Joseph Ganderson

European University Institute | EUI · Department of Political and Social Sciences

The UK’s in-out referendum on European Union membership is often attributed to an incompatibility inherent in the UK–EU relationship, or else a rising tide of Euroscepticism forcing a reckoning. We argue that the referendum should be understood as the culmination of parliamentary ‘referendum games’ in the preceding years, whereby backbenchers perio...

This introduction to the special issue recalls the alarm raised in EU capitals and Brussels after the UK’s in-out referendum delivered a Leave vote in June 2016. The fear was of a domino effect and the further fragmentation of an already divided EU. Seven years later, it is clear that there was rapid attrition of Eurosceptic triumphalism, and the E...

Multilevel polities do not typically facilitate secession, so why did the European Union adopt Article 50? Revisiting formative debates from the 2003 Convention on the Future of Europe, we combine archival research with an original dataset of delegate debates over two levels: the existence and procedural operation of an exit article. This reveals e...

A surprising feature of Brexit has been the united front the EU-27 presented during post-referendum negotiations. This membership crisis arrived when the EU had been facing multiple overlapping political and economic crises revealing deep cleavages both between and within member states. How did negotiations prevent a widening politicisation of Euro...

The European Union presents a puzzle to political systems scholars: how can a developing polity, with all its attendant functional weaknesses, be rendered politically stable even through moments of a policy crisis? Building on insights from the literature on fiscal federalism, this article challenges much conventional wisdom on Europe’s incompleten...

After a decade of crisis management, the democratic implications of emergency modes of governance in the European Union (EU) are under the spotlight. The prevailing analysis is critical. Scholars point to an emergent, distinctly European trend of transnational crisis exploitation where elite appeals to exceptional pressures serve asymmetric power a...

The chapter analyses the spread of general consumption taxes. It makes two points. First, it shows that the initial introduction of a general consumption tax has boosted revenue-raising capacity in countries around the world. Typically, the first general consumption tax was not a VAT but a less technically sophisticated general sales tax. Second, t...

The volume analyses the rise of modern taxation around the world from the late eighteenth century to today. It is based on a new ‘Tax Introduction Dataset’ that records the historical dates of first adoption of six key taxes of the modern state in 220 countries worldwide, 1750–2018. The taxes include personal and corporate income tax, inheritance t...

Successive crises in the European Union have led critics to identify a pervasive tendency to emergency politics, where democratic deliberation gives way to policy decisions forced through by executive authority. By contrast, in this article it is argued that crises may stimulate deliberation and compromise, even when preceded by open conflict and a...

This article describes the new Tax Introduction Dataset (TID). Listing the year and the mode of the first permanent introduction of six major taxes (inheritance tax, personal income tax, corporate income tax, social security contributions, general sales tax and value added tax) in 220 countries, 1750–2018, TID is the most comprehensive dataset of i...

After the subprime financial crisis, the countries who were worst affected set about reforming legacy financial regulations. Given multiple similarities in the way they experienced the crisis and the similar complexions of their post-crisis economies and politics, the contrast between the UK and the Netherlands' approaches to breaking up their larg...