Universität zu Köln

Eisl, Andreas ORCID: 0000-0002-1916-2873 (2023). The politics of budgetary constraints. An ideational explanation for the variation in national fiscal frameworks in the eurozone. PhD thesis, Universität zu Köln.

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Abstract

Situated in the fields of comparative and international political economy, this dissertation is interested in national fiscal frameworks in the eurozone. These sets of fiscal rules and institutions aim at reducing the fiscal policy discretion of political decision-makers. While national fiscal frameworks face substantial convergence pressures in Europe, we can nevertheless observe significant and persistent variation in their stringency, design and timing. The research project thus sets out to explain this fiscal framework variation studying six country cases (Germany, France, Austria, Slovakia, Ireland and Portugal). Building on a diverse case-selection strategy to maximise both the internal and external validity of the comparative research design, the empirical evidence includes interviews with 81 fiscal policy actors, as well as parliamentary debates, electoral manifestos, legal documents, reports, newspaper articles and descriptive statistics. Drawing on these varied materials, the dissertation tests several theories that could explain the variation in fiscal frameworks and their reforms between the early 1990s and the late 2010s. Among these potential explanations are domestic ideas, national economic interests, public opinion, financial markets, and coercion by powerful external actors. In-depth process-tracing of fiscal framework reforms in Slovakia, Austria and France highlights the role of country-specific macroeconomic idea-sets in explaining the variation of national fiscal frameworks. Macroeconomic idea-sets differ with regard to the role they assign to the state in the economy and to which extent they favour the use of rules and/or expertise to guide fiscal policy-making. They are embedded in domestic political, economic and research institutions. The case studies show how Slovak neoliberalism, Austro-pragmatism and French post-dirigisme, respectively, led to the implementation of a constraining, intermediate, and lenient fiscal framework in terms of stringency. Comparative analyses of all six country cases and the in-depth case studies help to evaluate the extent to which the four alternative theories can explain national fiscal framework variation. The findings suggest that financial markets (in Austria and Slovakia) as well as external coercion (in Ireland and Portugal) played a role in the timing and design of certain fiscal framework reforms. While correlational evidence also suggests an influence of economic interests on fiscal framework variation, the absence of process-tracing evidence puts this explanation into question. Both economic models and fiscal frameworks might be driven by the same macroeconomic idea-sets instead. Public opinion, finally, did not influence fiscal framework reforms in any significant manner.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD thesis)
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Eisl, Andreas andreas.eisl@sciencespo.fr orcid.org/0000-0002-1916-2873 UNSPECIFIED
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-719510
Date:	30 January 2023
Language:	English
Faculty:	Faculty of Management, Economy and Social Sciences
Divisions:	Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Political Science > Cologne Center for Comparative Politics
Subjects:	Political science Economics
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language Comparative political economy English Public debt English Fiscal frameworks English Ideas English UNSPECIFIED English UNSPECIFIED English UNSPECIFIED English
Date of oral exam:	30 January 2023
Referee:	Name Academic Title Kaiser, André Professor für Politikwissenschaft (Universität zu Köln) Schmidt, Vivien A. Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration and Professor of International Relations and Political Science (Boston University)
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/71951