Martin Rhodes

University of Denver · Josef Korbel School of International Studies

The research question here is two-fold. The article seeks to explain why bank performance varied so dramatically during and after the financial crisis on Europe’s periphery, both across states and also at times within them. The dependent variable used is bank performance in terms of credit provision and banks’ contribution to financial stability. T...

European banking union and Capital markets union have emerged as two of the key pillars of European integration since the post-2008 financial crisis. Neither were anticipated prior to the financial crisis, nor was the rapidity of their construction. Both imply the same critical shifts in Europe’s institutional political economy. The first relocates...

This article examines the political dynamics behind Europe’s new banking union in two stages. First it examines the accretion of political power to two European institutions – the European Commission and the European Central Bank (ECB) – during the financial crisis, emphasising the ways in which the European Central Bank (especially under Mario Dra...

Comparative Welfare State Politics: Development, Opportunities, and Reform. By Van Kersbergen Kees and Vis Barbara . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 256p. $89.99 cloth, $34.99 paper. - Volume 14 Issue 1 - Martin Rhodes

This article explains why there was a dramatic centralization of supervisory authority over the European Union's largest banks under the European Central Bank (ECB) by the end of 2014. We note that scholars had long acknowledged that nationally fragmented banking markets could potentially undermine a common currency. But it was not until 2012 that...

Traditionally identified as sharing a common “Southern model” of welfare capitalism and subject to a similar “Southern syndrome” of low employment and productivity growth, Italy and Spain are the largest of the Eurozone’s debtor countries to be swept up in its sovereign debt crisis. Despite similar starting points, we observe important contrasts in...

The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests, and Inter-Firm Cooperation in Italy and Germany. By HenryFarrell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 256p. $102.00 cloth, $34.99 paper. - Volume 11 Issue 1 - Martin Rhodes

The financial crisis has generated contrasting policy responses to the financial crisis in the EU and US, the significance of which is discussed by the contributors to this Debate. In the US, the regulatory response involves a partial reversal (although too limited for its critics) of deregulation in the 1980s–1990s. In the EU, the transformation o...

This chapter assesses the book's analytical framework. Regarding social pact emergence, overall the evidence supports our central argument that pacts emerge via political processes driven by interests and power, not because of the role of ideas, through social learning, or via spontaneous coordination in response to problem loads. In instances of b...

This chapter on Spain follows the general argument of the book in rejecting the explanatory capacity of single-variable analyses. The history of social pacts in Spain is one of early success in the 1980s, when broad or encompassing tripartite social pacts were abandoned, failures in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and a gradual institutional consol...

This article represents a first attempt to analyse the forces at work in the transformation of European corporate space, at both the national and supranational levels. In doing so, it consciously combines a comparative with an international political economy perspective and argues against analyses which minimize the role of domestic institutions an...

The result of a four-year long comparative research study centred at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and financed by the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme, this book presents the first full-length theoretical and comparative empirical study of new social pacts in Europe. Its aim is to bring the level of sophistic...

Introduction. This chapter maps out the challenges facing social democratic parties deriving from the labour market and welfare state – areas in which the centre-left has traditionally built its organisational and electoral strength. The principal argument is that equality – which Kitschelt (1999), referring to the rise of ‘left-libertarianism’, ar...

In this chapter we interpret and analyse the findings of a wide-ranging study of modes of socio-economic governance in the European Union at supranational, national and subnational levels, including the ‘micro-level’ of firms and local networks.1 The governance modes studied here are not always easy to classify as ‘new’ or ‘old’. Some have long ped...

New modes of governance — as this book has shown — come in various guises, aim at various objectives, are based on numerous different instruments and are linked in varying ways to governmental action. Diverse as they are, they all strive to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of public policy-making, mostly by using soft instruments. By build...

Since the early 1990s, Europe's economies have been facing several new challenges: the 1992 single market programme, the collapse of the Berlin wall and eastward enlargement, and monetary unification. Building on the influential Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) perspective, this book critically analyses these developments in the European political eco...

This introductory chapter ties together themes running through all the chapters in this volume. It discusses critiques of the Varieties of Capitalism or VoC approach in four areas in which it has proven most vulnerable to criticism, and proposes a framework to address these. First, the chapter analyses the role of political and distributive struggl...

Résumé Cet article analyse la réforme des systèmes de protection sociale dans deux pays méditerranéens, prenant comme point de départ le modèle des variétés du capitalisme. Son but est de démontrer l’intérêt d’une méthode intégrant les différentes approches à l’étude de l’État providence. Prenant comme point de départ la capacité limitée des théori...

Ten years after the last special issue of West European Politics dedicated to Italian politics, it is possible to extend and refine the framework used in that issue to document and explain the trajectory of change in Italian politics since the early 1990s. After the crisis at the beginning of that decade, the long period that has followed has been...

The 1990s saw an important shift from long-term reform sclerosis in the Italian industrial relations and welfare state systems to important innovations, both in the mode of policy making (concertation via social pacts) and the content of reform (decentralization in the collective bargaining system and greater flexibilization of a highly-rigid labou...

VoC theory seems to be caught in a trade-off between parsimony and explanatory capacity. It provides high heuristic value-added for analysing countries where performance-enhancing complementarities rely on clearly different patterns of actor interaction and forms of coordination. It appears more difficult to extend to 'deviant' cases where there is...

The emergence in the European Union of new modes of governance (NMG) such as the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) has produced an enormous literature that falls into four broad categories: a theoretical approach seeks to explain why such methods emerged and locates them in existing theories of European integration, policy-making and institutional...

Labour market regulation in the 1980s was subject to transnational pressures for deregulation, especially in the form of ‘flexibilisation’. The ‘Single European Market’ project (SEM) promises further development in this direction. At the same time, proposals for a ‘Social Charter’ are meant to introduce a European level of regulation to counteract...

Europe is haunted by the spectre of Anglo-American neoliberal capitalism. Behind the hostile reaction of Gerhard Schroeder and Jacques Chirac to the European Union's cross-border services directive, conflict over the redefinition of the rules of EMU's Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), the widespread fear that enlargement has opened the gates to a fl...

The Berlusconi pension reform of 2004 was characterized by identifiable similarities with the recent past of pensions policy-making, but also by important differences. A core element of continuity was the presence of a strong vincolo esterno—external constraint—which pressured the government to engage in reform. But the pension reform is also novel...

This paper provides the scientific framework for the NEWGOV project Distributive Politics, Learning and Reform. In Part I, we establish our own definition and conceptualization of social pacts. We distinguish four types of pacts with different scope and depth: shadow pacts, headline pacts, coordinated wage setting, and embedded pacts akin to neocor...

During the 1990s, wage setting increasingly became coordinated in many Member States of the European Union (EU), often through new arrangements involving broad encompassing social pacts between employers, trade unions, and governments striking deals across policy areas from wages to social and employment policies. We argue that the different forms...

Correction to:French Politics (2004) 2, 1–23. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200048

France, like other European countries, has faced growing challenges to its welfare state. Pensions in particular have been at the core of the public debate on recasting its ‘social model’. This article analyses reform processes in the 1990s and early 2000s to explain ‘how France reforms pensions’. While in other Bismarckian welfare states with pay-...

How do veto-heavy European welfare systems engage in reform? In this paper we analyse the pensions policy reform process in four Bismarckian welfare states against the background of recent theorizing about the scope and nature of welfare reform. We develop the notion of a 'double trade off' - involving both politics and policy - to illustrate how g...

The chapter presents, in synthesis form, some key elements of what is now understood about welfare regimes, their respective pathologies of development, their current paths of reform, and the challenges that still confront them. The first section examines welfare state performance thematically, focusing on employment, the scale and shape of social...

The enlargement crisis of the EU has been triggered by problems related to enlargement towards the east but its roots extend far beyond that issue. To date, European integration has developed within a structure of a wealthy core territory and concentric circles around this centre. The emergence of this pattern has been driven by the dialectics of i...

Following a period of almost obsessive academic attention in the 1980s, in the early 1990s the concept of corporatism fell from favor, as its explanatory powers appeared to wane and the Keynesian welfare systems under which it had flourished apparently fell into decline. In the late 1990s, a new interest in corporatism emerged, in line with new pat...

With EMU (economic and monetary union), the European Union has embarked on one of the biggest projects in its history. This book analyses the role of EMU in Europeanization and examines its effects on public policies, political structures, and political discourses. It considers the mechanisms by which EMU produces its effects, and the role of domes...

This article examines the prospects for European welfare states in the context of globalization. It begins with a critical review of the globalization arguments. While there is some evidence that external constraints make life harder for policymakers seeking positive‐sum outcomes, it is the combination of national debt and spending limits, plus dom...

The welfare states of the affluent democracies now stand at the centre of political discussion and social conflict. In this book, which grew out of two conferences held at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University, in November 1997 and October 1998, an international team of leading analysts reject simplistic claims about the impact of eco...

This is the second of a two‐volume study of the adjustment of advanced welfare states to international economic pressures, in which leading scholars detail the wide variety of responses in 12 countries to the challenges to their employment and social policy systems in the period between the first oil‐price crises of the early 1970s and the increasi...

This article places European welfare states squarely in today's European integration context and looks optimistically at social policy perspectives from the European level. It has the needs of European policy makers in mind, and thus their interests in optimal policy mixes, lessons from national experiences and in a new institutional architecture t...

New Labour's 'Third Way' and its innovations in employment and social policy can only be understood against the background of welfare state construction in Britain, the problems faced by all post-war governments in welfare policy and the nature of the institutional solution to those problems implemented by the Thatcher and Major governments. Severa...

[Introduction by Mark A. Pollack, series editor]. THE PORTUGUESE PRESIDENCY, WHICH organized the work of the Council during the first six months of the year, was tasked with the heavy responsibility of organizing the opening months of the 2000 IGC (see Dinan and Vanhoonacker, this issue), yet the Portuguese also embarked on a major campaign to spon...

Understanding the recent explosion of political scandals in certain European countries requires a close analysis of why previously tolerated practices of party financing became the object of scandal. This article has twin objectives. The first is to understand why the market for ‘corrupt exchange’ surrounding party finance became so extensive in It...

The relationship between globalization and welfare states has neither been adequately theorized nor empirically investigated. Much of the literature assumes a convergence among European welfare states on a ‘lean welfare model’, given external competitive pressures and unsustainable domestic commitments, while, in the absence of a strong European in...

We are currently living in an era of welfare pessimism. While extensive welfare programmes and high levels of social transfers remain central to the political economy of western — and, to a lesser extent, eastern — European countries, the traditional ‘social contract’ between states and their citizens is simultaneously failing to fulfil its origina...

European welfare states are currently under stress and the 'social contracts' that underpin them are being challenged. First, welfare spending has arguably 'grown to limits' in a number of countries while expanding everywhere in the 1990s in line with higher unemployment. Second, demographic change and the emergence of new patterns of family and wo...

The Italian political system is both dynamic and sclerotic, adaptable and blocked, and with a surprising degree of institutional inertia. While some aspects of the system are adjusting to the new challenges of the decade, other areas are adapting much more slowly, despite the headline-grabbing political upheavals of recent years. Indeed, paradoxica...

Party finance in Italy has been regulated by law since 1974. But the introduction of regulation did little to restrain the expansion of well established practices of financing from bribes and kickbacks. Indeed, there are good reasons to suggest that the form of regulation actually fuelled the rapid growth of corruption throughout the Italian politi...

Gospodarska politika Zapadne Europe sada doživljava duboke promjene. To se u velikoj mjeri odražava na zapadnoeuropske države dobrobiti. Postoje različite prepreke i kontraindikacije koje djeluju na funkcioniranje države dobiti u Zapadnoj Europi. Posebno značajnu ulogu pri tome igra sve veća globalizacija svjetskog gospodarstva koja mijenja struktu...

Globalisation and European integration are having a profound impact on Europe’s socio-economic order. Other chapters in this volume discuss the implications of these developments for macroeconomic management and welfare states. This chapter focuses more precisely on their consequences for Europe’s ‘models’ of capitalism. It argues that while there...

The 1980s and 1990s have seen a proliferation of corruption scandals across Western Europe. In the most spectacular case, Italy, an entire political class has been put on trial and the political system transformed, largely as a result of public outrage at, and the legal prosecution of, corrupt bureaucrats, businessmen, party officials and members o...

Western Europe is undergoing a process of accelerating change. This process is simultaneously supranational, national and subnational in its origins and manifestations. It is of such complexity that there is not as yet — and perhaps will never be — a single formula or theory for comprehending it. The nature of the changes themselves are easily iden...

No account of recent development in west European politics would be complete without an in-depth consideration of the present and future of the welfare state — for three main reasons. First, welfare institutions and programmes are central to the functioning of European economies and labour markets and are underpinned by long-standing political and...

The development of European economic integration is often seen as a process whereby nation-states have steadily surrendered economic policy-making to the European institutions. But while there has been evidence of this in the most recent phase of integration, especially with plans for a shift towards full monetary union at the end of the 1990s, the...

Developments in West European Politics brings together specially commissioned chapters by leading authorities to provide a tightly integrated assessment of politics, government and policy set in a broad economic and social context. It focuses throughout on the impact of globalisation, West European integration and intra-European relations and the e...

West European political economies are cur rently experiencing a tumultuous process of change. Although it is still unclear exactly how far and in what ways this will affect welfare states, it is increasingly evident that they will not emerge unscathed. Understanding what is happening is far from easy, given the inability of much analysis to grasp t...

Introduction: The Regions and the New Europe, Martin Rhodes Part I The Transnational Scene: European Integration and Regional Responses, Professor Paul C. Cheshire European Cities Towards 2000 Entrepreneurialism, Competition and Social Exclusion, Michael Parkinson Regional Lobbying in the New Europe Sonia Mazey European Cities Towards 2000 - Entrep...

This introduction considers the debate on the existence of a southern European welfare state ‘model’, and stresses the distinctive developmental context and institutional structures of welfare provision in the region. While they may embody similar principles of social policy organization to their northern European counterparts, understanding the pa...

European welfare state autonomy is being eroded by both European integration and ‘globalization’. The attempted creation of a European ‘social’ area, the completion of the internal market, the competitive effects of trade liberalization and the impact on policy autonomy of greater international capital mobility all have implications for the future...

This chapter portrays the process of regulatory policy-making in the 'social dimension' as an ongoing attempt to resolve this regulatory conundrum. It begins by considering the context from which European level of social and labour market policy has begun to emerge: the actors, competing interests, institutions, pressures and counter-pressures whic...

Although the labour market and labour relations have been marginal to the process of European integration, present developments, both within member states and at the European Union (EU) level, have major implications for the European business environment. The last thirty years have witnessed profound changes in the nature of European employment, wi...

Trade Unions: ‘A Return to Normalcy’? - Baglioni G and Crouch C (eds): European Industrial Relations: the Challenge of Flexibility, London, Sage Publications, 1990, 368 pp., £32.00. - Volume 26 Issue 4 - Martin Rhodes

On 27 July 1989, President Bush fulfilled a hastily-made campaign promise and approved a renewal, for two and a half years, of the protectionist system of ‘voluntary restraint agreements’ (VRAs) which had sheltered the US steel industry since the early 1980s. He had little choice: despite the predominance of free trade sentiments within his own adm...

This article explores some of the major reasons for the weakness of the European steel unions during the crisis years of 1974–84. The crisis revealed the absence of viable union strategies and the inefficiency of their tactics, and also exposed - and aggravated - the divisions within and between the unions and their inability fully to control their...

This article sets out to analyse the response of West European governments and of the European Community to the challenge of information technology (IT). European countries have joined the race among industrial nations to restructure their economies around the industries of the future (micro-electronics, computers and advanced telecommunications)....

CernyP. G. and SchainM. A., Socialism, the State and Public Policy in France, London, Frances Pinter, 1985, 220 pp., £17.50. - Volume 5 Issue 3 - Martin Rhodes

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

The aim of this paper is to use the employment-labor market policy responses to the crisis of the last several years in Italy and Spain to understand these two countries’ capacity for a coordinated policy response and policy innovation. It tries to answer the puzzle as to why Spain’s previously well-established system of concerted policy making bre...

Sottrarsi al trade-off tra eguaglianza ed efficienza Conciliare la crescita economica, con i suoi esigenti imperativi di «efficienza», e la giustizia sociale, con le sue egualmente esigenti richieste di «eguaglianza», è stata una delle aspirazioni più significative del ventesimo secolo «lungo», ormai giunto al suo termine. Da entrambi i lati dell'A...