Search

Employer organizations have been presented as strong promoters of the liberalization of industrial relations in Europe. This article, in contrast, argues that the preferences of employers vis-à-vis liberalization are heterogeneous and documents how employer organizations in Spain, Italy, and Portugal have resisted state-led reforms to liberalize collective bargaining during the Euro crisis. It shows that the dominance of small firms in the economies of these countries make employer organizations supportive of selective aspects of sectoral bargaining and state regulation. Encompassing sectoral bargaining is important for small firms for three reasons: it limits industrial conflict, reduces transaction costs related to wage-bargaining, and ensures that member firms are not undercut by rivals offering lower wages and employment conditions. Furthermore, the maintenance of sectoral bargaining and its extension to whole sectors by the state is a matter of survival for employer organizations. The article presents rationales for employer opposition to liberalization that differ from the varieties of capitalism approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When countries face balance-of-payments crises, their policy responses vary widely. This article argues that the choice between the two main options of internal adjustment (i.e., austerity and structural reforms) and external adjustment (i.e., exchange-rate devaluation) depends on how costly each of these strategies is for a country overall. Although the choice of adjustment strategy is thus structurally determined, the level of political conflict associated with crisis management depends on both the national vulnerability profile and partisan interests. Moreover, irrespective of the adjustment strategy, all governments design the specific reforms in ways that shelter their own voters. Empirically, this article uses qualitative case studies and survey data to examine the significant variation in crisis responses, crisis politics, and distributive outcomes of the 2008-2010 global financial crisis in eight Eastern European countries. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the Eastern European experience for crisis politics in the Eurozone crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lisbon Treaty has institutionalized a dual constitution, supranational in the single market’s policies and intergovernmental in (among others) economic and financial policies. The extremely complex system of economic governance set up for answering the euro crisis has been defined and implemented on the basis of the intergovernmental constitution of the EU. The euro crisis has thus represented a test for the validity of the intergovernmental constitution of the Lisbon Treaty. Although the measures adopted in the period 2010-2012, consisting of legislative decisions and new intergovernmental treaties, are of an unprecedented magnitude, they were nevertheless unable to promote effective and legitimate solutions for dealing with the financial crisis. In the context of an existential challenge, the intergovernmental approach faced a structural difficulty in solving basic dilemmas of collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]