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This chapter focuses on the inner rationale and consequences of four different archetypal positions regarding how ethical and political values are tackled in welfare economics. Welfare economics is standardly associated with the welfarist framework, for which social welfare is based on individual utility only. Beyond this, we distinguish the value-neutrality claim – for which ethical values should be and are out of the scope of welfare economics –, the value confinement ideal – for which ethical values are acceptable if they are minimal and consensual–, the transparency requirement – for which any ethical values may be acceptable in the welfare economics framework if explicit and formalized –, and the entanglement claim – which challenges the very possibility of demarcation between facts and values.

Political activism positively affects firm innovation. Firms that support more politicians, politicians on Congressional committees with jurisdictional authority over the firms’ industries and politicians who join those committees innovate more. We employ instrumental variables estimation and a natural experiment to show a causal effect of political activism on innovation. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that political activism is valuable because it helps reduce political uncertainty, which, in turn, fosters firm innovation. Also consistent with this hypothesis, we show that politically active firms successfully time future legislation and set their innovation strategies in expectation of future legislative changes.Keywords: political contributions, innovation, investment policy, policy uncertainty

International audience; This article analyses the political significance of the protests that have arisen in Tunisia since the ʻrevolution’ and the establishment of a parliamentary regime. This is what the protests studied have in common: they belong to neglected regions in the country’s hinterland; that they mobilise young local populations; they claim rights over their territories’ soil and subsoil resources exploitation; they occupy a strategic location for a relatively long period of time; and they set up democratic mechanisms for these locations’ self-management, in the form of ‘coordinations’. The description of social logics and the way populations resist, as well as the authoritarian rationality of government action and the inability of elected officials to mediate conflicts, reveal differences between protesters who seek autonomy from state control, while others refer to a rent-centred understanding of the claim. It also shows the emergence of a ‘protest democracy’, itself an expression of a crisis of ‘governmentality’. These two phenomena are symptomatic of a demand for integrating populations and new ways of governing that break with the reeks of past authoritarianism and current representative democracy.

The European response to COVID-19 has revealed an inconvenient truth. Despite having integrated public health concerns across all its policies – be it agriculture, consumer protection, or security –, the Union cannot directly act to save people’s lives. Only member states can do so. Yet when they adopted unilateral measures to counter the spread of the virus, those proved not only ineffective but also disruptive on vital supply chains, by ultimately preventing the flow of essential goods and people across the Union. These fragmented efforts in tackling cross-border health threats have almost immediately prompted political calls for the urgent creation of a European Health Union. Yet this call raises more questions than answers. With the aim to offer a rigorous and timely blueprint to decision-makers and the public at large, this Special Issue of the European Journal of Risk Regulation contextualizes such a new political project within the broader constitutional and institutional framework of EU public health law and policy. By introducing the Special, this paper argues that unless the envisaged Health Union will tackle the root causes of what prevented the Union from effectively responding to COVID-19 – the divergent health capacity across the Union –, it might fall short of its declared objective of strengthening the EU’resilience for cross-border health threats.

In the face of rising income inequality (Acemoglu & Autor, 2011; Atkinson, Piketty, & Saez, 2011; Piketty, 2014; World Economic Forum, 2014), one recent proposal is to provide consumers with information about the income inequality across those involved in the production of each good, at the point of purchase. This has been shown to depress overall inequality (Hill, 2020), though its impact depends crucially on whether people are willing to pay more for goods whose production involves less income inequality. Here we investigate this largely unexplored empirical question through an incentivised, behavioural choice experiment on a representative sample of the English population. We find that a large majority are willing to pay significantly more for goods associated with less inequality. How much more people are willing to pay varies with political leaning and increases with the extent of the inequality reduction, but is positive across the political spectrum and for all studied inequality differences. Moreover, it is typically higher when inequality is reported in more intuitive and informa- tive formats. Our results bode well for the effectiveness of product-level inequality information provision as a tool for moderating income inequality, promising impacts even in markets where all goods involve relatively high inequality levels and potential participation across the political spectrum.

This time was supposed 'to be different', at least this was the motto of the 2014 European Parliament elections campaign. With less than a year before the next European elections, the time is ripe to examine how different this EU political cycle has actually been. Emboldened by the Spitzenkandidaten process – which established for the first time a link between the outcome of the EU elections and the presidency of the EU Commission –, the Juncker Commission emerged as the most political yet. To shrug off the label of technocratic institution – historically insulated from citizens’ preferences –, the new Commission asked EU citizens to judge its operation by its ability ‘to deliver solutions to the big issues that cannot be addressed by the Member States alone’. While the Better Regulation Agenda might have improved the Commission’s public accountability – with both citizens and stakeholders being better informed about and engaged with EU policy-making –, without however increasing its responsiveness to public preferences. This is the case at the input, throughput and output stage. Rather, the techno-political approach to policymaking – which characterizes the Juncker’s Better Regulation – might have paradoxically led to a compression of participatory democracy and somehow chilled stakeholder engagement. At a time of unprecedented contestation of the EU project – a trend which is combined by a record-demand for new forms of political representation –, it appears paradoxical that the EU – an early promoter of participation – is missing out the chance to seize the momentum to diversify and redesign its participatory structures being busy delivering on its electoral promises no one will ever judge.At the very same time the Juncker Commission has been striving to develop its own, autonomous democratic credentials, its choice to embrace a set of well-defined institutional mechanisms that reward expert judgment over political adjudication appears at odds with its newly-acquired political nature.

The recently born expression "analytic narratives" refers to studies that have appeared at the boundaries of history, political science, and economics. These studies purport to explain specific historical events by combining the usual narrative way of historians with the analytic tools that economists and political scientists find in rational choice theory. Game theory is prominent among these tools. The paper explains what analytic narratives are by sampling from the eponymous book Analytic Narratives by Bates, Greif, Levi, Rosenthal, and Weingast (1998) and covering one outside study by Mongin (2008). It first evaluates the explanatory performance of the new genre, using some philosophy of historical explanation and then checks its discursive consistency, using some narratology. The paper concludes that analytic narratives can usefully complement standard narratives in historical explanation, provided they specialize in the gaps that these narratives reveal and that they are discursively consistent, despite the tension that combining a formal model with a narration creates. Two expository modes, called alternation and local supplementation, emerge from the discussion as the most appropriate ones to resolve this tension