representative claims-making unfolds in the public sphere, the institutional factors of the public sphere may affect both the claimants it provides a platform for as well as constituencies represented. The paper finds that politicians continue to perform a crucial role in representation, both with regards to their prominence in the public sphere and with regards to the plurality of constituencies represented in their claims. Although institutional factors clearly affect claimants, there are much less pronounced – though noticeable – differences in the constituencies represented in different public spheres. The overall picture is one of a highly plural representative space in which multiple claimants compete with each other to get their message across. In doing so, claimants address the interests of multiple constituencies. It may well be the inherent competition among claimants, fostered by institutional factors, that ensures the plurality of the EU representative space.