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In light of the German government’s long-held preference against EU-wide fiscal burden-sharing, a hallmark of the Euro crisis, its support for an EU-wide debt-instrument during the COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a dramatic policy U-turn. To make sense of the ‘Berlin puzzle’, we develop a theoretical mechanism that explores why an initially reluctant German government heeded to the call for transnational fiscal solidarity: First, to avoid a ‘common bad’ of a large-scale economic contraction, proposals for an EU-wide fiscal response became a political imperative. Second, the successful framing of the crisis as ‘nobody’s fault’ rendered the call for European solidarity as the dominant standard of legitimacy to which all governments subscribed. Third, governments whose preferences were not aligned with this standard faced mounting normative pressure and isolation. As a result, governments changed their positions, but not their preferences. We probe this mechanism by carrying out a process-tracing analysis of the German government’s fiscal policy U-turn in the crucial months preceding the adoption of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) recovery plan in July 2020. The paper contributes to the growing literature on fiscal burdensharing in the EU by demonstrating when and how member states can change their stance on transnational fiscal burden-sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little doubt that the European Central Bank (ECB), and in particular its presidency, has taken the lead in tackling the euro crisis. But can this leadership be also characterised as charismatic? This article answers the question by focusing on language – a key component as well as a reliable indicator of charisma. By means of a software‐assisted content analysis of the entire corpus of ECB presidential speeches, it is found that the crisis has indeed led to the emergence of the Bank's presidency as a charismatic euro leader. This in turn confirms the recent politicisation of the ECB, but at the same time might be seen as mitigating the problems related to the Bank's democratic deficit, to the extent that charisma can be seen, from a Weberian standpoint, as an alternative source of political legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article it is argued that citizens take into account the degree of a government's political autonomy to implement particular policies when expressing their views on satisfaction with democracy (SWD) but, in order to do so, they need to perceive it. When citizens directly observe the external constraints that reduce their government's autonomy, then variations in levels of regime satisfaction may no longer be exclusively about government performance - as widely argued by political economists - but also about democratic choice. The argument develops after comparing the existing scenarios in the Eurozone before and after the Great Recession. Citizens only began to perceive their own lack of choice to decide between policy alternatives when the sovereign debt crisis broke out in May 2010, the date of the first Greek bail-out. It is then when citizens started to update their beliefs about the functioning of democracy as a system in which alternative policies can be adopted as bail-out deals were signed between national governments from the Euro periphery and the Troika. This updating process towards the way democracy works explains the increasing gap in the levels of SWD between bailed-out economies and the rest of the countries in the Eurozone. Empirical confirmation for this claim is found after analysing Eurobarometer surveys from 2002 to 2014 and using a two-step difference-in-difference analysis that combines individual and aggregate data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]