The current financial crisis has brought Europe to a critical juncture. In this paper, we map the fiscally United States of Europe. We simulate an optimal EU-wide income tax and calculate the implied cross-country transfers. The comparison of the implied transfers with the real transfers shows...

Im Zuge der Reformen des öffentlichen Dienstes in Deutschland seit den 1990er Jahren werden an die Beschäftigten neue normative Erwartungen gestellt. So sollen neben den durch den traditionellen "Staatsdiener" charakterisierte Werte wie Neutralität, Regelgeleitetes Handeln oder Loyalität...

How does international tax competition affect fiscal democracy? To what extent does it constrain the autonomy of democratic governments in choosing the level and structure of national taxation? While tax competition has not reduced the level of total taxation in OECD-22 countries, it has revenue...

Why do citizens support or reject the idea of global authority? The paper addresses this question by examining individual attitudes about UN authority in a comparative perspective. According to the main argument put forward in this paper, we may think of the formation of citizens' support for...

In this paper we examine the Chinese domestic discourse centering on Shanghai's participation in the PISA study and interpretations of the 2009 results. The main focus is to examine why local education authority took part in the PISA project and how actors from the education authority use PISA...

In Reaktion auf zahlreiche wirtschaftliche Missbrauchsfälle und Gewalteskalationen, in die Private Sicherheitsunternehmen (PSU) während des Irak- und Afghanistaneinsatzes verwickelt waren, sind in den Vereinigten Staaten eine Reihe von neuen Regulierungen in Kraft getreten. Im Mittelpunkt...

When representatives of the U.S. government and Congress debated military intervention in the conflict in Bosnia in 1995, they were not just talking about an American troop contribution. The dispute became a focal point for issues such as relations with the U.N. and NATO and the general...

In this working paper, we treat legitimacy and legitimation as interactive, discursive and relational concepts: Legitimacy is socially constructed in the public spheres of (democratic) political regimes, that is, in discursive exchanges of political elites and citizens about the acceptability of...

Based on qualitative research conducted in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom, the article analyses the citizens' perspective on the EU financial crisis as it is communicated in the European public sphere. With reference to this aim, we argue in the following...