Journal Articles
Arguments out in print
September 2024 (Political Studies)
Macroeconomic Sovereignty in the European Economic and Monetary Union: A Republican Approach
The Economic and Monetary Union has fundamentally changed how fiscal and monetary powers are exercised over democratic publics which raise the question of whether a normative vision of macroeconomic sovereignty is compatible with membership within the Eurozone. After conceptualising sovereignty in republican terms as the balance between four ‘power-countering strategies’, this article conducts a normative analysis of the evolution of Economic and Monetary Union governance. This exercise shows how – by neglecting one of the four republican strategies, namely to increase citizens’ democratic participation at the European Union level – successive institutional innovations as well as recent proposals fail to make the exercise of public powers compatible with citizens’ status equality. In contrast, the argument suggests that if citizens’ influence is channelled through a ‘system of dual partisanship’, in which national and European parliamentarians coordinate their activities, national and Economic and Monetary Union’ executives’ discretion can be democratically controlled.
February 2023 (Journal of Politics)
A Republican Assessment of Independent Fiscal Institutions
Some economists have suggested that expert bodies like Fiscal Councils should manage public debt like central banks manage inflation. What are the democratic credentials of these new institutions? This work attempts to answer this question by highlighting the differences between two ways of conceptualising democracy offered by Pettit. The first sees constraints on politicians’ powers and depoliticisation as a proper way to preserve the non-domination of citizens, while the second pivots around the notion of popular control. Borrowing from the economic literature on deficit bias, the paper argues that Pettit’s second view of legitimacy is better equipped at dealing with what is truly normatively problematic about the path of debt accumulation witnessed in many European countries, namely: that government powers are not under the control of those subject to them. This suggests that Fiscal Councils should not be given the task of managing public debt, but rather be used as a tool to reduce the information asymmetry between executives and parliaments that is at the heart of deficit bias and that results in public powers being used arbitrarily.
September 2023 (Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy )
A Republican Fiscal Constitution for the EMU
The democratic management of macroeconomic externalities between Members of the Economic and Monetary Union requires abandoning the legal entrenchment of fiscal rules as well as their technocratic administration. The fiscal constitution of the EMU can instead become an instrument that guarantees European citizens’ and peoples’ reciprocal non-domination. This republican goal can be attained once a core set of fiscal principles are agreed upon and later interpreted in a political way by the Council and the European Commission. To be non-dominating the interpretations of these executive bodies on the management of macroeconomic externalities must be subject to a ‘dual contestatory system’. Citizens should not only control, through their national parliaments, what their own governments decide, but also what a collective of governments decide at the EU level. This requires stepping up of the contestatory powers of the European Parliament. Finally, this kind of democratic control should be epistemically supported and facilitated by a network of national Independent Fiscal Institutions who should allow citizens and parliaments to monitor what executives decide both at the national and at the EU level.
August 2022 (Review of Social Economy)
Self-fulfilling crises in the Eurozone and the institutional preconditions of republican sovereignty
By combining macroeconomics with political theory, this paper ex- plores the possibility that the conception of freedom as non-domination can be meaningfully applied to evaluate, from the point of view of justice, the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis. This perspective will high- light how member states’ capacity to autonomously determine how to weather the impact of the crisis has been unjustly curtailed by the dominating power of financial markets. The system of rules that governs the single currency has led investors to question the capacity of member states to finance their debts. The self-fulfilling sudden-stop crisis that ensued as a consequence of such uncertainty has diluted member states’ autonomy. In motivating this line of argument, the paper touches upon the recent debates on the sources and site of domi- nation and on the stance republican scholars should take toward com- petitive markets. The paper concludes by noting that, if Europeancitizens are truly free only if they live in a state that is not dominated by external institutions and forces, then Eurozone countries have an obligation to establish institutions that increase private and public channels of risk-sharing.
May 2021 (Swiss Political Science Review)
Differentiated Fiscal Surveillance and the Democratic Promise of Independent Fiscal Institutions (with Cristina Fasone)
The post-crisis reforms of the EMU have met with skepticism toward their democratic credentials. This certainly applies to the requirement to set up Independent Fiscal Institutions (IFIs). Drawing on Pettit’s model of republican legitimacy, this paper argues however that IFIs can increase the democratic character of national fiscal policy while preserving Member States’ autonomy. Such a democratic contribution is further facilitated by nationally differentiated implementation of the EU rules regarding the heterogeneous design and powers of IFIs. Based on a comparative analysis of selected Member States’ “elaboration discretion” in defining the organisation and the mandate of IFIs, the article highlights that these features reflect the variety of constitutional settings at domestic level. It is concluded that this heterogeneity amounts to a form of differentiated integration which allows for a better navigation of the trade-off between the persistence of fiscal policy externalities and the reduction in national autonomy.
March 2020 (Journal of European Integration)
Democratic Legitimacy in the Post-Crisis EMU (with Ben Crum)
This paper examines the democratic legitimacy of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) since the international financial crisis hit the euro area. From its inception, EMU has been marked by an asymmetry as its monetary pillar relied on output legitimacy while its economic pillar relied essentially on input legitimacy at the national level. The crisis severely challenged EMU’s output legitimacy, which led to the establishment of new European-level institutions. We analyse the European Stability Mechanism, the European Semester, and Banking Union to take stock of their powers and the ways that these are balanced by mechanisms of legitimacy. Our main finding is that the intergovernmental and output-oriented approach that originally informed the legitimacy of EMU has remained prevalent after the crisis. However, as the three domains – in varying degrees – address questions that are essentially political, we argue that the channels for input legitimacy at the European level remain deficient.