The Politics of Bad Options - Why the Eurozone's Problems Have Been So Hard to Resolve

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Why was the Eurozone crisis so difficult to resolve? Why was it resolved in a manner in which some countries bore a much larger share of the pain than other countries? Why did no country leave the Eurozone rather than implement unprecedented austerity? Who supported and opposed the different policy options in the crisis domestically, and how did the distributive struggles among these groups shape crisis politics? Building on macro-level statistical data, original survey data from interest groups, and qualitative comparative case studies, this book argues and shows that the answers to these questions revolve around distributive struggles about how the costs of the Eurozone crisis should be divided among countries, and within countries, among different socioeconomic groups. Together with divergent but strongly held ideas about the 'right way' to conduct economic policy and asymmetries in the distribution of power among actors, severe distributive concerns of important actors lie at the root of the difficulties of resolving the Eurozone crisis as well as the difficulties to substantially reform EMU. The book provides new insights into the politics of the Eurozone crisis by emphasizing three perspectives that have received scant attention in existing research: a comparative perspective on the Eurozone crisis by systematically comparing it to previous financial crises, an analysis of the whole range of policy options, including the ones not chosen, and a unified framework that examines crisis politics not just in deficit-debtor, but also in surplus-creditor countries.

Product details

• Authors: Ari Ray, Nils Redecker, Nils Redeker, Stefanie Walter, Stefanie (Full Professor for International Walter, Walter Stefanie
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.09.2020
• EAN: 9780198857020
• ISBN: 978-0-19-885702-0
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 232 mm x 15 mm
• Subjects: Non-fiction book; Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education; Finance, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Economy, POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Economic Policy, Political science & theory, International Economics, Political Economy, Political science and theory, EU (European Union), Economic & financial crises & disasters, Economic and financial crises and disasters, International institutions, EU & European institutions, Finance and the finance industry