Networks of economic policy expertise in Germany and the United States in the wake of the Great Recession

Flickenschild, Michael; Afonso, Alexandre

doi:10.1080/13501763.2018.1518992

Cited by 16 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…For that reason, the continuing development of elite-oriented studies in this regard is very welcome (e.g. Bremer and McDaniel 2019;Dellepiane-Avellaneda 2015;Farrell and Quiggin 2017;Flickenschild and Afonso 2019;Helgadóttir 2016;Wren-Lewis 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Policy Analogies Persuasive? The Household Budget Analogy and Public Support for Austerity

Barnes

Hicks

2021

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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Public opinion on complex policy questions is shaped by the ways in which elites simplify the issues. Given the prevalence of metaphor and analogy as tools for cognitive problem solving, the deployment of analogies is often proposed as a tool for this kind of influence. For instance, a prominent explanation for the acceptance of austerity is that voters understand government deficits through an analogy to household borrowing. Indeed, there are theoretical reasons to think the household finance analogy represents a most likely case for the causal influence of analogical reasoning on policy preferences. This article examines this best-case scenario using original survey data from the United Kingdom. It reports observational and experimental analyses that find no evidence of causation running from the household analogy to preferences over the government budget. Rather, endorsement of the analogy is invoked ex post to justify support for fiscal consolidation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are Policy Analogies Persuasive? The Household Budget Analogy and Public Support for Austerity

Barnes

Hicks

2021

Brit. J. Polit. Sci.

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“…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 policy 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).…”

Section: Recent Debates On the Peculiar Character Of Economicsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…At the level of policy support, we analyze economists with affiliations to government-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.…”

Section: Political Involvement and Paradigmatic Orientation Of Economists In Germanymentioning

confidence: 99%

Paradigms and policies: the state of economics in the German-speaking countries

Kapeller

Pühringer

Grimm

2021

Review of International Political Economy

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This paper studies research interests, paradigmatic orientation and political involvement 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 academic 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 perspectives relative to (over-represented) ordoliberal views in policy contexts is characteristic of economic policymaking in Germany. KEYWORDSeconomic sociology; economic and political paradigms; academic institutions; German economics; economic policy advice; ordoliberalismis 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't work" (Joseph E. Stiglitz in Phillips, 2016). The global financial crisis and the paradigmatic structure of economicsThe 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

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“…The prominence of 'unelected power' (Tucker 2018) has stirred debates about the EU's perceived democratic deficit for decades. Recognising the importance of policymaking elites, studies on EU economic governance have long focused on the role of expert groups both within EU institutions, such as the Delors committee (Verdun 1999) or the Eurogroup (Puetter 2006), and externally, as in Brussels' think tanks (Coman 2019) or groups of academic economists (Flickenschild and Afonso 2018). Despite the recent backlash against the outsized influence of experts, their influence has not waned.…”

Section: Emu Research As the Study Of Unelected Power?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following this approach, Ban and Patenaude (2019: 13) argue that the IMF revised its fiscal policy stance considerably more than the conservative ECB and demonstrate that the two institutions 'tapped into relatively distinct pools of expertise and enrolled different networks of experts'. Flickenschild and Afonso's (2018) comparative study of networks of economic policy advice in the US Council of Economic Advisors and Germany's Sachverständigenrat also makes use of social network analysis, as does Seabrooke and Tsingou's (2014) analysis of professional knowledge in expert groups drafting proposals for economic reform. Like speech data, the official publications these studies use are freely available, making the raw data easy to access and replication possible.…”

Section: Novel Strategies To Measure Policymakers' Ideas and Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Researching Technocracy: Actor-Centred Methodologies and Empirical Strategies for Studying EU Economic Governance in Hard Times

Schulz¹

2019

JCER

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The Euro's problem-ridden second decade has made crisis management and economic reform across the European Union (EU) the priority of high politics. Despite the prominence of high-level intergovernmental summits, however, many studies identify EU policymaking elites as influential or even causal factors determining the EU's crisis response. This commentary therefore reviews the recent literature on EU economic governance which emphasises the role of supranational actors. The focus is on the methodologies and empirical strategies that scholars employ to determine the independent effect of policymaking elites on outcomes. This commentary identifies a renewed interest in actor-centred methodologies as well as a continuing emphasis on process-tracing approaches, primarily based on elite interviewing and document analysis. Finally, it discusses the potential of novel approaches relying on other sources of data such as policymakers' biographies, their speeches, or publication and citation patterns.

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Networks of economic policy expertise in Germany and the United States in the wake of the Great Recession

Cited by 16 publications

References 31 publications

Are Policy Analogies Persuasive? The Household Budget Analogy and Public Support for Austerity

Are Policy Analogies Persuasive? The Household Budget Analogy and Public Support for Austerity

Paradigms and policies: the state of economics in the German-speaking countries

Researching Technocracy: Actor-Centred Methodologies and Empirical Strategies for Studying EU Economic Governance in Hard Times

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