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Review of International Political Economy
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Paradigms and policies: the state of economics in
the German-speaking countries
Jakob Kapeller, Stephan Puehringer & Christian Grimm
To cite this article: Jakob Kapeller, Stephan Puehringer & Christian Grimm (2021): Paradigms and
policies: the state of economics in the German-speaking countries, Review of International Political
Economy, DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2021.1904269
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2021.1904269
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Paradigms and policies: the state of economics
in the German-speaking countries
Jakob Kapeller
a,b
, Stephan Puehringer
a,c
and Christian Grimm
a
a
Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz,
Austria;
b
Institute for Socio-Economics, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany;
c
Institute of
Economics, Bernkastel-Kues, Germany
ABSTRACT
This paper studies research interests, paradigmatic orientation and political involve-
ment among roughly 700 full professors of economics at universities located in
German-speaking countries. We collect biographical and institutional information on
these professorships to derive indicators for research orientation, paradigmatic
stance and political involvement. The main contribution of this paper is empirical; it
documents the fairly homogeneous paradigmatic stance of German-speaking aca-
demic economics, analyzes the interplay between paradigmatic orientation and the
policy process and contributes to a better understanding of the role of economic
experts in German economic policymaking. Regarding the latter, we found that a
highly asymmetric involvement of (under-represented) pluralist/heterodox perspec-
tives relative to (over-represented) ordoliberal views in policy contexts is characteris-
tic of economic policymaking in Germany.
KEYWORDS
economic sociology; economic and political paradigms; academic institutions; German economics; economic
policy advice; ordoliberalism
JEL CLASSIFICATION
A11; A14; B5
“What is very clearly true [ …] is that German economics is different from economics
everywhere else in the world. They still believe in austerity even though the IMF, which is not
a left-wing organization, has said austerity doesn’twork”(Joseph E. Stiglitz in Phillips, 2016).
1. The global financial crisis and the paradigmatic structure
of economics
The global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007/08 and the subsequent economic crises in
Europe and the US initiated a period of increased concern for and intensified
CONTACT Stephan Puehringer stephan.puehringer@jku.at Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of
the Economy (ICAE), Johannes Kepler University Linz, Aubrunnerweg 3a, Linz, 4040, Austria.
ß2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited.
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2021.1904269
criticism of the current state of academic economics. This criticism of academic
economics is advanced by in- and outsiders of the field and typically rests on the
observation that economists did not warn against the consequences of financial fra-
gility (Colander et al.,2009; Krugman, 2009; Golub et al.,2015) and lacked a com-
prehensive framework for understanding financial calamities ex-post (Blyth and
Matthijs, 2017; Katzenstein and Nelson, 2013). In addition, some economists were
even held partly responsible for the economic calamities, as their political support
for financial market de-regulation in the run-up to the crisis was attributed to
either ideological convictions (Cahill et al.,2012; Mirowski, 2013) or personal
financial interests standing in conflict with their alleged role as ‘neutral’economic
experts (Carrick-Hagenbarth and Epstein, 2012). On a more fundamental level, it
was argued that the dominant economic paradigm, which is organized around the
axiomatic core of neoclassical economics, systematically overestimates the stability
of financial markets (Kotz, 2009; Elster, 2009) and, hence, leaves one ill-equipped
to understand the dynamics of financial crises.
These arguments all relate to the debate on the paradigmatic development of
current economics, which in recent years has been articulated through the notion
of an ‘empirical’or ‘applied turn’within mainstream economics (Angrist et al.,
2017; Backhouse and Cherrier, 2017; Aistleitner and P€
uhringer, 2020) as well as
through calls for a more pluralistic orientation of academic research and teaching
in economics in general (Hodgson et al.,1992; Garnett and Reardon, 2011;
Dobusch and Kapeller, 2012b). In 2014, these efforts to create a more pluralist eco-
nomics discipline culminated in the International Student Initiative for Pluralism
in Economics (ISIPE, 2014), comprising more than 100 student groups in 34 coun-
tries, which published a plea for pluralism and interdisciplinarity in economic
teaching and that also found support among a series of prominent economists.
These calls for greater pluralism and openness can be interpreted as a reaction to
the emergence of a rather narrow and closed conceptual monism in mainstream
economics, which is accompanied by a corresponding marginalization of alternative
approaches, typically subsumed under the label ‘heterodox economics’(Rothschild,
2008; Lee, 2008). However, despite the manifold criticisms invoked against the neo-
classical mainstream, there are hardly any indications of paradigmatic change in
economics (Green and Hay, 2015;P
€
uhringer, 2015; Blyth and Matthijs, 2017).
Parallel to this debate on the peculiar paradigmatic structure of current econom-
ics, a similar research discourse on economic policy has evolved, which centers on
the narrow recipes offered by standard economics in times of depression
(Wilkinson, 2014; Chwieroth, 2010). Conventional economic policy in this contexts
mimics the conceptual lopsidedness of economics as an academic discipline and
leads to a “silo approach in economic policy making”(OECD, 2014) that assigns
priority to stable budgets, deregulated (labor) markets and international competi-
tiveness. Particularly in the aftermath of the crisis, Germany adhered strongly to
these conventional economic policy prescriptions and, hence, demanded austerity
measures from more crisis-ridden Eurozone countries (Bulmer and Paterson, 2013;
Blyth, 2013; Piketty, 2020). This stance was confronted with opposition during the
Eurozone crisis, with some vocal critics coming from the U.S. and the U.K.
(Krugman, 2012;M
€
unchau, 2014; The Economist, 2015). In this debate, German
economists were criticized for their conservative policy views, their allegedly
‘ordoliberal’attitude and their peculiarly orthodox interpretations of standard
2 J. KAPELLER ET AL.
textbook models. This critique also provoked defensive statements, stressing the
‘mainstream academic views’(Burda, 2015) of prominent German economists or
the misguided labeling of austerity policies as ‘ordoliberal’(Feld et al.,2015). In
general, much of the debate and critique against German economics evolved
around the role and the impact of ordoliberalism on German economic policy.
Against this backdrop, this paper not only contributes to the general debate on
change in economics after the GFC, but also illuminates the multifaceted relation
of economic paradigms, economic research programs and economic policies by
providing answers to the following pertinent question: What are the main charac-
teristics of economists within German-speaking countries in terms of their aca-
demic research profile as well as their paradigmatic orientation, and how do these
characteristics translate into political contexts? Can we clarify the exact role ordo-
liberalism plays in this specific context? By answering these questions, we hope to
contribute to a better understanding of the alleged peculiarity of German econom-
ics and the role of ordoliberalism in German economic policymaking.
To answer these questions, this paper studies the academic research profile and
the political involvement of about 700 full professors of economics at universities
located in German-speaking countries. To do so, we collected biographical and
institutional information on these academics by inspecting personal and profes-
sional websites as well as publicly available CVs, to derive reliable indicators for
their paradigmatic orientation and main research interests, as well as for the degree
and type of their political involvement. The main contribution of this paper, hence,
is empirical; it documents the fairly homogeneous paradigmatic stance of German-
speaking academic economics and identifies some important specificities relevant
for understanding the gaps between the overall characteristics of economists in
Germany and their impact on political decision making and public debate.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: The next chapter reviews
current debates on the paradigmatic and social structure of economics, with a spe-
cific focus on past findings and results that seem especially relevant for the case of
German economics. Section Three introduces our methodological approach, which
consists of an indicator-based analysis of the academic research profiles and the
political and public involvement of economists in the German-speaking countries.
In Section Four, we present our main findings regarding institutional and sociode-
mographic data, the academic research profiles, and the political and public
involvement of the economists under study. In doing so, we also compare German
to U.S. economics and highlight some specific characteristics of German econom-
ics. Section Five offers some concluding remarks.
2. Setting the stage: the paradigmatic and social structure
of economics
2.1. Recent debates on the peculiar character of economics
Recent empirical studies in the field of economic sociology found that economics
occupies a unique position within the social sciences. Its peculiarity is driven by a
variety of features, including stark limits to interdisciplinary responsiveness
(Fourcade, 2009; Fourcade et al.,2015), a high degree of internal stratification and
a strong role in policymaking, as well as the existence of a dominant and
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 3
encompassing theoretical approach that characterizes research and teaching in
mainstream economics. For this article, the latter three aspects are of
prime importance.
The first of these three findings indicates that the “elite in the profession”(as
invoked by Colander et al.,2004: 490) are composed of comparably narrow groups
of interrelated departments (Fourcade et al.,2015; Hodgson and Rothman, 1999),
journals (Aistleitner et al.,2019; Heckman and Moktan, 2020) and actors (Colussi,
2018). However, this rather close-knit network has a comparatively strong imprint
on the profession, as economists tend to focus on the top of their discipline, which
is evidenced by the fact that the concentration of citations in economics is actually
increasing over time (Gl€
otzl and Aigner, 2019), whereas it is decreasing for most
other fields in the social and natural sciences (Larivi
ere et al.,2009). For the pur-
pose of our paper, this finding implies a need to inspect the more exclusive circles
of economists in Germany to get a better grasp on the exact contours and potential
reasons for Germany’s alleged peculiarity.
Secondly, social science scholars are concerned with the political and societal
impact of economists and the ‘economic ideas’they promote (Campbell, 1998;
Campbell and Pedersen, 2014). In doing so, they highlight different levels and devi-
ces by which economists influence political programs, processes and decisions.
Among these are the professional authority of economics, the institutional positions
of economists, and the establishment of a specific economic style of reasoning in
political discourse (Fourcade, 2009; Hirschman and Berman, 2014; Christensen,
2017). Thereby, the comparative analysis of national knowledge regimes by
Campbell and Pedersen (2014) emphasizes the impact of institutionalized policy
advice from economic research institutes in Germany. However, while the crisis of
the corporatist German model has reduced the importance of institutionalized pol-
icy advice, economic experts from economic research institutes and newly funded
think tanks still have a high impact on policymaking (Flickenschild and Afonso,
2018; Plehwe, 2017;P
€
uhringer, 2020). Against this background, our paper addresses
the political involvement of German economists on three different levels and aims
to highlight paradigmatic as well as ideological power structures within politically
involved economists, as recently shown for the U.S. by van Gunten et al. (2016).
In addition, research on the role of economists in public policy debates typically
distinguishes between the specific role of highly visible ‘public economists’–in the
sense of ‘public intellectuals’–and the general symbolic capital associated with
being an economist. In the former case, scholars with different disciplinary back-
grounds analyze ‘public interventions’(Eyal and Buchholz, 2010) of those econo-
mists, who are highly visible in political and public debates. Prominent examples of
highly influential economists in the U.S. include Milton Friedman (e.g. Jones,
2012), John Kenneth Galbraith (e.g. Chirat, 2018) and in the present day, promin-
ent economists such as Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Dani Rodrik. In this
context, our paper employs this stream of research by using visibility rankings to
assess the overall robustness of our argument by analyzing the role of highly visible
and/or influential economists.
The final finding of interest for this paper is on the existence of a dominant and
encompassing theoretical approach. While the debate on the marginalization of
specific schools of economic thought and the supposed homogeneity of the eco-
nomic mainstream is manifold (see e.g. Colander et al.,2004; Dobusch and
4 J. KAPELLER ET AL.
Kapeller, 2009; Rodrik, 2018), in this paper we mainly refer to two partially con-
flicting diagnoses: the alleged tendency of paradigmatic closure in mainstream eco-
nomics, which comes with the corresponding exclusion of heterodox approaches
(like evolutionary economics, radical economics, post-Keynesian economics or eco-
logical economics) and, on the other hand, the claim that the economic main-
stream already comprises a set of heterogenous approaches and, hence, exhibits
theoretical diversity. In this view, the marginalization of heterodox economic
approaches cannot be based on paradigmatic prejudice (Colander et al. (2004)as
there exists a great variety of different theoretical models in ‘cutting-edge’research
in mainstream economics.
According to Colander (2000), this so-called ‘edge of economics’, which is
labeled as ‘Colander’s Edge’(Lavoie, 2012) in what follows, consists of various
novel research fields, such as evolutionary game theory, ecological economics,
behavioral/psychological economics, complexity theory, experimental economics,
computer simulation and advanced econometrics dealing with the limitations of
classical statistics.
In contrast, heterodox economists and critical observers emphasize the narrow
paradigmatic boundaries of current mainstream economics and argue that
“economics is unique among the social sciences in having a single monolithic
mainstream, which is either unaware of or actively hostile to alternative approach-
es”(King, 2013: 17). Against this backdrop of paradigmatic division in economics,
our paper contributes to the mainstream-heterodoxy debate by providing a com-
prehensive empirical analysis of the current paradigmatic state of economics in
German-speaking countries
1
. Furthermore, we also inspect whether these paradig-
matic alignments in the German economics profession help to explain distinct eco-
nomic policy reactions after the GFC and to what extent heterodox views are
represented in policy contexts.
2.2. Are German economists really different?
Throughout the Eurozone crisis debate, Germany and German economists were
criticized for their rather conservative policy prescriptions, with much of this cri-
tique directed toward the impact of ordoliberalism on German economic policy.
To put it briefly, the ordoliberal tradition distinguishes between the ordo principle,
which assigns responsibility for the overall economic and institutional order to the
state, and economic policy understood as the fine-tuning of the business cycle. As
a consequence, ordoliberals stood and continue to stand mostly in opposition to
Keynesian-oriented economic policies (Bibow, 2018; van Esch, 2014). Additionally,
the ordoliberal tradition is well-known as one of the core strands of a broader neo-
liberal movement (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009; Ptak, 2009).
The ordoliberal tradition, which is sometimes conceived as a ‘German oddity’
(Beck and Kotz, 2017), also had a long-standing formative impact on German and
European economic policy. Empirical examples for the impact of ordoliberal ideas
can be found in various contexts, including (i) the historical development of the
European Union (e.g. the competition policy of the European Economic
Community in the 1960s, the Single European Act in 1987, and the foundation of
the ECB in 1998; see Campbell and Pedersen, 2014; Feld et al.,2017; Ergen and
Kohl, 2019), (ii) monetary policy, where monetary stability and the associated
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 5
inflation aversion of the German Bundesbank are key policy drivers (Howarth and
Rommerskirchen, 2017; Carstensen and Schmidt, 2018), and (iii) debates on fiscal
policy articulated through the repeated call for strict austerity measures, labor mar-
ket flexibility and the opposition to a move toward a European banking or fiscal
union after the GFC (Blyth, 2013; Piketty, 2020; Ville and de Berckvens, 2015).
Hien and Joerges (2018a: 2) argue that the “spectre of ordoliberalism”today
“has become an item of the common national container [ …] frequently used by
politicians and economic
elite to communicate with the public”. Thus, aside from
recent developments of the ordoliberal research program in academic economics
2
,
ordoliberal reasoning presumably plays a major role in German government minis-
tries and the bureaucracy, as well as in economic policy institutions such as the
Bundesbank. An example is provided by the German Minister of Finance,
Wolfgang Sch€
auble, who distinguishes “US policymakers”, who “like to focus on
short-term corrective measures”from German officials, who “take the longer view
and are, therefore, more preoccupied with the implications of excessive deficits and
the dangers of high inflation. [ …] This aversion to deficits and inflationary fears,
which has their roots in German history in the past century, may appear peculiar
to our American friends, whose economic culture is, in part, shaped by deflationary
episodes”(Sch€
auble, 2010). This example is not only telling in a literal sense –it is
also indicative of the dogmatic views of German policy officials as it simply ignores
the deflationary episode in Germany’s economic history that fueled the ascension
of the Nazis to power.
However, contrary to its alleged public and political impact, ordoliberalism as
an economic research program seems to be losing credibility among German econ-
omists. For instance, in 2009, R€
udiger Bachmann, Dirk Kr€
uger and Harald Uhlig,
three German economists working in the U.S., initiated a petition titled “Rebuild
German economics according to international standards!”(Bachmann et al.,2009),
which was supported by about 150 German economists. In their petition, the
authors stressed the need for an empirical turn in economic policy research and
accused leading ordoliberals of following “old dogmas”. In a survey by the German
Economic Association (GEA) conducted in 2010, 46.7% of the respondents sup-
ported the position of Bachmann et al. (2009), while 22.8% supported the converse
position of the ordoliberals (Fricke, 2017).
This observation is also confirmed when comparing surveys of the economics
profession in the U.S. and in Germany. Recent surveys of the members of the
American Economic Association (AEA) as well as of the members of the German
Economic Association (GEA) revealed some convergence with respect to major
policy issues. Addressing the issue of government interventions in the business
cycle in 2015, 36% of economists in Germany agreed that fiscal policy instruments
have a stabilizing function on the business cycle. Furthermore, 53% agreed with
provisos and only 8% disagreed. Compared to older surveys, this overall positive
responses indicates a significant increase in support for fiscal policy measures
among economists in Germany (Fricke, 2017)
3
. In contrast, when U.S. economists
were asked about the impact of fiscal policy on a less than fully employed economy
in 2011, 19% disagreed, 34% agreed with provisos and 46% agreed. Contrary to the
German case, this result indicates a decrease in the belief in the effectiveness of fis-
cal policy when compared to older surveys conducted in 2000 and 1990 (Fuller
and Geide-Stevenson, 2014).
4
However, for our purpose, the main insight is that
6 J. KAPELLER ET AL.
from a bird’s-eye view, there is not much different between the policy attitude of
the average economist in the U.S. and the average economist in Germany, at least
in terms of fiscal policy.
While surveys of German and U.S. economists are not fully comparable, recent
results indicate a trend of increasing harmonization of the responses of German
and U.S. economists regarding issues such as paradigmatic orientation
5
, the
importance of empirical research, the role of fiscal policy, and the preference for
market-based policies (Fricke, 2017). However, Fricke (2017) also reports that quite
often, the majority position among German economists on economic policy issues
(e.g. minimum wages, the ‘banking union’etc.) substantially deviates from the pos-
ition of the group of most influential German economic policy advisers. Against
this background, we aim to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the specific
characteristics of the German economics profession, to arrive at a more definite
and nuanced answer to explain the specific stance of German economic policy,
given that the average economist in Germany is not much different from her or
his international counterparts.
3. Methodological approach
The central aim of this paper is to present results from a survey of professors of
economics located in universities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (henceforth
referred to as ‘the German-speaking area’). The study is based on comprehensive
online biographical research of CVs and related information obtained from per-
sonal and professional websites of the researchers under study.
3.1. Data collection
Data collection was conducted from autumn 2015 to spring 2016, with a focus on
full professors of economics at public universities in the German-speaking area.
6
Despite reforms in recent years, the academic sector in Germany is still rather hier-
archically structured and reflects the long tradition of the German
‘Ordinarienuniversit€
aten’organized around ‘professorial chairs’(Lehrst€
uhle; see
€
Ostling, 2018). These ‘professorial chairs’represent the highest strata of economists
in terms of academic recognition.
The data collection process was organized as follows: in a preparatory step, we
compiled a list of economics departments in 89 German-speaking universities and
identified all full professors of economics. This led us to a sample of 708 econo-
mists (45 in Austria, 95 in Switzerland and 568 in Germany), which served as a
basis for all further analysis.
The aim of this paper is to develop an indicator-based typology of economists
in the German-speaking area, based on a transparent, multistage survey procedure
comprising qualitative as well as quantitative information, which allows for a com-
parative analysis of the individuals contained in the dataset. We thus follow a
recent trend of applying indicator-based analyses and typologies for research on
the field of academic economics (Fourcade, 2009; Rossier, 2020; Schmidt-
Wellenburg, 2018). In our empirical analysis, more than 20 different variables have
been taken into the account, which cover three broad categories of interest: (i)
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 7
institutional and sociodemographic characteristics, (ii) academic research orienta-
tion and (iii) political involvement (Table 1).
In line with the aforementioned findings on the extraordinary role of ‘public
economists’, media debates and the public policy arena are dominated by a small
group of highly influential ‘star economists’. To access this dimension, we employ
supplementary information from a ranking of public impact of economists pub-
lished by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)
7
. This ranking distinguishes
between three categories, ‘science’,‘politics’and ‘media’, where the latter two are
also subsumed under the heading ‘public’. According to this ranking, Hans-Werner
Sinn, Clemens Fuest, Marcel Fratzscher, Lars Feld and Michael H€
uther are the
most influential public economists in Germany; however, international economists
such as Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty and Lawrence Summers are
also found in this group. In order to address the question of the public impact of
the economics profession in Germany, we make use of the ‘media’categories in the
FAZ rankings of economists from 2015-2018, to identify the twenty most publicly
visible economists in Germany in recent years (Table 2).
3.2. Data processing and coding
While we could directly import the data on (i), institutional and sociodemographic
characteristics of professors in economics, from our prime sources, information
regarding the academic research profile and the political involvement of economists
proved to be more difficult to assess, as it required us to make assumptions on
how to process the underlying data to arrive at suitable indicators.
In order to examine (ii), the academic research profile of economists in the
German-speaking area, we assess the general research focus, the paradigmatic
orientation and the specific topical foci of economists in these countries. For the
general research focus, we collect self-proclaimed research interests, to assign the
economics professors to one of five general research areas (microeconomics, mac-
roeconomics, public economics, econometrics, diverse), where the latter category
contains those economists that have a comparatively broad range of research inter-
ests covering more than one sub-discipline. In further evaluating these data, we
make use of both self-proclaimed research interests and the derived general
research focus.
To identify the paradigmatic stance of economists in the German-speaking area,
we build on our theoretical considerations and introduce two different indicators:
one tailored to capture paradigmatic diversity along the mainstream-heterodoxy
continuum, another aiming to assess diversity within mainstream economics along
the lines of ‘Colander’s Edge’. Regarding the former, we not only differentiate
between (neoclassical) mainstream economics and heterodox economics, but also
introduce ‘plural mainstream’as a middle category to capture those economists
that participate in mainstream as well as in heterodox discourses. This categoriza-
tion is based on publications in refereed economic journals as listed in the Social
Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). In doing so, we use the list of heterodox economics
journals provided by the Heterodox Economics Directory to identify those journals,
that are in principle open for heterodox submissions. The Heterodox Economic
Directory, first published in 2005 (Lee et al.,2005) and currently in its sixth edi-
tion, “aims to document the institutional diversity and breadth of the heterodox
8 J. KAPELLER ET AL.
Table 1. Main variables and indicators: overview.
Variable Indicator Operationalization
(i) Institutional and socio-demographic data
Institutional variables University, country, size economic department –
Socio-demographic data variables Name, gender, age, academic age, citizenship of
economics professors
–
(ii) Academic research focus
Research focus I:
Self-proclaimed research interests
Statements/keywords describing research interests in
CV or website
–
Research focus II General research area Qualitative assignment based on self-proclaimed
research interests
Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, Public Economics or
Econometrics: min. 50% of research interests belong to
a specific area
‘Diverse’:<50% with a clear assignment
Paradigmatic stance I: Mainstream
vs Heterodoxy
Number of publications in journals listed in the
Heterodox Economics Directory
Mainstream: <3 publications
Plural mainstream: min 3 but less than 50% of total
journal publications
Heterodox economics: min 50% of total journal
publications
Paradigmatic stance II: ‘Colander’s Edge’Presence of keywords for research areas in ‘Colander’s
Edge’in self-proclaimed research interests or journal
publications
Standard economics: no keywords
‘Colander’s Edge’: keywords in self-proclaimed research
interests supplemented by titles and keywords of
journal publications
Topical focus I: Reference to Ordoliberalism Number of publications in specific ordoliberal journals No reference: <3 publications
Ordoliberal reference: min 3 publications
Topical focus II: Research on financial crises Presence of keywords referring to the global financial
crisis in publication titles
No reference to crisis: less than 5% of publications
Weak reference to crisis: min 5% but less than 50% of
publications
Strong reference to crisis: min 50% of publications
(iii) Political involvement
Policy support Link to economic research institutes Affiliation to or institutional position in economic
research institutes
Policy engagement Political think tanks; institutions or petitions with a
proactive political agenda; petitions with an
ideological agenda
Membership (in Scientific Advisory Boards), Board or other
position in organizations; official support for petitions
Policy advice Official economic policy advice bodies (Scientific
Advisory Boards in German Federal Ministry of
Finance or Economic Affairs; German Council of
Economic Experts)
Membership or position
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 9
Table 2. Ranking of 20 most influential public economists in Germany.
FAZ media impact 2015-18
Rank Name Affiliation Rank Name Affiliation
1 Clemens Fuest Ifo-Institute 11 J€
org Zeuner KfW
2 Marcel Fratzscher DIW Berlin 12 Lars Feld Walter-Eucken-Institute Freiburg
3 Hans-Werner Sinn Ifo-Institute 13 Paul Krugman City University of New York
4J
€
org Kr€
amer Commerzbank 14 Christoph Schmidt RWI Essen
5 Michael H€
uther IW K€
oln 15 Joseph Stiglitz Columbia University
6 Carsten Brzeski ING 16 Stefan Bielmeier DZ Bank
7 Thomas Piketty
Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales 17 Lawrence Summers Harvard University
8 Holger Schmieding Berenberg Bank 18 Peter Praet EZB
9 Peter Bofinger University of W€
urzburg 19 Isabel Schnabel University of Bonn
10 Thomas Mayer Flossbach v. Storch Research Institute 20 Achim Wambach ZEW Mannheim
Ranking according to the weighted average of the FAZ media ranking from 2015-2018 (authors’own calculations). Economists from nonacademic institutions are printed in gray.
10 J. KAPELLER ET AL.
economic community within academia”(Kapeller and Springholz, 2016: preface). It
comprises a collection of 144 economic journals, which are open to submissions
incorporating heterodox perspectives. In our work, we draw on this collection to
identify the paradigmatic orientation of individual contributions made by the econ-
omists studied in this paper. Economists are classified as heterodox if more than
50% of their publication outlets for refereed works are in journals listed in the
Directory.
8
If economists do publish in heterodox outlets but the majority of their
articles are published in outlets devoted to the mainstream, they are assigned to the
middle category, ‘plural mainstream’. In both cases, we use a threshold value of (at
least) three publications in refereed heterodox outlets before a researcher is
assigned to one of these two categories. In this respect, our contribution builds on
existing work highlighting the separation between mainstream and heterodox jour-
nals (e.g. Dobusch and Kapeller, 2012b; King, 2013; Lee et al.,2010).
The second indicator to classify the paradigmatic stance of economists in the
German-speaking area –‘Colander’s Edge’–is based on the arguments provided
by Colander (2000) and Colander et al. (2004)–and aims to capture the degree of
conceptual diversity within contemporary mainstream economics, that is, the
“changing face of mainstream economics”(Colander et al.,2004: 485). The indica-
tor only applies to economists not already categorized as heterodox and can take
two different values: ‘standard-economics’and ‘Colanders Edge’. An economist is
classified as working in ‘Colander’s Edge’if his or her research interests or recently
published papers relate to at least one of the seven keywords provided in Colander
et al. (2004) to circumscribe the “changing face of mainstream economics”. These
keywords are evolutionary game theory, ecological economics, behavioral econom-
ics, complexity theory, experimental economics, computer simulation, and econo-
metric work dealing with the limitations of classical statistics. Following an
argument put forward in scientometric studies (e.g. Dobusch and Kapeller, 2012a),
we also added economic geography to this list of keywords.
In terms of topical foci, we aim to identify those economists in the German-
speaking area that can be connected to an ordoliberal research agenda or that have
published research related to the financial crises or the GFC. For the case of ordo-
liberalism, we design a binary variable which is, again, based on journal publica-
tions. Regarding this aspect, a number of specific journals with a traditional
ordoliberal emphasis (ORDO-Jahrbuch f€
ur die Ordnung von Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft,Zeitschrift f€
ur Wirtschaftspolitik,Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik,
Orientierungen zur Wirtschaft- und Gesellschaftspolitik) are treated as indicative of
an economist’s proximity to ordoliberalism. Again, at least three publications in
these specific outlets are necessary for an economist to be assigned to the ordolib-
eral research field; otherwise, we assume no relation to ordoliberalism.
To identify researchers that work on crisis-related issues, we examine all publi-
cation titles since 2008 to trace links to financial crises in general or the GFC in
particular. We distinguish between three different categories of economists: Those
who have a strong research interest in the financial crisis (at least 50% of their
publications cover this issue or they published a monograph related to the financial
crisis), those with moderate interest (at least 5% but less than 50% of publications),
and those who, by and large, do not refer to the crisis (<5% of publications). For
our further analysis, we conflate ‘moderate’and ‘strong’research interest in the
financial crisis into one single category.
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 11
Finally, the third area of our analysis focuses on (iii), political involvement. In
this context, we only focus on economists at German universities, to better align
this part of the analysis with our main research interest. We capture political
involvement at three levels: First, the category policy support comprises connections
of economists in Germany to government-funded economic research institutes.
The second category, policy engagement, captures relations to think tanks, organiza-
tions and public petitions, which pursue a clear political agenda
9
. The third cat-
egory is labeled policy advice and comprises all professors of economics taking part
in institutionalized economic policy advisory boards. In this context, we focus on
three major institutions, namely the German Council of Economic Experts
(‘Sachverst€
andigenrat zur Begutachtung der gesamtwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung’,
GCEE), and the scientific advisory boards of the German Ministry of Finance
(BMF) and Economic Affairs (BMWi), respectively.
4. Empirical results
This section provides the main findings of our analysis in four steps. First, we offer
some descriptive results focusing on the institutional and sociodemographic charac-
teristics of our sample. In the second part, the central outcomes regarding the aca-
demic research profile of economists in the German-speaking area are presented.
In the third part, we relate our findings on research profiles to the political orienta-
tion and involvement of German economists and compare the situation of German
economics to the U.S. In the fourth and final part, we highlight the special role of
ordoliberalism in German economics and thus provide some evidence on the pecu-
liarities of German economics and German economic policy advice.
4.1. Institutional and socio-demographic data
In sum, our sample consists of 708 economists (Austria 45 (6.4%), Switzerland 95
(13.4%), Germany 568 (80.2%)) in 89 universities. The largest universities in our
sample, as measured by the number of Chairs in Economics, are all located in
Germany (with 26 at the University of Bonn, 23 at the University of Frankfurt and
the LMU Munich, and 22 full professors at the University of Mannheim). 658
(92.9%) out of 708 professorships in economics have a specific designation (e.g.
public economics, macroeconomics, economic policy); the remainder (7.1%) are
simply termed ‘economics’. The total percentage of female professors in our sample
is 12.4%, which is quite similar to the gender ratio of economics professors given
in other studies (Ceci et al.,2014; Ginther and Kahn, 2014). Whereas the percent-
age in Austria (13.3%) and Germany (13.7%) is quite similar, in Switzerland (7.4%)
the percentage of female economics professors is significantly lower. We further-
more analyze the trend in the proportion of female economics professors. To this
end, we divide our sample into different cohorts based on academic age and find
that the percentage of female economics professors in German-speaking countries
has increased over the time, from about 8% in the oldest (1971-80) to slightly
below 20% in the youngest (2006-12) cohort.
Finally, we examined the nationality of economists in our sample. About 90% of
economics professors at German universities are also German citizens, while in
12 J. KAPELLER ET AL.
Austria the proportion of ‘domestic’professors is 60.9% and in Switzerland
only 34.8%.
4.2. Academic research profile
To present our empirical findings, we first focus on the general research areas
occupied by the researchers under study. In this context, our data indicates a dom-
inance of microeconomic research orientations (50.5%) across German-speaking
universities, while less than a fifth of the economists in our sample can be assigned
to macroeconomics (18.8%). Furthermore, specializations in public economics
(6.6%) and econometrics (6.2%) are more rarely found, but each of those fields still
represents slightly more than 5% of our total sample. Finally, a comparably high
percentage of economists (17.8%), mainly coming from older cohorts, have a
research focus covering at least two of these research areas and thus are assigned
to the category ‘diversified’.
In a next step, we inspected the paradigmatic stance of professors of economics
in the German-speaking area (Figure 1) and its relation to the main research areas
as well as the topical foci of researchers
10
. Overall, we found that in total only
3.2% of the professors in our sample are heterodox economists, while 5.6% belong
to the category ‘plural mainstream’. In contrast, the percentage of professors work-
ing in ‘Colanders Edge’is much higher at 15.8%. However, the vast majority
(75.5%) of scholars have been assigned to the (neoclassical) mainstream in a more
traditional sense. This result is quite robust in variations in the relevant threshold;
taking, for instance, two instead of three publications in heterodox economic jour-
nals as minimum requirement for inclusion in the category ‘plural mainstream’,
the percentage of mainstream economists is only slightly reduced to 72.3%
11
.Ifwe
take a look at national differences, the case of Austria stands out due to the histor-
ically stronger role of heterodox traditions (King, 2019): in Austria, roughly 20% of
researchers are classified as either ‘heterodox’or ‘plural mainstream’, compared to
Figure 1. Topical foci of economists in the German-speaking area.
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 13
Switzerland and Germany, where the joint share of heterodox and plural econo-
mists is only about 5% and 8%, respectively.
Breaking down these findings to the university level shows that the University
of Bremen (where 3 out of 3 full professors of economics are assigned to the non-
mainstream) is the only institution with a heterodox majority among its professors.
In addition, we found that there are only four more universities –out of 89 –with
a majority of non-mainstream economists. All of them are relatively small (no
more than six professorships) and located in Germany. While this finding resem-
bles the more general insight from science & technology studies that small groups
tend to be more disruptive and challenging toward dominant ideas (Wu et al.,
2019), these locations with a non-mainstream majority are typically also character-
ized by specific institutional histories, which are extensively discussed by Heise and
Thieme (2016).
In contrast, most large and prestigious universities, like Bonn, Munich or
Mannheim, are overwhelmingly dominated by mainstream economists. As has
been emphasized, the percentage of economists working in ‘Colander’s Edge’is
much higher than that associated with the ‘plural mainstream’. Whereas the latter
is characterized by a principal openness to heterodox approaches, ‘Colander’s Edge’
on the other hand signifies a greater internal diversification within mainstream eco-
nomics. More importantly, a large majority (about 85%) of the economics profes-
sors working in ‘Colanders Edge’have an expertise in behavioral and experimental
economics, which implies that of all the research areas mentioned by Colander, the
interrelated duo of behavioral and experimental economics is the only one that
managed to gain real traction in the German economics profession.
Further analysis indicates that behavioral economics –as the dominant force
within ‘Colander’s Edge’–clearly represents a case of internal diversification of the
mainstream, as only 3.8% of those researchers, who are associated with behavioral
or experimental economics, also belong to the plural mainstream (see also Dobusch
and Kapeller, 2012b, as well as Gl€
otzl and Aigner (2018), who reach similar
results). This minimal overlap indicates that ‘diversity within the mainstream’and
‘plurality beyond the mainstream’are indeed separated in practice, at least in the
context of behavioral and experimental economics. Against this backdrop,
Colander’s original classification seems somehow unsystematic as it comprises both
–upcoming research programs within the economic mainstream (behavioral/
experimental economics) as well as more marginalized approaches, like complexity
economics or ecological economics.
Figure 1 reproduces the results already stated and illustrates how paradigmatic
orientation impacts on the preferred research focus: While, for instance, the total
percentage of economists working in ‘Colanders Edge’is 15.8%, their presence is
considerably stronger in microeconomics (27.6%), much weaker in macroeconom-
ics (1.5%) and absent for public economics (0%). In contrast, plural and heterodox
approaches are more present in macroeconomics (9.2%) that in microeconomics
(7.8%), while all public economists are assigned to the mainstream. Against this
backdrop, internal diversification in mainstream economics again seems to be con-
strained to specific areas of research.
In our analysis of the current paradigmatic structure of the German-speaking
area, we furthermore assess the role of the ordoliberal tradition. In sum, 48 (6.8%)
out of 698 professors show a relation to ordoliberalism. Unsurprisingly,
14 J. KAPELLER ET AL.
ordoliberalism is relatively more important for German economics (8.1%) com-
pared to Austria (2.2%) and Switzerland (2.1%). Within ordoliberalism, the share
of professors associated with a plural mainstream (10.4%) is considerably higher
than in the total sample. This can be explained by the historical composition of
ordoliberalism, which is partly connected to other paradigmatic approaches, includ-
ing evolutionary, Austrian, social and neoclassical economics. Therefore, econo-
mists with a relation to ordoliberalism are slightly more receptive to ideas beyond
the mainstream and also have a greater interest in the history of eco-
nomic thought.
Finally, Figure 1 indicates the paradigmatic stance of economists who have done
work on crisis-related issues. We found that only a minor proportion of economics
professors in our sample (14.5%) published books or journal articles dealing with
the GFC or financial crises after 2008
12
. Given some empirical evidence for the
reluctance to deal with economic and financial crises in mainstream economics
(Acemoglu, 2009;P
€
uhringer and Hirte, 2015), the comparatively high share of het-
erodox researchers (8.2%) among those that engage with the GFC could be
expected. Comparatively speaking, the GFC is a more important research issue for
heterodox economists, which is in line with the general supposition that the eco-
nomic mainstream views capitalism as a self-equilibrating phenomenon, while het-
erodox economists are more strongly inclined to emphasize the role of crisis
and conflict.
To introduce a temporal dimension into our analysis, we rearranged our sample
of economists according to their academic age to form seven different age-cohorts,
by taking the year in which our subjects received their PhDs as a starting point.
This procedure allows us to capture temporal trends, as summarized in Figure 2.
In line with other recent work on the general development of economics
(Angrist et al.,2017), we find a growing focus on microeconomic research topics –
an increase also associated with the now prominent position of behavioral and
experimental economics –, whereas the share of economists focusing on macroeco-
nomic subjects decreases from 26.9% in the oldest to 17.1% in the youngest cohort.
In a similar vein, the percentage of mainstream economists rises more or less con-
tinuously, from 76.9% in the oldest to 98.1% in the youngest cohort, which indi-
cates that the complete marginalization of heterodox economics is a more recent
historical phenomenon. A similar observation can be made for the ordoliberal trad-
ition, where association is even more strongly correlated with (academic) age. This
finding is in line with recent literature on ordoliberal reasoning and its position in
economics (e.g. Hien and Joerges, 2018b). Finally, the GFC as a research topic has
a slightly higher relevance for older cohorts compared to younger economists.
For the detailed topical analysis of the research and paradigmatic profile of the
German-speaking area (Figure 3), we examined the relevance of the five most
important research interests conditional on the paradigmatic and topical orienta-
tions shown in Figure 1.InFigure 3, we show the relative proportion of the five
mostly used keywords relative to all keywords in this group with at least two
occurrences. To do so, we aggregated very similar keywords (e.g. microeconomics
and microeconomic theory) into joint categories.
In the full population, the share covered by the five most common keywords in
all keywords is relatively low, which is plausible as the full population exhibits
greater heterogeneity than the subgroups described by the other columns. For
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 15
instance, economists assigned to ‘Colanders Edge’form a quite homogeneous
group related to microeconomic oriented research fields, where the interrelated
fields of experimental and behavioral economics add up to almost one third of all
keywords. In contrast, the share of researchers concerned with policy-relevant
issues such as ecological and environmental economics, macroeconomics, economic
policy or evolutionary and innovation economics is higher within the groups of
plural mainstreamers, heterodox economists and researchers interested in crisis-
related issues. Scholars with reference to German ordoliberalism on the other hand
show a strong focus on public finance related issues, which cover up to 20% of all
keywords in this subset. Contrasting these latter two findings, we find that the
paradigmatic division strongly aligns with differences in topical foci, where more
pluralist & heterodox researchers tend to focus on key socio-economic challenges
like environmental degradation, growth and distribution, whereas ordoliberal
researchers are more concerned about the role of public finance(s). Against this
backdrop, the subsequent section will explore whether this alignment between para-
digmatic and topical orientation also translates to the level of political involvement.
Figure 2. Research interests across cohorts: German-speaking countries.
Figure 3. Research focus and topical orientation of economists in the German-speaking countries.
16 J. KAPELLER ET AL.
In sum, our findings point to a strong paradigmatic homogeneity in German
academics that has been increasing over time. Novel developments from a paradig-
matic perspective mostly pertain to microeconomic issues from a mainstream per-
spective, which goes along with a relative neglect of macroeconomics, economic
policy, crises and heterodox traditions among younger cohorts of economists in
Germany. Consequently, we find that these topics are comparatively more import-
ant for economists with a pluralist or heterodox orientation.
4.3. Political involvement and paradigmatic orientation of economists
in Germany
The alleged orthodox and conservative view of German economists was at the cen-
ter of a controversy between U.S. and German economists on the design of
adequate policies in the aftermath of the GFC. Stiglitz, for instance, stressed the
allegedly extraordinary political orientation of German economists, particularly in
comparison with the U.S., where a majority of economists support liberal
‘interventionist policies’(Hedengren et al.,2010; Klein and Stern, 2009). In a simi-
lar vein, several authors stressed the importance of the “Rhine Divide”
(Brunnermeier et al.,2016) for the case of Europe, where the German stance con-
flicts with a rather Keynesian-oriented policy paradigm that is more dominant in
France (van Esch, 2014). However, at least for the case of the U.S., the surveys dis-
cussed in Section 2 indicate that, on average, economists in the U.S. and Germany
share similar views regarding the role and potential of fiscal policy. Against this
backdrop, the hypothesis of a peculiarity of German economics in general does not
seem too convincing.
To provide a more precise analysis of this alleged peculiarity, we suggest focus-
ing more strongly on the issue of transmission of economic expertise into public
debates and policymaking. For this purpose, we look solely at German economists
(n¼568) and distinguish between three different forms of political involvement:
policy support, policy engagement and policy advice
13
.
At the level of policy support, we analyze economists with affiliations to govern-
ment-funded economic research institutes, which do play a central role in German
public economic debates (Campbell and Pedersen, 2014; Flickenschild and Afonso,
2018). Overall, the most important institution in quantitative terms is the CESifo
Group Munich, with 120 (21.1%) affiliations among German economists. Other fre-
quently mentioned research institutes are the Institute of Labor Economics Bonn
(IZA) with 74 (13.1%), the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) with 56
(9.9%), and the Centre for European Economic Research Mannheim (ZEW) and
the German Institute for Economic Research Berlin (DIW), with 37 (6.5%) affilia-
tions respectively. By matching the political support category with the paradigmatic
profile of economists (Figure 4), we found that economists associated with the cat-
egory of policy support show an even stronger inclination toward mainstream
approaches than the overall population of German economists. For instance, while
every second mainstream economist is affiliated to policy support institutions, only
a quarter of heterodox economists are. Given the importance of economic research
institutes in public economic debates and for policymaking in Germany, this
underrepresentation further lowers the potential political impact of alternative eco-
nomic views.
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 17
In the category of policy engagement, which comprises economists active in
think tanks and organizations or supporting public petitions with the aim of exert-
ing political influence, we found a slightly higher share of heterodox/pluralist econ-
omists as compared to the category policy support. However, the share of
mainstream economists in this sub-group also surpasses the corresponding share
for the full population, as economists associated with ‘Colander’s Edge’are slightly
less visible in such contexts. A possible interpretation of the pattern obtained in
Figure 4 is, hence, that economists holding alternative views would be willing to
engage with policy issues (which is why they are engaged) but have difficulties in
actually getting a hearing at the respective policy-relevant institutions (as covered
by the remaining two categories).
The most prominent institution related to policy engagement in our sample was
the ‘plenum of economists’, which has 169 members (29.7%) in our sample.
Furthermore, we identify substantially more and closer connections of economists
to ordoliberal or neoliberal German think tanks, such as the ‘Initiative New Social
Market Economy’(INSM)
14
, the ‘Kronberger Kreis’or the ‘Friedrich von Hayek
Society’, than to think tanks with an ‘interventionist’, Keynesian orientation or a
link to the trade unions (e.g. ‘Keynes Society’,‘B€
ockler Foundation’). Moreover, 90
German economists in our sample (15.9%) signed the neoliberal petition
‘Hamburger Appell’(Funke et al.,2005), which was launched in 2005, aiming to
push for rigid labor market reforms.
In line with this finding of an underrepresentation of heterodox ideas among
politically engaged economists in Germany, the FAZ media ranking shows that
‘pragmatic Keynesian’(Lavoie, 2010) positions in the German economic discourse
are, to a certain extent, ‘imported’. This means that visible public economists taking
such a stance often come from other countries. Aside from Marcel Fratzscher and
Peter Bofinger, visible economists taking Keynesian stances in German public dis-
course are, following the ranking of the FAZ, either based in the U.S. (such as Paul
Krugman, Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz) or in France (Thomas Piketty).
Figure 4. Theoretical orientations of politically-involved economists in Germany.
18 J. KAPELLER ET AL.
Incidentally, these economists not only a fill a gap in terms of the policy discourse;
they also enrich the respective discourse in terms of paradigmatic diversity, as two
out of these four economists fall in the category of plural economists (according to
the criteria laid out in Section 3). These observations align well with the finding
that more pluralist authors tend to focus on different topics as well as with their
alleged exclusion from large parts of the political arena.
We also examined the social network structure of public economists identified
with reference to the FAZ media ranking by mapping their institutional links to
non-university institutions, such as economic research institutes, advisory bodies,
and academic and advocacy think tanks
15
. The resulting two-mode personal-insti-
tutional social network further underscores the marginalization of pluralist econo-
mists. It shows that German Keynesians (Peter Bofinger, Gustav Horn) and
international contributors to German debates both lack strong ties to the dominant
cluster in terms of policy engagement, which centers around ordo- and neoliberal
institutions such as the Ludwig Erhard Foundation and the Initiative for New
Social Market Economy (INSM). However, more recent developments in the FAZ
ranking indicate a trend in favor of pragmatic Keynesian and other critical econo-
mists, to the disadvantage of traditional ordoliberal discourse coalitions
(Schwarzbauer et al.,2019). Examples include Jens S€
udekum, Sebastian Dullien,
Claudia Kemfert and Achim Truger, who substantially improved their position in
the FAZ ranking 2020, not least due to their high scores in politics and in the
newly-established category ‘social media’(Figure 5).
Finally, we focused on the members of the three main German economic insti-
tutions for policy advice: the German Council of Economic Experts (GCEE) and
the scientific advisory boards in the German Ministries of Finance and Economic
Affairs. When matching the policy advice category with the paradigmatic orienta-
tion, we found that all the German economists of our sample who engaged in pol-
icy advice institutions belong either to the mainstream (90.6%) or to ‘Colander’s
Edge’(9.4%), while none of them can be classified as heterodox or plural main-
stream, which, again, can be interpreted as a sign of the exclusion of alternative
Figure 5. Social network structure of public economists.
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 19
economic views from important parts of the political landscape. And indeed, this
observation marks a stark difference to the U.S., where among all still living chair-
men of the Council of Economic Advisers, which can be seen as the prime policy
advice institution in the U.S., about 20% could be classified as heterodox or plural-
ist economists (according to the criteria laid out in Section 3).
To sum up, the dominance of mainstream economists is obvious at all levels of
political involvement. However, whereas in the categories of policy support and
policy engagement heterodox and plural mainstream economists at least have a
minor share, the category of policy advice is exclusively composed of main-
stream economists.
4.4. The specter of ordoliberalism
Regarding the specific impact of ordoliberalism, we found only a rather weak
‘conservative’and/or ordoliberal bias in the overall population of German econo-
mists at the level of research orientation (8%), which is, furthermore, declining
over time. At first sight, these findings imply that the importance of ordoliberalism
as a core ‘German oddity’is small and declining. This impression, however,
changes significantly, if we direct our focus toward economists who reside in the
categories of policy engagement and policy advice. Within these subgroups, the
respective numbers increase to 13.4% for the category of policy engagement and
about 40% for the category of policy advise (see Figure 6), which is arguably the
category in our framework that is associated with the greatest potential impact and
influence, as these circles offer an institutionalized forum for providing direct pol-
icy recommendations. This finding indicates that the alignment between paradig-
matic and topical orientation observed in Section 4.3 also translates to the level of
political impact. Ordoliberal scholars are known to have a more conservative policy
stance (Blyth, 2013; van Esch, 2014) and show a corresponding topical focus on
public finance, whereas economists of more pluralist persuasions tend to focus on
key social challenges, such as environmental degradation, unemployment or distri-
bution. While both groups represent only a small share of the overall population
Figure 6. Ordoliberalism and Neoliberalism in the political involvement of German economists.
20 J. KAPELLER ET AL.
(both about 8-9% in total), their uneven representation in political contexts, where
ordoliberalism is massively overrepresented, while (other) alternative economic
views are next to totally excluded, emerges as a key reason for the lopsidedness of
economic policymaking in Germany.
To critically reflect on the robustness of this surprising finding, we borrow from
the approach applied by Mirowski and Plehwe (2009) and P€
uhringer (2020), who
identify economists with personal links to ordo-neoliberal institutions and public
petitions as members of a ‘German neoliberal thought collective’(GNTC). By
applying this institutional definition and employing the broad collection of neo-
liberal think tanks provided by the TTNR (2020), we identify members of the
GNTC in our dataset, which allows us to assess the robustness of our finding on
the increasing importance of ordoliberalism in policy contexts. Figure 6 shows that
both identification strategies –ordoliberalism as well as the GNTC –lead to very
similar overall outcomes.
Hence, we found that ordoliberalism still plays a decisive role in Germany’s eco-
nomic policymaking. This points to the fact that selection processes within German
economics matter a lot for the formation of specific political views and positions in
Germany: although many economists in Germany hold rather pragmatic views
toward the potential of interventionist policies, such economists do not seem to
self-select (or get selected) into more influential policy circles, which dominate
public debates (policy engagement) as well as actual policymaking (policy advice). In
such contexts, not only do we find a disproportional presence of ordoliberal ideas
–which in relative terms increases five-fold (from 8% to 40%) when moving from
the overall population to the most influential policy institutions –but we also see
that economists based outside Germany enter the public debate to partially com-
pensate for the lack of visible alternative views on economic policymaking in
Germany, notwithstanding the trend of a stronger presence of pragmatic
Keynesians and other critical German economists in recent years (Schwarzbauer
et al.,2019).
Our findings on the important role of ordoliberalism among publicly visible and
politically influential economists are in line with other empirical studies reporting a
strong and densely connected German neoliberal/ordoliberal power structure
organized around think tank networks (Plehwe et al.,2018;P
€
uhringer, 2018;
Flickenschild and Afonso, 2018; Plehwe, 2017), particularly when compared to its
Keynesian, center-left ‘interventionist’counterpart, and thus offer an explanation
for the relatively strong German calls for austerity measures after the crisis. Our
results furthermore support the thesis that the European reaction to the financial
and economic crisis is partly shaped by ordoliberal ideas (Biebricher, 2014;
Bonefeld, 2012; Blyth, 2013) and also gives some indication as to how this ordolib-
eral influence emerges despite the low number of researchers actually dedicated to
an ordoliberal research program.
5. Conclusion
This paper provides an analysis of the institutional and paradigmatic structure of
the economics discipline in German-speaking countries, as well as an analysis of
the political involvement and orientation of economists in Germany. For this pur-
pose, we applied an indicator-based analysis to the CVs and research profiles of
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 21
more than 700 professors of economics at German, Austrian and Swiss universities.
We use their self-proclaimed research interests and publications in economic jour-
nals to assess their paradigmatic orientation and topical foci, and data on member-
ships, associations and related aspects to document the degree of political
involvement in different dimensions.
Our empirical findings indicate that heterodox and plural mainstream econo-
mists are a minority among economists in Germany (together about 9% of the
full population) and that recent trends have contributed to further amplifying
this asymmetry between mainstream economics and alternative approaches.
Perhaps surprisingly, we found that a similarly small share of economists in
Germany (8%) are related to the ordoliberal research program; hence, from a
bird’s-eye view ordoliberalism and heterodox approaches seem to be marginalized
to a similar degree, as both groups hold minority views within the economics
profession in Germany.
Furthermore, we found some substantial differences with regard to these sub-
groups that improve our understanding of the specific trajectory of German eco-
nomic policy in the past decade. For instance, the share of economists working
on the GFC is much higher for heterodox economists (31.8% vs. 14.5%), who
also tend to be more interested in policy-relevant topics, like macroeconomics or
environmental economics. At the same time, this group of heterodox and plural-
ist economists is underrepresented in institutionalized policy contexts.
Conversely, we show that neo- and ordoliberal ideas, organized around think
tanks and institutions such as the Initiative for New Social Market Economy, the
Kronberger Kreis, the Eucken Institute and the Friedrich von Hayek Society, are
overrepresented in policy contexts. This observation strengthens the observation
that economics in Germany is probably quite similar to economics elsewhere in
the developed world, but selection into policy-relevant spheres might follow dif-
ferent, more idiosyncratic criteria, where intellectual closeness to traditional
German attitudes in economic policymaking is rewarded with greater political
visibility and influence.
Given that pluralist and heterodox economists as well as economists who sup-
port ‘pragmatic Keynesian’positions played a minor role at the level of economic
policy advice after the GFC, our findings suggest that critical Keynesian perspec-
tives were often ‘imported’from foreign economists with more pluralist paradig-
matic orientations. However, more recent developments indicate that new critical
voices, like those of Claudia Kemfert (DIW), Jens S€
udekum (DICE), Sebastien
Dullien (B€
ockler Foundation) and Achim Truger (GCEE), are gaining ground in
public debates, potentially challenging the dominance of traditional ordoliberal dis-
course coalitions (Schwarzbauer et al.,2019).
In sum, this paper suggests that aside from contextual factors, like role of
Germany as a ‘winnerin the international race for economic competitiveness or its
function as a ‘steward’in the genesis of the European policy institutions (Gr€
abner
et al.,2020), the ideological bias in German public debate and economic policy-
making that prevailed in the last decade can be understood as drawing on two fac-
tors: a strong, but not exceptional, paradigmatic homogeneity among economists in
Germany, as well as a highly asymmetric positioning of pluralist/heterodox per-
spectives relative to ordoliberal views in policy contexts.
22 J. KAPELLER ET AL.
Notes
1. See Gr€
abner and Strunk (2020) for an overview of the recent debate on pluralism
in economics.
2. In recent years, prominent ordoliberal economists have stressed the resemblances of
the ordoliberal tradition with public choice economics, constitutional economics and
new institutionalism and aimed at a realignment of ordoliberalism under the heading
of ‘Ordnungs€
okonomik’or ‘order economics’(Feld et al.,2017; Vanberg, 2014).
Indeed, under the influence of Hayek –who was a professor at Freiburg from the
1960s onwards –and in collaboration with James Buchanan, ordoliberal scholars
aimed to adjust ordoliberalism to mainstream economics. Upon the awarding of the
Eucken-Medal to Buchanan, the Eucken Institute praised him for his contributions to
modern order economics “in a spirit related to the Freiburg School”(“in einem der
Freiburger Schule verwandten Geist”).
3. The exact question was: ‘Fiscal policy can be an effective instrument to stabilize the
business cycle. Do you agree?’. In 2006, for instance, about 29%of the respondents
answered ‘no’. Questions from the GEA surveys were translated by the authors.
4. The exact question was: ‘Fiscal policy (e.g. tax cut and/or expenditure increase) has a
significant stimulative impact on a less than fully employed economy’. However,
despite the negative trend, these results still report an overall positive attitude towards
fiscal policies, which is also reflected in the very supportive responses to the question
‘Appropriately designed fiscal policy can increase the long-run rate of capital
formation and economic growth’:52%of the respondents agreed, 34%agreed with
provisos and only 13%disagreed (Fuller and Geide-Stevenson 2014).
5. The paradigmatic orientation of economists is just a minor point in the GEA surveys.
6. Universities of Applied Sciences have been excluded from this analysis as they clearly
represent ‘second-tier’universities in the German-speaking academic world, which
exhibit a clear focus on undergraduate and graduate teaching.
7. Notwithstanding the methodological critique advanced against this ranking and its
potential bias in favor of mainstream media, we employ the FAZ ranking because of
its wide range and popularity.
8. The paradigmatic classification, as well as the identification of an ordoliberal
reference, is not based on the specific content of publications but on the
journal outlets.
9. For the variable on policy engagement, we additionally had to complement our own
data with input drawn from the database of the TTNR (2020) and from previous
research on think tank networks of German economists (P€
uhringer, 2020). We also
included former connections because many institutions (e.g. the Kronberger Kreis)
periodically change their board members.
10. Due to the focus on publications in refereed journals, our full sample is slightly
reduced from 708 to 698 economists, because 10 of them have not published in
academic journals or there was no publication record available.
11. If we, in contrast, restrict the category plural mainstream to at least 4 publications in
heterodox journals, the percentage of mainstream economists increases to 78.5%.
12. As outlined above, we grouped “strong”and “moderate”research interest in the
financial crisis here. We want to thank an anonymous reviewer for drawing our
attention to this inaccuracy.
13. The transmission of economic expert knowledge into politics is a multifaceted process
that is affected by personal relationships between experts and politicians as well as
ad-hoc committees and commissions. However, we base our analysis of economists’
political impact on institutionalized forms of political involvement. Additionally, we
employ the FAZ media ranking as a complement to include publicly visible economic
advisors, who are not part of institutionalized policy advising.
14. For an in-depth analysis of the political and discursive strategy of the INSM, one core
actor in the GNTC, see (Kinderman, 2017).
15. We apply social network analysis, more precisely the community detecting algorithm
the Louvain Method (Blondel et al. 2008), to highlight community structures in the
social network of public economists.
REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY 23
Acknowledgements
We want to thank Friedrich Schneider, the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their valu-
able comments and suggestions, which substantially improved our paper.
Disclosure statement
The authors declare no conflict of interests
Funding
This research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [Grant number: ZK60-G27].
Notes on contributors
Jakob Kapeller is philosopher and socio-economist. He is Professor at the Institute for Socio-
Economics (www.uni-due.de/soziooekonomie) at the University of Duisburg-Essen and heads the
Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy (ICAE) at the Johannes Kepler University
(JKU) Linz (www.jku.at/icae). His research interests include socio-economic change from a polit-
ical economy perspective, the history of economic and political ideas, distributional issues and
heterodox economics.
Stephan Puehringer is post-doc research associate at the ICAE at the JKU Linz. His main research
interests include Political Economy, the performativity of economic thought and power structures
in economics. In his work he applies discourse and social network analysis of economics and
economists and bibliometric methods and is hence contributing to the field of Social Studies
of Economics.
Christian Grimm currently works at the Institute for Philosophy und Scientific Method (ISPM) at
the JKU Linz as a Lecturer. His main research interests include history of economic thought, het-
erodox economics, political economy and social philosophy. Furthermore, he works for a book
publisher in the fields of economics and business administration.
ORCID
Jakob Kapeller http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7538-9706
Stephan Puehringer http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2902-1895
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