Political Aspects of Macroeconomic Policies and Growth Models

The Great Recession dragged macroeconomic policies from the technocratic realm of “quiet politics” into the electoral realm of “noisy politics”. Still, comparative political economy has not adequately studied the politics of macroeconomic policies in the twenty-first century. It lacks a clear understanding of how the distributive consequences of different macroeconomic policies translate into political struggles over power and policies. This research project thus studies the political conflicts behind macroeconomic policies and growth models. It assumes that the economy is not isolated from electoral competition in liberal democracies and that different macroeconomic policies can be politically contested. Therefore, the project analyses how economic interests are aggregated into political coalitions that rally around different economic policies. Specifically, it studies social and political conflicts over macroeconomic policies in the advanced economies and aims to answer three research questions: (1) To what extent are macroeconomic policies contested among voters? (2) How and why do different political actors support or oppose different macroeconomic policies? (3) How do these actors legitimize support for their preferred policies among voters?

Working papers:

• “The constrained politics of local public investments under cooperative federalism” (with Donato di Carlo and Leon Wansleben, under review)
  Pre-print version

Work in progress:

• “Public opinion towards growth strategies: Evidence from a new survey” (with Lucio Baccaro, Kostas Gemenis, and Erik Neimanns)
• “Covid Keynesianism and its trade-offs: Evidence from a survey experiment” (with Lucio Baccaro)
• “The impact of unconventional monetary policies on public opinion: A natural experiment on the ECB’s PEPP announcement” (with Lucio Baccaro)
• “When central banking becomes costly: The politics of unconventional monetary policies and its trade-offs” (with Jeffrey Chwieroth)
• “What should we do about debt? Understanding how people reason about fiscal stress and debt sustainability” (with Charlotte Cavaille, Catherine de Vries, and Lisanne de Blok
• “Party favoritism and local public investment: Quasi-experimental evidence from Germany”