“Strong” vs. “Weak” Governments and the Challenge of Economic Reforms
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Introduction
The project focuses on the politics of economic reforms in EU member states during the past decades. It investigates which governments are willing and able to introduce economic reforms, responding to such challenges as economic stagnation, Europeanization, globalization, societal aging, and global warming. In so doing the project goes beyond the existing literature by focusing on various types of government. These types are theorized to display varying degrees of “strength” in several dimensions. Many scholars of comparative politics believe that countries with multi-party systems have ineffective governments since the need to coordinate decision-making among several parties prevents coalition governments from responding effectively to changes in the economic and social environment. However, we suggest that coalition governments are only ineffective under certain circumstances, for example, many coalition governments have established so called “governance mechanisms”, which enable them to overcome coordination problems. Hence, the project investigates whether and under what conditions governments can reform decisively and successfully, thereby enhancing our understanding of the feasibility of reform politics in multi-party democracies. The project aims at establishing a unique dataset on economic reforms implemented in 14 Western European countries since the 1980s, by collecting information on reform ambitions, implemented and failed reforms. Information on reform ambitions of governments is drawn from government declarations, whereas information on actual and failed reforms is drawn from a content analysis of country reports edited by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). The project is funded by The German Science Foundation (DFG) and is part of the collaborative research center (SFB) “The Political Economy of Reforms” at the University of Mannheim. The project period is 2010-2013.
Department Researchers in this Project
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Koordinator/Projektledare
Hanna
Bäck
(Associate Professor) |
External Project Members
Professor Wolfgang C. Müller (University of Vienna) Katharina Barié (University of Mannheim) Sebastian Hartmann (University of Mannheim)
