European societies are once more in the grip of the kind of identity politics that decades of carefully constructed economic relationships were supposed to obviate. This paper argues that if the EU is ill-equipped to meet this challenge, it is not so much because of its bias in favor of...

I argue that the conflict that arose in Europe as a result of the Reformation and culminated in the Thirty Years' War persists to this day, as the two spirits corresponding respectively to Protestantism and Catholicism continue to divide us. Analyzing phenomena such as the Pepsi Challenge and...

Following Brexit, the rise of populist Eurosceptics across the EU, Central Eastern Europe's flirtation with 'illiberal democracy' and the sovereign debt crisis, which essentially still remains unresolved ten years after it started, even some of the EU's most enthusiastic supporters are today...

The determinants of public spending composition have been studied from three broad perspectives in the scholarly literature: functional economic pressures, institutional constraints and party-political determinants. This paper engages with the third perspective by placing intra-governmental...

I argue that the conflict that arose in Europe as a result of the Reformation and culminated in the Thirty Years' War persists to this day, as the two spirits corresponding respectively to Protestantism and Catholicism continue to divide us. Analyzing phenomena such as the Pepsi Challenge and...

Governments and domestic banks in Europe have attracted criticism due to the heightening inclination of banks to hold more local sovereign debt in the midst of the crisis. This has traditionally been interpreted as an evidence of financial repression or moral suasion. By using a novel dataset on...

The paper examines how efforts to design a policy regime governed by rules may lead on the contrary to recurrent and far-reaching political discretion. Where re-orientations of policy are formally excluded, as in the ordo-liberal perspective, unforeseen situations will typically provoke...

The public funding of long-term care (LTC) programs to support the frail elderly is still underdeveloped compared to other areas of social protection for old age. In Europe, any moves to broaden entitlements to LTC are impeded by increasing demand for care coinciding with constrained public...

This paper is concerned with the development of housing finance in peripheral European states. Interestingly, the biggest mortgage and housing booms and busts prior to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) have occurred in these countries, rather than in the core. This is surprising, given the...

Grexit was narrowly averted in summer 2015. Nevertheless, the view that Greece might be better off outside the Euro area has never really gone away. Moreover, although Marine Le Pen's bid for the French presidency was frustrated in May 2017, in Italy a disparate coalition, encompassing Beppe...