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Fiscal rules have emerged over time as a response to governments' challenges in managing their public finances. As economies have become more complex, sustainable fiscal policy has become increasingly important. Governments have used fiscal rules to impose discipline on their spending and borrowing and to help ensure they can meet their financial obligations. As a result, the prevalence of fiscal rules has increased in recent decades. In this thesis, I focus on understanding how fiscal rules are implemented across a diverse group of countries. The research fills gaps in current knowledge by examining the factors that influence the adoption of fiscal rules, the effects of these rules on budget balances and bond yields, and the impact of violating fiscal rules on sovereign bonds. The effectiveness of fiscal rules is often assumed to be based on certain assumptions that have not been tested empirically. This research investigates the validity of these assumptions to inform the design of fiscal rules that are effective and efficient. The first chapter provides a brief overview of the history of fiscal rules and the current state of research on the topic. It also outlines the main research questions and hypotheses that will be addressed in subsequent chapters. The second chapter presents a literature review of existing studies on fiscal rules. This includes an examination of the theoretical foundations of fiscal rules, the various types of fiscal rules that have been implemented, and the factors that influence their adoption and effectiveness. The literature review also discusses the benefits and drawbacks of fiscal rules and identifies gaps in the existing research that this study aims to fill. The third and fourth chapter presents the theoretical motivation that underpins the existence of fiscal rules and the methodology used in this study. This includes a description of the deficit bias, its possible causes, and types of fiscal rules. I also describe why I chose to use quantitative methods, limitations, and steps that can be taken to address potential sources of bias and error in the analysis. Chapter five presents a novel dataset on fiscal rule breaks in EU member states. The dataset is an original and unique contribution that I make in this thesis, and it extends the current understanding of fiscal rules and expands avenues for future research. Chapters six, seven, and eight are thematic chapters that each develop research questions and hypotheses for which empirical results are presented. They consider; i) preconditions for fiscal rule existence, ii) how the budget balance and sovereign borrowing cost respond to the existence of fiscal rules under different regimes, and iii) if the fixed income market reacts to fiscal rules being broken. In addition, these chapters include chapter-specific literature reviews, empirical analysis, and detailed discussions of their respective results. Overall, I provide a comprehensive analysis of the adoption and effects of fiscal rules in this thesis, using a quantitative empirical method based on regression analysis.

Aiming to reduce unauthorised migratory flows, several European countries have in recent years focused on measures of deterrence, based on the idea of discouraging irregular mobility by threatening harsh sanctions. Such strategies have a great appeal for policymakers: Because individuals are expected to migrate irregularly when the anticipated benefits outweigh the foreseen costs, increasing the latter should make the conduct less profitable, thus reducing its occurrence. But can deterrence succeed in curbing unauthorised migration? This research aims to deconstruct deterrence strategies in the context of international migration, by investigating their functioning, effectiveness and potential consequences. Theoretically, it builds upon the international political economy (IPE) debate on states’ ability to regulate migratory flows. If realists view states as being able to control entries, neoliberal institutionalists regard legal and institutional factors as significantly limiting such capacity, whereas transnationalist authors consider migration as structural and largely beyond states’ control. This thesis intends to add to such discussion, by focusing on the specific concept of deterrence, and analysing it through an interdisciplinary approach that draws from both IPE and criminological studies. The latter discipline enables in-depth understanding of the way in which deterrent strategies work, highlighting in particular the relevance of the certainty and (to a lesser extent) severity of sanctions, of how such factors are perceived by potential rule-breakers, as well as of the social costs involved in penalties. Empirically, the study focuses on the criminalisation of irregular migration in Italy and France, that is, on the use of the criminal law to sanction foreigners’ unauthorised entry or stay, since the early 2000s. If Italy is the country that punishes irregular migration with one of the highest fines in the EU, France imposes more moderate economic penalties, but also commands imprisonment, being among the few member states inflicting a double punishment. Drawing from the ‘policy gap’ hypothesis, the dissertation thus investigates the problematics that influenced the effectiveness of the criminalisation of migration in reducing irregular flows to the two countries. Specifically, it looks for potential inconsistencies between politicians’ rhetoric and the actual design of the measures (‘discursive gaps’), the measures’ design and eventual enforcement (‘implementation gaps’), and, finally, the latter’s enforcement and overall results (‘efficacy gaps’). To study the above, the thesis adopts a policy evaluation methodology, applying a set of five criteria derived from EU guidelines on ex-post evaluations, namely: Efficacy, efficiency, coherence, sustainability and utility. It relies on over 50 interviews with key stakeholders, more than 100 questionnaires with third country nationals, and two previously unreleased official datasets, triangulating both sources and methods. Overall, the study finds that the criminalisation of migration, as an example of deterrence, has not been effective in either Italy or France. Not only has it scored poorly in most of the evaluation parameters considered, but it has also had counterproductive effects, including the promotion of vicious cycles of insecurity, through both heightened rhetoric and increased irregularity. While, in Italy, diverging interests, including those of employers of irregular migrants, seem to have played a key role in leading to policy incoherence, in France, the judicial system has been crucial in inducing the partial repeal of the norm. More broadly, the study finds criminalisation to have had only marginal significance, compared to the deeper drivers of migration. From a theoretical viewpoint, it concludes by suggesting that a parallelism may be traced between the three-fold understanding of policy gaps, outlined above, and the three main IPE approaches discussed, with each of the latter theories focusing, in fact, on a different level of gaps.

The EU is at the forefront in pressing for compelling instruments to cope with climate problems and China is increasingly sensitive about this. There is also a close relationship between both since the 1980s. The EU can be arguably a norm entrepreneur affecting China’s transition towards an ecological-rational political economy. This claim is interrogated by anatomising the existence of the EU’s values in China. The analysis starts with identifying the norms upheld by the EU followed by evaluating diffusion and internalisation. Document analysis reveals that certain behaviours of the EU can converge as two procedural norms – Polycentric and Porous Policymaking (PPP) and Ecological Modernisation (EM). PPP underscores porous public–private coalitions for initiating policy. Coordinated decision-making, burden-sharing, subsidiarity, harmonisation and subnational involvement in the EU reflect the norm. EM highlights the compatibility between the economy and ecological construction. Environmental damage is an institutionalised problem that is internalised through the principle of polluters pay, allstate and all-sector participation, an emissions trading mechanism, technology and renewables. Interviews, participatory observations and document analysis confirm that the EU delivers both norms to China through the mechanisms of procedural expansion, informational diffusion, physical assistance, cultural filter and socialisation. By designing joint dialogue and local programmes, the EU creates opportunities for being visible and facilitating norm internalisation. Essential concepts included in PPP, such as reaching out to subnational authorities, inviting private actors and organising public–private partnerships are exported. Its actions in teaching the ETS concept, cooperating in technology and introducing European standards, represent the delivery of EM. Consequently, China adapts PPP but modifies EM. It realises that public authorities have limited capability; project-focused coordination with private actors is a tactic to improve policy quality, put-into-effect execution and sectoral capacity. Regarding EM, concepts including national ETS, green intelligent production, recycling economy and demonstration pilots can all be traced back to European ideologies but with Chinese interpretations and needs. China accommodates EM to fit in with domestic development and reorganise administration–society relationship and industrial structures.

The European Parliament (EP) is nowadays a powerful legislative assembly. The question then arises of whether national parties have started to devote more attention to this institution in order to shape nationally relevant legislation. In other words, are national parties following more closely than in the past the internal workings of the EP? Are they putting more efforts into coordinating with their national delegations gathered in Brussels and Strasbourg? These are the overarching questions this research addresses. In a nutshell, the answer is 'not quite yet'. As this thesis demonstrates, a gap persists between the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and their parent parties at home, especially when the latter occupy the mainstream side of the party system. But why bother? These are troubling times for representative democracy in the EU. The economic and financial crisis that hit Europe in the second decade of the 21st century has fuelled public unrest further and been a catalyst for Euroscepticism. This has added to the EU's longstanding democratic malaise generated by the transfer of decision-making power beyond the State. Crucially, a smooth interplay between national parties and their delegations in the EP - what I call 'party multilevel coordination' - may help mend these flaws by bridging the gap between citizens and their supranational representatives. This research puzzle is solved through a mixed-method approach. First, a multilevel statistical analysis highlights the main longitudinal and cross-sectional trends in party multilevel coordination. The dataset spans from 1999 to 2015 and draws on several existing databases. Second, a case study approach focusing on Italian and British mainstream parties, and relying on semi-structured interviews and analysis of party documents, scrutinises the casual mechanisms accounting for variation in party multilevel coordination. The empirical analysis is underpinned by a revised version of Müller and Strøm's (1999) framework, according to which national parties' incentives to invest time in party multilevel coordination depends on the pursuit of policy, vote, and opportunity goals in national and EU arenas. Remarkably, this multi-method investigation unveils the interplay between party multilevel coordination, party strategy, political culture and institutional features, and throws light on the many missed opportunities that have characterised the EU dealings of, most notably, mainstream national parties.

Irregular migration management finds itself high on the political agenda of the European Union with the aim to establish a clear, fair and transparent common return policy respecting fundamental rights. Thus, in 2008, the EU adopted the Return Directive that became a subject of vast criticism by academics as well as practitioners due to its controversial nature. The main object of critique has been claims that the Return Directive does not provide sufficient fundamental rights protection for irregular third-country nationals during the return procedure and is thus not in compliance with general principles of EU law. The thesis aims to study the fundamental rights protection in the Return Directive in the light of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and general principles of EU law. While the concerns over the Return Directive’s compliance with the fundamental rights principles continue even now, they have demonstrated a slight shift, which provides reason to question whether the Directive really is as insufficient as initially feared. The thesis sets to examine whether the alleged fundamental rights shortcomings in the Return Directive can be salvaged by the application of the Charter and general principle of EU law. In carrying out the research the thesis aims to study whether the Return Directive entails any shortcomings to provide sufficient fundamental rights safeguards during the return procedure and whether these shortcomings appeared because of the flawed work of legislators or were caused by the Member States whilst applying the Return Directive. The thesis is composed of five parts, beginning with the Introduction and ending with the Conclusions. The form of methodology adopted throughout is therefore doctrinal.

One of the common debates in the European Union revolves around the argument that labour mobility in the EU is too low and well below the general expectations. Since the implementation of neoliberal policies in the 1980s, the EU has increasingly favoured ‘high labour mobility levels within the EU’ and has desperately been trying to increase them ever since. In particular, in the last decade the EU has implemented various programmes in order to boost labour mobility between the member states. This thesis challenges the current view of EU institutions with their call for higher mobility levels between the EU member states. According to migration theories (the neoclassical theory of migration), individuals move in order to profit from economic advantages, i.e. they move to regions with better prospects of earning higher wages. In other words, under this lens migration takes places between economically different regions. In addition, the EU has been trying to achieve convergence between the regions by implementing cohesion polices, which means the reduction of economic disparities between regions. Through semi-structured interviews, the motivations of EU-migrants between converged and non-converged regions are explored and compared. The outcomes of this research study bring into question the perspective of the EU institutions by providing evidence that high mobility levels cannot be achieved in converged regions as both ambitions correlate from the same source, namely wage differentials. The EU is thus following paradoxical aims.

The global competition economy is impacting the way local government is run and how local elected officials behave. Within local government, elected officials are reacting to the changes by positioning themselves within the global political economy. Two key actors linking the global and the local are local elected officials and ethnic entrepreneurs. It is important to understand what behaviours are facilitating the connection of local economies to the global economy and what local structures enable or inhibit the activity. This research examines the changing behaviours and structures at the local level as a result of globalisation. The research presents positive indicators from empirical research and three local case studies that a dyadic arrangement of transformational leadership and a legislative-­‐activist structure appear more likely to connect a local economy to opportunities in the global economy. Further, in the areas examined within this research, it emerges that a politically motivated elected official advances a local connection to the global stage more than one motivated by a purely public servant agenda; and representation embodied by a political party and global ideals connects the local to the global with greater frequency than a correlation to a local or national representational focus. The research is based on and expands several fields of study including international relations, economics, immigration and politics. The empirical research and case studies contribute to the existing body of literature by providing a conceptual framework for structure-­‐plus-­‐agency to view and understand how the global economy impacts the behaviour of local elected officials and ethnic entrepreneurs and how changing structures in local government facilitate or constrain these activities. Further, the research presents a new measure for behaviour and structure (based on Clark and Moonen, 2013) to extrapolate the potential for local participation in a global economy.

This thesis critically engages with the politics of citizenship, immigration and identity in Europe. It asks why different public and political responses to the presence of Romanian immigrants have arisen in Italy, where this nationality has been presented as a threat to security and public order, compared to Spain where this has not been so. In doing so, it has sought to bring an understudied immigrant population into mainstream academic view whilst contrasting the prevalent idea in academia and politics that immigrants constitute culturally homogeneous and bounded groups or communities. It argues that different responses are due not to the cultural characteristics of immigrants themselves but rather to the choices and strategies of mobilisation of structurally-situated actors who negotiate what it means to be categorised as being of one of these nationalities. It then examines the implications of the accession of Romania to the European Union in 2007, finding that the legal category of EU citizen does not directly herald an increasing presence in the public sphere for Romanian immigrants. Instead, the impact of the rights of citizenship of the EU on public references to Romanian immigrants are contingent on local contexts and dependent on the ability of specific actors to take advantage of national and local opportunities for inclusion and participation. The research project thus contributes empirically and methodologically to diverse literatures on the role of identity in contemporary politics, immigrant and ethnic minority political participation and social movements, and the implications of European Union integration on immigration, immigrant integration and social citizenship in the current phase of globalisation. It thus provides a perspective on the political dimension of immigration and ethnic relations as well as a way of unveiling and explaining the mobilisation of populist xenophobic discourses found in some European countries today.