Waltraud Schelkle
Biographic Data
| ID | 300062 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Waltraud Schelkle |
| GIVEN NAMES | Waltraud |
| FAMILY NAME | Schelkle |
| SIGNATURE | SCHELKLE W |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4127-107X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 297 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Gouvernabilité, inégalités et État-providence
Insécurité économique et inégalités complexifient la gouvernance des sociétés politiques et celle du système international. La substitution des dépenses de sécurité aux engagements sociaux de l’État-providence n’a donc pas de sens sur le long terme. Il faut plutôt orienter cet État-providence vers une protection renforçant la capacité de production, surtout en un temps où les modalités de production risquent d’être bouleversées par l’irruption de…
The Curse of the Beauty Spot: Governing the Commons of Tourist Destinations
Tourism is a service industry with a self‐destructive tendency. The more attractive the destination, the more overrun it becomes by visitors, degrading its attractiveness. This is a variant of the tragedy of the commons. The late Elinor Ostrom showed that tragedy is not inevitable. She and her collaborators studied how communities around the world manage to use common goods sustainably. We use the insights from her work to answer two questions. F…
Change against the odds: Crisis policy feedback in a politicised EU
Published online: 16 January 2026
Free to move, bound to be exploited? The political economy of gender inequality in EU care migration
The emerging system of re-insurance in the EU: Beyond Negative and Positive Integration
Beyond the North–South divide: Transnational coalitions in EU reforms
The literature on fifteen years of European crises leaves the reader with a puzzle. Prominent accounts of the longest crisis - that of the euro area (EA) - assert that the EA is deeply divided between North and South, with Central Eastern European (CEE) member states being ignored. This makes it hard to explain how the union has managed to reform since 2008 and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Scholars have started to talk of transnationa…
Money Makes the World Go Round: How Much Difference Do Recovery and Resilience Plans Make to EU Reform Governance
The Next Generation EU (NGEU) package transformed European economic governance. This article examines the implications of this change in terms of EU polity formation and in terms of social policy content. It asks whether the temporary availability of large funds increases the leverage of the Commission in the European Semester and how this innovation affects sensitive policies. In the tradition of Stein Rokkan, the article advances a conception o…
Brexit – the EU membership crisis that wasn’t
This introduction to the special issue recalls the alarm raised in EU capitals and Brussels after the UK's in-out referendum delivered a Leave vote in June 2016. The fear was of a domino effect and the further fragmentation of an already divided EU. Seven years later, it is clear that there was rapid attrition of Eurosceptic triumphalism, and the EU-27 showed remarkable unity. This required a sustained collective effort to contain a membership cr…
Maintaining the EU’s compound polity during the long crisis decade
The EU is still fragile after its long decade of crises since 2008, and its durability remains an open question. New capacities were created during this time. But it is not clear how robust they are and whether developing them further will encounter insurmountable obstacles, including resentment by citizens. Over time, tensions and disagreements unleashed three foundational conflicts: conflicts over sovereignty (who decides), solidarity (who gets…
Who is afraid of emergency politics? Public opinion on European crisis management during Covid-19
After a decade of crisis management, the democratic implications of emergency modes of governance in the European Union (EU) are under the spotlight. The prevailing analysis is critical. Scholars point to an emergent, distinctly European trend of transnational crisis exploitation where elite appeals to exceptional pressures serve asymmetric power and influence, overriding democratic norms and potentially fuelling Eurosceptic backlash. However, th…
The strength of a weak centre: Pandemic politics in the European Union and the United States
The European Union presents a puzzle to political systems scholars: how can a developing polity, with all its attendant functional weaknesses, be rendered politically stable even through moments of a policy crisis? Building on insights from the literature on fiscal federalism, this article challenges much conventional wisdom on Europe’s incompleteness. This is based on the corollary of Jonathan Rodden’s concept of Hamilton’s Paradox : whereas a s…
What difference does the framing of a crisis make to European Union solidarity
Does the framing of crises shape public support for inter-state solidarity? We focus on three dimensions that have been salient in the characterisation of European Union crises and may affect public support for solidarity more generally: (a) how country-specific or common a crisis is; (b) whether policymakers are seen as responsible for the crisis or not; and (c) how existential or manageable the threat posed by a crisis appears. We employ a pre-…
Buying time for democracies? European Union emergency politics in the time of Covid-19
Published online: 18 May 2021
Fiscal Integration in an Experimental Union: How Path‐Breaking Was the EU's Response to the Covid‐19 Pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic could not have started worse for the EU (Herszenhorn and Wheaton, 2020). In late February 2020, Italy requested supplies of medical equipment from other member states under the EU's crisis response programme, the Civil Protection Mechanism. The Commission duly escalated it to highest alert. But there was no response. Alarmed by Italy's request, France engaged in a stock-taking exercise that did not allow trading. Czechia, Ge…
European political economy of finance and financialization
First published online: 20 August 2020
Independent or lonely? Central banking in crisis
The financial crisis has called our understanding of central bank independence (CBI) into question. Central banks were praised for bold interventions but simultaneously criticized for overreaching their mandates. Central bankers themselves have complained that they are ‘the only game in town’. We develop the second generation theory of CBI to understand how independence can turn into loneliness when a financial crisis calls for cooperation betwee…
EU Pension policy and financialisation: Purpose Without Power
This article asks whether the EU's pension policy promotes and achieves financialisation of old age security. Financialisation in this context means financial market integration that, in conjunction with pension reforms in member states, creates a market-based mode of governance for old age security. After an overview of how significant private pension funds have become in the EU, the article takes a most-likely case study of financialisation, th…
The Political Economy of Monetary Solidarity: Understanding the Euro Experiment
Creating the European monetary union between diverse and unequal nation states is one of the biggest social experiments in history. This book offers an explanation of how the euro experiment came about and was sustained despite a severe crisis. A comparison with the US dollar area, another diverse monetary union, shows illuminating parallels. The euro experiment can be understood as risk sharing through a currency that is issued by a supranationa…
Listening to the Experts on European Monetary Integration: Comment on Noah Carl
Introduction: Up for Grabs? Key Issues in the Negotiations about Britain's Membership in the EU
Financial Centre and Monetary Outsider: How Precarious is the UK 's Position in the EU
The UK 's negotiating position in the area of ‘economic governance’ started from the assumption that there is a deep dividing line between insiders and outsiders of the ‘euro zone’. To protect the outsiders, the UK government did not ask for a veto, but for a safeguard mechanism that can postpone a decision in the euro area. This is exactly what David Cameron achieved in the negotiations with Council President Tusk. This article explains why the …
At Cross-purposes: Commercial versus Technocratic Governance of Sovereign Debt in the EU
The governance of EMU was premised on the idea that market discipline, informed by fiscal surveillance, supports the building of a hard currency union. Theory would lead us to expect that the international–commercial and the supranational–technocratic assessments of sovereign debt are fairly aligned. But they were not. We show that credit rating agencies and Eurostat have rather different assessments of what certain policies mean for sovereign de…
What difference does Euro membership make to stabilization? The political economy of international monetary systems revisited
For many political economists, the loss of monetary sovereignty is the major reason why the Southern periphery fared so badly in the Euro area crisis. Monetary sovereignty here means the ability of the central bank to devalue the exchange rate or to buy government debt by printing the domestic currency. We explore this diagnosis by comparing three countries – Hungary, Latvia and Greece – that received considerable amounts of external assistance u…
Collapsing Worlds and Varieties of Welfare Capitalism: In Search of a New Political Economy of Welfare
A Crisis of What? Mortgage Credit Markets and the Social Policy of Promoting Homeownership in the United States and in Europe
The crisis of 2007-09 was prefigured by bubbles in the housing and mortgage credit markets of major Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. A comparison of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France reveals that, contrary to popular perception, the two European countries had a bigger housing price bubble, more volatility, and a more short-termist mortgage market. Yet, the fallout of the crisis—in terms of o…
Maintaining the EU’s compound polity during the long crisis decade
The EU is still fragile after its long decade of crises since 2008, and its durability remains an open question. New capacities were created during this time. But it is not clear how robust they are and whether developing them further will encounter insurmountable obstacles, including resentment by citizens. Over time, tensions and disagreements unleashed three foundational conflicts: conflicts over sovereignty (who decides), solidarity (who gets…
Buying time for democracies? European Union emergency politics in the time of Covid-19
Published online: 18 May 2021
Fiscal Integration in an Experimental Union: How Path‐Breaking Was the EU's Response to the Covid‐19 Pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic could not have started worse for the EU (Herszenhorn and Wheaton, 2020). In late February 2020, Italy requested supplies of medical equipment from other member states under the EU's crisis response programme, the Civil Protection Mechanism. The Commission duly escalated it to highest alert. But there was no response. Alarmed by Italy's request, France engaged in a stock-taking exercise that did not allow trading. Czechia, Ge…
A Crisis of What? Mortgage Credit Markets and the Social Policy of Promoting Homeownership in the United States and in Europe
The crisis of 2007-09 was prefigured by bubbles in the housing and mortgage credit markets of major Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. A comparison of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France reveals that, contrary to popular perception, the two European countries had a bigger housing price bubble, more volatility, and a more short-termist mortgage market. Yet, the fallout of the crisis—in terms of o…
Independent or lonely? Central banking in crisis
The financial crisis has called our understanding of central bank independence (CBI) into question. Central banks were praised for bold interventions but simultaneously criticized for overreaching their mandates. Central bankers themselves have complained that they are ‘the only game in town’. We develop the second generation theory of CBI to understand how independence can turn into loneliness when a financial crisis calls for cooperation betwee…
What difference does Euro membership make to stabilization? The political economy of international monetary systems revisited
For many political economists, the loss of monetary sovereignty is the major reason why the Southern periphery fared so badly in the Euro area crisis. Monetary sovereignty here means the ability of the central bank to devalue the exchange rate or to buy government debt by printing the domestic currency. We explore this diagnosis by comparing three countries – Hungary, Latvia and Greece – that received considerable amounts of external assistance u…
In the Spotlight of Crisis: How Social Policies Create, Correct, and Compensate Financial Markets
This special issue of Politics & Society explores the relationship between social policy and financial markets, which was thrown into sharp relief by the financial crisis of 2007-09. The research asks how particular social policies underpin and even create financial markets, specifically mass markets for consumer finance, mortgages, and pensions
The Contentious Creation of the Regulatory State in Fiscal Surveillance
This paper analyses how the EU regulatory state expands into fiscal surveillance and what conflicts arise in the process. That the EU should have gone down the route of regulating budgets is puzzling. In Majone's original concept, the regulatory state is meant not to interfere with member states' budgetary redistributive policies. Yet the revision of the Pact strengthened the regulatory content of fiscal surveillance by reformulating the policy p…
Money Makes the World Go Round: How Much Difference Do Recovery and Resilience Plans Make to EU Reform Governance
The Next Generation EU (NGEU) package transformed European economic governance. This article examines the implications of this change in terms of EU polity formation and in terms of social policy content. It asks whether the temporary availability of large funds increases the leverage of the Commission in the European Semester and how this innovation affects sensitive policies. In the tradition of Stein Rokkan, the article advances a conception o…
The Theory and Practice of Economic Governance in EMU Revisited: What Have we Learnt About Commitment and Credibility
This special issue asks commentators who made seminal contributions to our understanding of economic governance to revisit their analyses. This introductory article discusses the example of a major contribution, namely the ‘advantage of tying one's hands' (Giavazzi and Pagano, 1988), relating it to the other contributions along the way
The strength of a weak centre: Pandemic politics in the European Union and the United States
The European Union presents a puzzle to political systems scholars: how can a developing polity, with all its attendant functional weaknesses, be rendered politically stable even through moments of a policy crisis? Building on insights from the literature on fiscal federalism, this article challenges much conventional wisdom on Europe’s incompleteness. This is based on the corollary of Jonathan Rodden’s concept of Hamilton’s Paradox : whereas a s…
What difference does the framing of a crisis make to European Union solidarity
Does the framing of crises shape public support for inter-state solidarity? We focus on three dimensions that have been salient in the characterisation of European Union crises and may affect public support for solidarity more generally: (a) how country-specific or common a crisis is; (b) whether policymakers are seen as responsible for the crisis or not; and (c) how existential or manageable the threat posed by a crisis appears. We employ a pre-…
European political economy of finance and financialization
First published online: 20 August 2020
The Politics of Conflict Management in EU Regulation
This article examines how the conflicts latent in EU regulation are managed. First, it looks at how policy issues are framed as positive-sum games, party-political arenas avoided and consensual problem-solving methods of policy-making promoted. Then it addresses the puzzle of the robustness of regulatory conflict management. If challenged in its regulatory endeavour, the EU tends to respond with more regulation. Finally, the article outlines the …
The Political Economy of Fiscal Policy Co-ordination in EMU: From Disciplinarian Device to Insurance Arrangement
The fiscal policy framework of EMU and possible reforms of the Stability and Growth Pact have elicited much debate. The pact has been predicated on a conception of it as a device to discipline Member States. This gives rise to a paradox in which the credibility of policy-makers it is supposed to enhance is undermined. The article puts forward an alternative conception of policy co-ordination — collective insurance — designed to enhance the effect…
EU Pension policy and financialisation: Purpose Without Power
This article asks whether the EU's pension policy promotes and achieves financialisation of old age security. Financialisation in this context means financial market integration that, in conjunction with pension reforms in member states, creates a market-based mode of governance for old age security. After an overview of how significant private pension funds have become in the EU, the article takes a most-likely case study of financialisation, th…
Financial Centre and Monetary Outsider: How Precarious is the UK 's Position in the EU
The UK 's negotiating position in the area of ‘economic governance’ started from the assumption that there is a deep dividing line between insiders and outsiders of the ‘euro zone’. To protect the outsiders, the UK government did not ask for a veto, but for a safeguard mechanism that can postpone a decision in the euro area. This is exactly what David Cameron achieved in the negotiations with Council President Tusk. This article explains why the …
Brexit – the EU membership crisis that wasn’t
This introduction to the special issue recalls the alarm raised in EU capitals and Brussels after the UK's in-out referendum delivered a Leave vote in June 2016. The fear was of a domino effect and the further fragmentation of an already divided EU. Seven years later, it is clear that there was rapid attrition of Eurosceptic triumphalism, and the EU-27 showed remarkable unity. This required a sustained collective effort to contain a membership cr…
Bringing Macroeconomics Back into the Political Economy of Reform: The Lisbon Agenda and the ‘Fiscal Philosophy’ of EMU
The Lisbon Strategy supports reform of Member States' tax‐benefit systems while the ‘fiscal philosophy’ of the EMU postulates that governments should allow only automatic stabilizers, built into tax‐benefit systems, to smooth aggregate income. We ask whether these two pillars of EU economic governance are compatible. By exploring how structural reforms affect fiscal stabilization, we complement a political economy literature that asks whether fis…
Can Fiscal Policy Co‐ordination be Made to Work Effectively
The emerging system of re-insurance in the EU: Beyond Negative and Positive Integration
Beyond the North–South divide: Transnational coalitions in EU reforms
The literature on fifteen years of European crises leaves the reader with a puzzle. Prominent accounts of the longest crisis - that of the euro area (EA) - assert that the EA is deeply divided between North and South, with Central Eastern European (CEE) member states being ignored. This makes it hard to explain how the union has managed to reform since 2008 and especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Scholars have started to talk of transnationa…
Good governance in crisis or a good crisis for governance? A comparison of the EU and the US
Free to move, bound to be exploited? The political economy of gender inequality in EU care migration
Who is afraid of emergency politics? Public opinion on European crisis management during Covid-19
After a decade of crisis management, the democratic implications of emergency modes of governance in the European Union (EU) are under the spotlight. The prevailing analysis is critical. Scholars point to an emergent, distinctly European trend of transnational crisis exploitation where elite appeals to exceptional pressures serve asymmetric power and influence, overriding democratic norms and potentially fuelling Eurosceptic backlash. However, th…
EMU's second chance: Enlargement and the reform of fiscal policy co-ordination
The rules for fiscal policy co-ordination in EMU have been seriously challenged since 2002. The original Stability and Growth Pact was not so much geared towards co-ordinating as towards disciplining members' fiscal policies. Since the Pact failed, another approach is required. The Commission's reform proposals are likely to provide for more co-ordination and mutually stabilizing insurance. The prospect of EMU enlargement suggests further changes…
Can Fiscal Policy Co‐ordination be Made to Work Effectively
Constitution and Erosion of a Monetary Economy: Problems of India's Development since Independence
Ever since Shaw and McKinnon published their path-breaking works on financial development in 1973, there has been extensive research on the effects of monetary and financial policies on economic growth of developing countries. This book puts forward a new paradigm of monetary development theory along Keynesian lines. The approach is substantiated by providing a fresh perspective on India's economic development after Independence.
The Political Economy of Fiscal Policy Co-ordination in EMU: From Disciplinarian Device to Insurance Arrangement
The fiscal policy framework of EMU and possible reforms of the Stability and Growth Pact have elicited much debate. The pact has been predicated on a conception of it as a device to discipline Member States. This gives rise to a paradox in which the credibility of policy-makers it is supposed to enhance is undermined. The article puts forward an alternative conception of policy co-ordination — collective insurance — designed to enhance the effect…
The Theory and Practice of Economic Governance in EMU Revisited: What Have we Learnt About Commitment and Credibility
This special issue asks commentators who made seminal contributions to our understanding of economic governance to revisit their analyses. This introductory article discusses the example of a major contribution, namely the ‘advantage of tying one's hands' (Giavazzi and Pagano, 1988), relating it to the other contributions along the way
Bringing Macroeconomics Back into the Political Economy of Reform: The Lisbon Agenda and the ‘Fiscal Philosophy’ of EMU
The Lisbon Strategy supports reform of Member States' tax‐benefit systems while the ‘fiscal philosophy’ of the EMU postulates that governments should allow only automatic stabilizers, built into tax‐benefit systems, to smooth aggregate income. We ask whether these two pillars of EU economic governance are compatible. By exploring how structural reforms affect fiscal stabilization, we complement a political economy literature that asks whether fis…
The Contentious Creation of the Regulatory State in Fiscal Surveillance
This paper analyses how the EU regulatory state expands into fiscal surveillance and what conflicts arise in the process. That the EU should have gone down the route of regulating budgets is puzzling. In Majone's original concept, the regulatory state is meant not to interfere with member states' budgetary redistributive policies. Yet the revision of the Pact strengthened the regulatory content of fiscal surveillance by reformulating the policy p…
The Politics of Conflict Management in EU Regulation
This article examines how the conflicts latent in EU regulation are managed. First, it looks at how policy issues are framed as positive-sum games, party-political arenas avoided and consensual problem-solving methods of policy-making promoted. Then it addresses the puzzle of the robustness of regulatory conflict management. If challenged in its regulatory endeavour, the EU tends to respond with more regulation. Finally, the article outlines the …
Good governance in crisis or a good crisis for governance? A comparison of the EU and the US
A Tale of Two Crises: The Euro Area in 2008/09 and in 2010
One puzzle that the crises of the past three years have thrown up is why the financial crisis of the period 2008–09 and the sovereign debt crisis of 2010 had such a different political-institutional fall-out on the Euro area. In both, governments were essentially trying to avert a banking collapse. The Euro area passed the stress test of the financial crisis in the period 2008–09 surprisingly well, especially when compared with the US. By contras…
Collapsing Worlds and Varieties of Welfare Capitalism: In Search of a New Political Economy of Welfare
A Crisis of What? Mortgage Credit Markets and the Social Policy of Promoting Homeownership in the United States and in Europe
The crisis of 2007-09 was prefigured by bubbles in the housing and mortgage credit markets of major Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. A comparison of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France reveals that, contrary to popular perception, the two European countries had a bigger housing price bubble, more volatility, and a more short-termist mortgage market. Yet, the fallout of the crisis—in terms of o…
In the Spotlight of Crisis: How Social Policies Create, Correct, and Compensate Financial Markets
This special issue of Politics & Society explores the relationship between social policy and financial markets, which was thrown into sharp relief by the financial crisis of 2007-09. The research asks how particular social policies underpin and even create financial markets, specifically mass markets for consumer finance, mortgages, and pensions
What difference does Euro membership make to stabilization? The political economy of international monetary systems revisited
For many political economists, the loss of monetary sovereignty is the major reason why the Southern periphery fared so badly in the Euro area crisis. Monetary sovereignty here means the ability of the central bank to devalue the exchange rate or to buy government debt by printing the domestic currency. We explore this diagnosis by comparing three countries – Hungary, Latvia and Greece – that received considerable amounts of external assistance u…
At Cross-purposes: Commercial versus Technocratic Governance of Sovereign Debt in the EU
The governance of EMU was premised on the idea that market discipline, informed by fiscal surveillance, supports the building of a hard currency union. Theory would lead us to expect that the international–commercial and the supranational–technocratic assessments of sovereign debt are fairly aligned. But they were not. We show that credit rating agencies and Eurostat have rather different assessments of what certain policies mean for sovereign de…
Introduction: Up for Grabs? Key Issues in the Negotiations about Britain's Membership in the EU
Financial Centre and Monetary Outsider: How Precarious is the UK 's Position in the EU
The UK 's negotiating position in the area of ‘economic governance’ started from the assumption that there is a deep dividing line between insiders and outsiders of the ‘euro zone’. To protect the outsiders, the UK government did not ask for a veto, but for a safeguard mechanism that can postpone a decision in the euro area. This is exactly what David Cameron achieved in the negotiations with Council President Tusk. This article explains why the …
The Political Economy of Monetary Solidarity: Understanding the Euro Experiment
Creating the European monetary union between diverse and unequal nation states is one of the biggest social experiments in history. This book offers an explanation of how the euro experiment came about and was sustained despite a severe crisis. A comparison with the US dollar area, another diverse monetary union, shows illuminating parallels. The euro experiment can be understood as risk sharing through a currency that is issued by a supranationa…
Listening to the Experts on European Monetary Integration: Comment on Noah Carl
Independent or lonely? Central banking in crisis
The financial crisis has called our understanding of central bank independence (CBI) into question. Central banks were praised for bold interventions but simultaneously criticized for overreaching their mandates. Central bankers themselves have complained that they are ‘the only game in town’. We develop the second generation theory of CBI to understand how independence can turn into loneliness when a financial crisis calls for cooperation betwee…
EU Pension policy and financialisation: Purpose Without Power
This article asks whether the EU's pension policy promotes and achieves financialisation of old age security. Financialisation in this context means financial market integration that, in conjunction with pension reforms in member states, creates a market-based mode of governance for old age security. After an overview of how significant private pension funds have become in the EU, the article takes a most-likely case study of financialisation, th…
European political economy of finance and financialization
First published online: 20 August 2020
Buying time for democracies? European Union emergency politics in the time of Covid-19
Published online: 18 May 2021
Fiscal Integration in an Experimental Union: How Path‐Breaking Was the EU's Response to the Covid‐19 Pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic could not have started worse for the EU (Herszenhorn and Wheaton, 2020). In late February 2020, Italy requested supplies of medical equipment from other member states under the EU's crisis response programme, the Civil Protection Mechanism. The Commission duly escalated it to highest alert. But there was no response. Alarmed by Italy's request, France engaged in a stock-taking exercise that did not allow trading. Czechia, Ge…
Who is afraid of emergency politics? Public opinion on European crisis management during Covid-19
After a decade of crisis management, the democratic implications of emergency modes of governance in the European Union (EU) are under the spotlight. The prevailing analysis is critical. Scholars point to an emergent, distinctly European trend of transnational crisis exploitation where elite appeals to exceptional pressures serve asymmetric power and influence, overriding democratic norms and potentially fuelling Eurosceptic backlash. However, th…
Economics (30 works) · Political science (30 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (22 works) · Law (20 works) · European Union Policy and Governance (18 works) · European union (17 works) · Political economy (17 works) · Finance (12 works) · Fiscal Policies and Political Economy (12 works)