Search

The climate crisis looms but support for fuel taxation is low. How to boost support? The obvious way is to make the connection to the climate crisis explicit. Many observers fear, however, that policy myopia renders this strategy ineffective: As the consequences of the climate crisis are long‐term and insecure, people are loath to pay for costly countermeasures in the short term. We look at policy distraction as a second potential drag. We argue that climate crisis‐induced support for fuel taxation can also be undermined by other salient events which divert attention. To test our argument, we conduct a large‐scale survey experiment with more than 21,000 respondents in 17 European countries. Our results show that a simple climate crisis prime raises support for fuel taxation by 12 percentage points. The effect decreases but remains substantial when stressing the long time horizon of the climate crisis. It almost disappears when other current crises (COVID‐19 and Russian military aggression) are mentioned. Thus, distraction by concurrent events is a serious impediment to mobilising support for fuel taxation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We challenge Kruck and Weiss' argument about the regulatory security state on two counts. First, we contest the notion that the regulatory state is a viable alternative to the positive security state. While regulation and epistemic authority are increasingly important means of security provision, they remain critically dependent power resources and political authority that only the positive state provides. The regulatory security state is premised on the positive state and unviable without it. Second, the rise of the regulatory security state over the past three decades reflects highly specific historical conditions rather than a general trend. These conditions include unusually low geopolitical tensions in Europe and the strong regulatory bias of EU integration. Concepts matter: The wider the notion of security, the more relevant the regulatory security state becomes. It is an important reality but the war in Ukraine reminds us of the enduring centrality of the positive state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constitutional differentiation is often assumed to match perfectly with reality. We argue, however, that this is often not the case in core state powers. Constitutional differentiation often does not lead to the exclusion of the non-integrated member states ("outs") from the policies of the integrated member states ("ins") but to their reintegration by different means. We present a cost-benefit-model which argues that both "outs" and "ins" often have strong functional and political incentives to seek reintegration after an earlier decision for differentiation because the costs of exclusion are too high. We use a novel dataset of reintegration opportunities to map trends and patterns of reintegration across policy fields, reintegration instruments and member states in core state powers. We conclude by arguing that reintegration is a frequent but fragile phenomenon through which "ins" and "outs" cope with the costs of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the Russian war in Ukraine affect European integration? Bellicist theories predict a push towards federation, marked by a centralization of fiscal, coercive and administrative core state powers at the EU level. But is it happening? We examine two main conditions of bellicist integration. The 'functional' condition refers to the efficiency gains of centralization: no federation without functional benefit. The 'political' condition refers to a threat-induced alignment of interests and identities that makes centralization politically viable: no federation without public support. We gauge both conditions during the early months of the war and explain why they have not pushed the EU towards centralized federation but, to the contrary, towards decentral alliance. We discuss issue-specific differences in defence, energy and fiscal policy and conclude with some general theoretical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the policy consequences of constitutional differentiation in core state powers? We argue that the most important consequence is not necessarily the exclusion of the constitutional outs from the policies of the ins, but their reintegration by different means. The outs often have strong functional and political incentives to re-join the policies they opted out from, and the ins have good reasons to help them back in. We develop a theoretical framework that derives the incentives for reintegration from the costs of a policy exclusion. We use a novel dataset of reintegration opportunities to map trends and patterns of reintegration across policy fields and member states. We analyze selected cases of reintegration to probe the plausibility of our theoretical argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kelemen and McNamara claim that the imbalance between the EU's strong regulatory authority and weak capacity in core state powers reflects its peaceful origins: the EU lacks coercive force, fiscal autonomy and administrative grip because it never had to confront a serious military threat. Will the emergence of such a threat suffice to correct the imbalance? As I argue theoretically, military threats have ambiguous effects on integration. They can fuel center-formation and capacity-building, as Kelemen and McNamara suggest, but also block it. As I show empirically, the military threat posed by the Russian attack of Ukraine in February 2022 has triggered very little EU capacity-building so far. I observe almost no centralization of core state powers but rather a strengthening of national powers with the support of EU institutions: 'bellicist integration' rather than 'bellicist state-building'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent article, Dan Kelemen and Kathleen McNamara ([4]) examine the political development of the European Union in a comparative historical perspective. The serial crises of the past decade highlighted the EU's weakness in fiscal, coercive, and administrative power that Kelemen and McNamara rightfully stress. He argues that the effect of military threats on EU capacity-building is more ambiguous than Kelemen and McNamara imply. [Extracted from the article]

Postfunctionalism posits a tradeoff between the functional scale of governance and the territorial scope of community: functional scale is large and transnational for efficiency reasons; community is small-scale and (sub-)national for reasons of social trust and collective identification. COVID-19 has turned this tradeoff upside down: it has shrunk functional scale to the (sub-)national level in the name of security, while lifting expectations of community to the grand transnational scale in the name of solidarity. This reversal of scales has resulted in a rapid rebordering of the Single Market and the Schengen area on the one hand, and a significant debordering of fiscal risk and burden sharing on the other. We reconstruct the evolution of this double-movement from January to August 2020, contrast it to historical trends in the scale-community tradeoff of European integration, and discuss implications for postfunctionalist theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the concept of orchestration as the mobilization of an intermediary by an orchestrator on a voluntary basis in pursuit of a joint governance goal. Orchestrator-Intermediary theory then provides a model of indirect governance that supplements delegation models premised on principal-agent theory. Under both theories, governors enhance their governance capacity by drawing on the capabilities of third parties. Whereas delegation is premised on hard ‘contractual’ control over the agent, however, orchestration relies on the soft control of like-minded intermediaries through material and ideational support. The two models overlap, and governors mix them in practice, but distinguishing between them analytically can broaden and deepen analysis of indirect forms of governance. This article discusses the circumstances under which each model provides a better fit for real-world problems, as well as the key limitations of each model. Among other things, orchestration is relatively more likely in democratic than authoritarian systems, when governors have limited direct capacities of their own and when veto players are more numerous. Orchestration is not always more desirable than delegation, but it provides an important alternative in some circumstances. Multiple examples from both domestic and international settings are used to illustrate this claim. The article closes with key considerations regarding the effectiveness and legitimacy of orchestration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It pays to be a tax haven. Ireland has become rich that way. Why do not all countries cut their capital taxes to get wealthy? One reason is structural. As the standard model of tax competition explains, small countries gain from competitive tax cuts while large countries suffer. Yet not all small (large) countries have low (high) capital taxes. Why? The reason, we argue, is political. While the standard model assumes governments to be democratic, more than a third of countries worldwide are non-democratic. We explain theoretically why autocracies are less likely to adjust to competitive constraints and test our argument empirically against data on the corporate tax policy of 99 countries from 1999 to 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We map trends of tax policy change in developing countries and transition economies since the 1980s, compare them to tax trends in the advanced Western democracies and review some of the explanations offered by the contributions to this volume. We find that non-Western countries follow the lead of Western countries in some important respects but not in others. While non-Western countries brought their general revenues closer to Western levels and copied important features of Western consumption taxation including higher value added tax revenues and lower revenues from trade taxation, they failed to emulate the hallmark of 20th-century Western taxation: a strong and progressive personal income tax. The taxation trends are closely associated with socio-economic changes (as summarized by GDP per capita) and structural factors (as summarized by country size). Yet the impact of political institutions on taxation is non-linear and complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We map the pattern and extent of the European integration of core state powers (coercive force, public finance and public administration) and analyse causes and consequences. We highlight two findings: First, in contrast to historical examples of federal state-building, where the nationalization of core state powers precipitated the institutional, territorial and political consolidation of the emerging state, the European integration of core state powers is associated with the institutional, territorial and political fragmentation of the European Union. Second, in contrast to European market integration, state élites and mass publics, not organized business interests, are the prime drivers of integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the state still the basic unit of political authority in OECD countries? International relations scholars discuss whether international institutions undermine or buttress state authority. Students of comparative political economy argue about the extent to which political authority has migrated to private market actors. We inventory and compare the main arguments in both debates. Our findings suggest a different pattern of state transformation than most participants in the debates implicitly assume. The key feature is not a zero-sum shift of political authority to nonstate actors but an unbundling and reconfiguration of authority. The segmental differentiation into largely self-contained national states is overlaid by a functionally differentiated order in which different dimensions of authority are exercised by different state and nonstate actors. The state remains focal, but its role changes from virtual monopolist to manager of political authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges the common assumption that the European Union (EU) has little power over taxation. Based on a comprehensive analysis of EU tax legislation and European Court of Justice (ECJ) tax jurisprudence from 1958 to 2007, the article shows that the EU exerts considerable regulatory control over the Member States' taxing power and imposes tighter constraints on Member State taxes than the American federal government imposes on American state taxation. These findings contradict the standard account of the EU as a regulatory polity that specialises in apolitical issues of market creation and leaves control of highly politicised core functions of government (defence, taxation, social security, education, etc.) to the Member States; despite strong treaty safeguards, national tax autonomy is undermined by EU regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is corporate tax competition a threat to democracy in the European Union (EU)? The answer depends crucially on a positive analysis of the effects of tax competition on national policy autonomy. Most analyses focus on direct effects on corporate tax rates and revenues. We contend that this focus is too narrow. It overlooks the fact that corporate tax competition also has important indirect effects on the progressivity and revenue-raising potential of personal income taxation. We elaborate on these indirect effects theoretically and empirically, and explore the implications for the normative debate on the EU's democratic deficit. Our findings show that European integration can constrain national redistribution in a major way: the democratic deficit is real. Greater political contestation over the EU's policy agenda is desirable in order to mitigate this deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why does the principle of mutual recognition apply to product regulation but not to product taxation, i.e. to value added tax (VAT)? It is not for lack of trying. The Commission called for mutual recognition of VAT long before the European Court of Justice 'invented' it for product regulation, and the thrust of much of the EU's VAT policy was to implement this principle. I argue that three factors explain the failure of this policy and the comparative success of mutual recognition of product regulation. First, it is economically less beneficial to apply mutual recognition to turnover taxation than to product regulation. Second, it is politically more demanding. Third, in contrast to product regulation, there is no judicial pressure towards mutual recognition of VAT. A review of these factors helps to understand not only the specific problems of mutual recognition of VAT but also the general problems of tax integration in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are basically three stories about the globalization-welfare state nexus. The first story argues that globalization is the cause of the chronic crisis of the welfare state. As national economies open to the international market, governments are forced w adapt to the imperatives of global competition, and this means cutting cost-intensive welfare programmes (globalization theory). The second story argues that, whatever the cause of the welfare state crisis, globalization is not part or it. There is neither theoretical reason nor empirical evidence to believe that national policy autonomy has decreased owing to increasing economic interdependencies (globalization sceptics). The third story holds that globalization, far from causing the welfare states troubles, is a consequence of these troubles, and part of their solution (revisionism). The paper reviews each of these stories, and counterposes them to simple descriptive statistics on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does globalization undermine the fiscal basis of the welfare state? Some observers are not convinced. They claim that aggregate data on Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries show no drop in tax levels and conclude from this that tax competition is not a serious challenge for the welfare state. This conclusion is unwarranted. The article shows that tax competition systematically constrains national tax autonomy in a serious way. It prevents governments from raising taxes in response to rising spending requirements and from detaxing labor in response to growing unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the tax competition in the European Union. Association of tax competition and economic integration; Development of a simple model of tax competition that allows to generate a number of testable implications; List of withholding taxes on nonresident and resident income.