Overview

How do governments in Europe justify their budgets towards the national parliament? Are their socioeconomic policies shaped more by electoral pressures or by their commitments towards the European Union? In Between Voters and Eurocrats, Johannes Karremans presents a framework and methodology for studying these questions. Based on theories of democratic legitimacy, he argues that if governments temporarily pursue unpopular policies with the justification that they need to be fiscally responsible, in subsequent years they need to become more responsive again to domestic socioeconomic demands in order to maintain the trust of citizens. The recent crises faced by European countries have repeatedly evoked the impression that European economic governance constrains governments' ability to be responsive to domestic demands. Today, especially in the European Union, maintaining financial sustainability of the state has become tied to international obligations. Karremans raises the concern that financial considerations are more important than people's demands and investigates whether this proposition is true through comparative study focussing on five countries - Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain - and explores how governments maintain a balance between institutional responsibility and democratic responsiveness.

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9780192886583

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Reviews

Budgetary speeches are the moments when our elected officials justify their choices to the voters. Karremans uses these moments of political rationalization to explore the trade-off between responsiveness to voters and responsibility to international economic commitments. His results will surprise you. This is a creative and insightful analysis of the interaction between the populist and technocratic impulses in eurozone democracies. * Pepper Culpepper, University of Oxford * Based on an original comparative analysis of the justifications provided by European finance ministers for their annual budget plans, Jan Karremans makes a major contribution to the analysis of public finance. He convincingly demonstrates how fiscal policy in five European countries shifted from fiscal responsibility, under the spell of austerity during the sovereign debt crisis, towards more electoral responsiveness in its aftermath, increasingly taking into account the distinct policy preferences of national constituencies. * Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute, Florence * To date, no scholarly work had systematically analysed governments' justifications for the policies contained in their annual budgets. This book is a novel and important contribution to the enduring debate about the relationship between (national-level) democracy and (international-level) economic integration, and provides one of the most advanced and detailed measurements of the balance between democratic responsiveness and institutional responsibility. Jan Karremans relies on a rigorous comparative research design and mixed methods to speak with political scientists and political economists, economic sociologists and economists and the broader scholarship in European Union Studies. * Zoe Lefkofridi, University of Salzburg *

Author Information

Johannes Karremans is Professor in Political Science at the European School of Political and Social Sciences of the Catholic University of Lille. He holds both the Austrian venia docendi and the Italian national scientific habilitation. Prior to his current appointment, Professor Karremans held several post-doctoral positions at the European University Institute, the University of Salzburg, and the University of Lisbon. Between 2019 and 2021, he was holder of the prestigious Lise Meitner grant from the Austrian Science Fund. His research has appeared in several leading scholarly journals, including West European Politics, Party Politics, the Journal of European Public Policy and the Journal of Common Market Studies.

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