The goal of this article was to explore how the experience of the crisis and the fiscal governance reforms at the European level have influenced budget processes in member states. Drawing on the Europeanization, fiscal governance and pubic crisis management literature, the article first outlines a series of propositions about the kinds of shifts in the budget process that we would expect to ensue from the crisis experience and European reforms. The empirical part of our article explores the validity of those theoretical conjectures in three different member states: Portugal, Austria and Finland. We found that the crisis experience and European reforms have led to increased centralization of the budgetary process in all three countries. Although we would have expected Austria and Portugal to move closer towards the contracts approach of fiscal governance, this has not happened as the medium-term expenditure frameworks are not viewed as binding.

In this paper, we explore the creation of the fiscal council (FC) in Estonia, using the perspectives of different strands of institutionalism. Our analysis shows that the institutional design of the FC was influenced, in tandem, by principal-agent considerations, transaction costs, existing institutional configurations, path dependence, and normative concerns of the bureaucratic agents in charge of creating the new body. We conclude that in order to understand and explain the motives and factors involved in institutional design, the explanatory angles provided by rational choice, historical and sociological institutionalism should be viewed as complementary rather than contradictory.

After the global financial crisis in 2008-2010, the governance framework of the European Union’s economic and fiscal policy has undergone several changes. The Stability and Growth Pact - the core of the EU’s fiscal governance framework - has been reinforced by the “sixpack”, the “two-pack”, the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union, and the rules are grounded in the European Semester process. After 10 years since the initial major changes were introduced into the EU’s legislative framework and given the current times of fiscal uncertainty as well as ongoing discussions on revising and improving the Stability and Growth Pact rules once again, it is of utmost importance to understand the impacts these past reforms have had on member states in the first place. The paper serves two purposes. First and foremost, the main goal of the paper is to build on the existing knowledge on Europeanization in order to bring into one single framework a whole set of different policy measures and their potential impact on the member state’s budgeting processes. Secondly, the theoretical discussion is followed by an empirical case study of Estonia. The case study not only illustrated and mapped out potential impacts that the EU’s economic and fiscal governance measures can have on a national budgetary process and demonstrated the potential degree of domestic change in response to these various policy measures, but also provided preliminary insights in the possible mediating factors that could additionally influence domestic adaption.