Ebook: Politics in the Age of Austerity

Introduction : politics in the age of austerity / Armin Schäfer and Wolfgang Streeck -- Public finance and the decline of state capacity in democratic capitalism / Wolfgang Streeck and Daniel Mertens -- Tax competition and fiscal democracy / Philipp Genschel and Peter Schwarz -- Governing as an engineering problem : the political economic of Swedish success / Sven Steinmo -- Monetary union, fiscal crisis and the disabling of democratic accountability / Fritz W. Scharpf -- Smaghi versus the parties : representative government and institutional constraints / Peter Mair -- Liberalization, inequality and democracy's discontent / Armin Schäfer -- Participatory inequality in the austerity state : a supply-side approach / Claus Offe -- From markets versus states to corporations versus civil society? / Colin Crouch -- The normalization of the right in post-security Europe / Mabel Berezin -- The crisis in context : democratic capitalism and its contradictions / Wolfgang Streeck.;In a world of increasing austerity measures, democratic politics comes under pressure. With the need to consolidate budgets and to accommodate financial markets, the responsiveness of governments to voters declines. However, democracy depends on choice. Citizens must be able to influence the course of government through elections and if a change in government cannot translate into different policies, democracy is incapacitated. Many mature democracies are approaching this situation as they confront fiscal crisis. For almost three decades, OECD countries have - in fi.