
Daniel MüggeUniversity of Amsterdam | UVA · Department of Political Science
Daniel Mügge
Professor
Professor of Political Arithmetic, University of Amsterdam - currently delving into AI regulation in the EU
About
52
Publications
20,955
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,158
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
September 2014 - present
September 2008 - present
Publications
Publications (52)
Trade statistics are widely used in studies and policymaking focused on economic interdependence. Yet, researchers in International Relations (IR) have largely disregarded half the data available to study trade. Bilateral trade flows are usually recorded twice: by the sending economy as an export and by the receiving one as an import. These two val...
Regulation is a prominent tool in what Kruck and Weiss call the Regulatory Security State. Safeguarding security entails shaping tech companies’ behaviour through arms-length rules, rather than wielding state capacity directly – a power shift away from state actors. As I argue, this dynamic also works in reverse: securitization of digital technolog...
Economic knowledge plays a central role in many theories of political behavior. But empirical studies have found many citizens to be poorly informed about the official state of the economy. Analyzing two waves of the Eurobarometer database, we re-examine the distribution of public knowledge of three macroeconomic indicators in two dozen European co...
Contemporary political economy is predicated on widely shared ideas and assumptions, some explicit but many implicit, about the past. Our aim in this Special Issue is to draw attention to, and to assess critically, these historical assumptions. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a political economy that is more attentive to the analytic assumpti...
Special Issue of New Political Economy.
The global financial crisis had seemed to vindicate broad-ranging IPE perspectives at the expense of narrow economics theories. Yet the tumultuous decade since then has confronted IPE scholars with rapidly-shifting global dynamics, many of which had remained underappreciated. We use the Blind Spots moniker in an attempt to push the topics covered h...
Macroeconomic statistics simultaneously shape and try to capture the political economy we study. Their biases mold social and political dynamics; they also infect academic and policy analysis. Political economy can both benefit from and advance an understanding of economic statistics as political artefacts. To help unlock that potential , this arti...
Which blind spots shape scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE)? That question animates the contributions to a double special issue—one in the Review of International Political Economy, and a companion one in New Political Economy. The global financial crisis had seemed to vindicate broad-ranging IPE perspectives at the expense of narr...
The transnationalization and digitization of economic activity has undermined the quality of official economic statistics, which still centre on national territories and material production. Why do we not witness more vigorous efforts to bring statistical standards in line with present-day economic realities, or admissions that precision in economi...
Contemporary governance is thoroughly quantified, and in no policy field more so than economic policy. The numbers on which economic debates draw present themselves as objective, technocratic data, above the everyday tussle of politics. At the same time, governance by the numbers has increasingly come under fire in recent years. In the extreme, cri...
Unemployment refuses unambiguous definition. Its statistical representation is always open to contestation, especially where labour markets differ from the Western-industrial norm. Why do countries adopt international standards even if they may fit local conditions poorly? South Africa is an exemplary case to answer this question. When Apartheid en...
International economic statistics play central roles in global economic governance. Governments and international organizations rely on them to monitor international economic agreements; governments use them to understand potential imbalances in bilateral relationships; and international investors build their country assessments on such data. These...
Official international economic statistics are generally considered accurate and meaningful gauges of cross-border flows of trade and capital. Most data users also assume that the quality of the underlying data keeps improving over time. Through an extensive review of the national accounting literature, archival research, two dozen interviews with...
Unemployment refuses unambiguous definition. Its statistical representation is always open to contestation, especially where labour markets differ from the Western-industrial norm. Why do countries embrace international standards even if they may fit poorly? South Africa is a unique case to answer this question. When Apartheid ended in the early 19...
Financial firms’ valuation approaches are key to financial market functioning. The financial crisis exposed fundamental faults in pre-crisis practices and the regulations that bolstered them. Critics pointed to reflexivity: financial markets have no solid anchor outside of market participants’ assessments, which makes them inherently unstable. Refl...
Before the crisis, the European Union (EU) had emerged as a major force in global financial governance (GFG). The contributions to this collection examine the different dimensions of the EU's role in GFG and how they have been affected by the recent crisis. Taking a bird's eye view, this introduction offers three main arguments. First, the EU has s...
In the years leading up the global financial crisis, the European Union (EU) had emerged as a central actor in global financial governance, almost rivalling the United States in influence. While the USA and the EU continue to dominate financial rule setting in the post-crisis world, the context in which they do so has changed dramatically. Pre-cris...
Macroeconomic indicators – especially inflation, gross domestic product growth, public deficits and unemployment – stand central in economic governance. Policy-makers use them to assess their economies’ health. Citizens evaluate politicians’ performance using them as yardsticks. But these indicators defy simple definition, and the formulae underlyi...
Many observers have diagnosed a fundamental shift in financial regulation since the 2008 crisis. In contrast, this article argues that changes have mostly been superficial. The ideas underpinning regulation have been adapted rather than overturned. Our financial system remains highly fragile, even if exceptionally loose monetary policy obscures suc...
In the half decade following the 2007 financial crisis, the reform of global financial governance was driven by two separate policy debates: one on the substantive content of regulations, the other on the organizational architecture of their governance. The separation of the two debates among policymakers has been mirrored in academia, where postcr...
Accounting standards are the foundations of the financial regulatory edifice, and global financial governance is no more stable than the asset valuations that feed it. Yet for two decades and up to this day, no international accounting rule for financial instruments – the bulk of banks' balance sheets – has emerged that was more than a temporary fi...
Before the crisis, the European Union (EU) had emerged as a major force in global financial governance (GFG). The contributions to this collection examine the different dimensions of the EU's role in GFG and how they have been affected by the recent crisis. Taking a bird's eye view, this introduction offers three main arguments. First, the EU has s...
An anniversary issue provides an inescapably inviting opportunity to reflect on the past, evaluate the present, and contemplate the future. Eschewing the self-congratulatory rhetoric of traditional anniversary celebrations, we have devoted this 20th anniversary issue of RIPE to contributions that critically examine the academic discipline of intern...
Over the past two decades, the European Union has become a central actor in financial regulation and has developed complex institutions to govern financial markets. Recent scholarship has detailed the functioning of these institutions and revealed their inner dynamics. At the same time, the political economy embeddedness of financial regulation, wh...
Absent alternatives and insider interests. A study of governments’ positions in reform debates during the financial crisis
The credit crisis that began in the summer of 2007 has fundamentally challenged much financial regulation and the political institutions that produced it. Measured against the criticisms that have been brought forth against pre...
Over the past two decades, the European Union (EU) has become a central actor in financial regulation and developed complex institutions to fulfill its roles. Pre-financial crisis scholarship has provided key insights into the functioning of this institutional cobweb and its evolution over time. However, the financial crisis has highlighted four fa...
Introduction It is difficult to find an account of the ‘neo-liberal’ decades since 1980 that does not reserve a special place for unshackled financial markets. This is true not only for the United States but also for the European economies that are the focus of this volume and chapter. Critics commonly portray globalized and deregulated finance as...
Contemporary analyses commonly attribute the global credit crisis to faulty regulation. What have been the roots of these deficient rules, particularly in Europe, where rapid spill-over from US markets took policy makers and observers by surprise? This article focuses on regulatory liberalism as the paradigm guiding European Union (EU) regulation....
Europe is a heavyweight in global finance. But does it have a presence in global financial governance to match? This paper employs a principal-agent approach to analyse patterns of policy-making delegation in the EU to explore this question. It finds a U-shaped relationship between the extent of delegation and the 'European presence' in global fina...
What makes institutions that govern global finance legitimate? Contemporary debates, fuelled by the recent crisis, commonly draw on the concepts of input and output legitimacy to answer this question. As this article argues, however, this distinction is as difficult to apply in practice as it may be sensible in theory. Limitations in input legitima...
Es ist weithin anerkannt, dass Kreditderivate in der gegenwärtigen Finanzkrise eine entscheidende Rolle gespielt haben (Hellwig
2008; Kragt 2008; Morris 2008; Wray 2008). Weit weniger klar hingegen ist, wie sich der kometenhafte Aufstieg dieser Finanzprodukte
verstehen lässt, und welche treibenden Kräfte dahinter stehen. Eine Antwort auf diese Frag...
Europe is a heavyweight in global finance. But does it have a presence in global financial governance to match? This paper employs a principal-agent approach to analyse patterns of policy-making delegation in the EU to explore this question. It finds a U-shaped relationship between the extent of delegation and the 'European presence' in global fina...
The credit crisis that began in the summer of 2007 has fundamentally challenged much financial regulation and the political institutions that produced it. Measured against the criticisms that have been brought forth against previous financial governance, the extent of governments’ overall reform ambitions has been disappointing, generating little h...
Early in the new millennium it appeared that a long period of financial crisis had come to an end, but the world now faces renewed and greater turmoil. This volume analyses the past three decades of global financial integration and governance and the recent collapse into crisis, offering a coherent and policy-relevant overview. State-of-the-art res...
The bitter winds of financial crisis have once again swept global markets, this time beginning at the core of the system, Wall Street. Whether blame be assigned to private greed, public policy lapses, or both, vast sums of public money and shareholder capital have been wiped out in the otherwise noble cause of preventing systemic breakdown. Vulnera...
For global finance, the year 2008 may prove to be a watershed. The collapse of Lehman Brothers on 15 September of that year brought the global financial system to the brink of meltdown, and much of the world has been experiencing the deepest recession for more than half a century. Only the timely intervention of public authorities prevented a rerun...
The article reviews the books "Capitalism With Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital & Class," by Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, "Financialization & Strategy: Narrative & Numbers," by Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver and Karel Williams, and "An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets," by Donal...
Over the last 15 years, Europe has seen the liberalization of national financial markets as well as the integration of these markets and their governance through the introduction of the 'Lamfalussy process'. This article argues that we can best understand these shifts as one integrated project of market-building in Europe, guided by distributional...
Scholarship on private authority in the transnational realm has commonly focused on the influence or power private actors are able to exert. This paper argues, however, that what often is at stake is not so much the strength or not of private authority, but the private or public character of the institutions through which it is exercise. Politico-e...
Finanzmärkte stellen für die Theorie reflexiver Modernisierung einen Sonderfall dar. Auf der einen Seite sind sie seit ihrem Entstehen reflexiv, haben also menschliches Handeln anstelle einer ihm äußeren Natur als Gegenstand. Auf der anderen Seite wird diese Reflexivität nach wie vor durch eine gesellschaftliche Praxis negiert die sich vertrauensvo...
For the theory of reflexive modernization, financial markets are a case apart. On the one hand they have been reflexive since their very existence, having human action as their object rather than an external 〉nature〈. On the other hand, social practice continues to ignore this reflexivity and leans on a distinction between transcendent 〉market forc...
For the theory of reflexive modernization, financial markets are a case apart. On the one hand they have been reflexive since their very existence, having human action as their object rather than an external > nature <. On the other hand, social practice continues to ignore this reflexivity and leans on a distinction between transcendent > market f...
Links wil de armen helpen en de rijken belasten, maar daar schieten beide groepen weinig mee op. Beter zou het zijn over te stappen naar een heel andere economische logica — een met een langetermijnvisie. Minder belasting heffen op consumptie en arbeid en meer op kapitaal is volgens Daniel Mügge de enige manier om niet binnen de kortste keren weer...
The article reviews the books "Capitalism With Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital & Class," by Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, "Financialization & Strategy: Narrative & Numbers," by Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, Adam Leaver and Karel Williams, and "An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets," by Donal...