Perspectives on "The Politics of Bad Options" by Walter, Ray & Redeker

Session Submission Type: Virtual Author meet critics

Session Description

This Author-meets-critics session discusses the recently published book «The Politics of Bad Options: Why the Eurozone’s problems have been so hard to resolve» by Stefanie Walter, Ari Ray and Nils Redeker (2020, Oxford University Press). The session brings together a group of senior and junior scholars working on European political economy in order to critically discuss the book’s argument, evidence and contribution. It begins with a brief presentation and discussion of the book’s main argument that severe distributive conflicts made resolving the Eurozone crisis so difficult and that crisis politics can best be understood when all (often bad) policy options are considered. The session next focuses on what the book means for research going forward. For this purpose, two junior scholars will each present their dissertation research on Eurozone politics and will discuss how this research speaks to the argument and evidence in the book. The presentations will focus on why austerity became the dominant response to the eurozone crisis (Bremer) and on external enablers of the Eurozone’s current account surpluses (Polyak). The session will close by discussing how this body of research jointly moves our understanding of European political economy forward with regard to issues such as the debate about interests vs. ideas, fault lines in EU politics, and contemporary challenges to the EU such as Brexit or the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sub Unit

• Division 6: Political Economy

Chair

• Jeffry A. Frieden Harvard University

Presenters

• Stefanie Walter University of Zurich

• Nils Redeker The Hertie School

• Björn Kristen Bremer Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies

• Matthias Matthijs Johns Hopkins University

• Palma Polyak Scuola Normale Superiore

• Christina J. Schneider University of California, San Diego