European political economy of finance and financialization

Abstract

This special issue leverages the variation across Europe to expand on the conceptualisation of and the empirical knowledge about finance and financialization. As we will show, focussing on Europe can offer a richer understanding of the reach of financialization than the prevalent focus on the Anglo-American world, with surprising insights that may be of more general relevance to other world regions. More specifically, a focus on Europe allows new insights on the reach of financialization, central actors that brought it about, and the choices and trade-offs that have shaped the process.

Keywords:

• Banking
• European integration
• financialization
• financial crisis
• power
• public finances
• welfare state

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Deborah Mabbett (Birkbeck) for her substantive input and for improving our English. At an earlier stage, Geoffrey Underhill (Amsterdam) has been extremely helpful in organizing an ECPR Joint Session at which most of the articles were discussed. Finally, we thank our home institutions, the European Institute at LSE and the EUI, for financial support of an initial workshop.

Disclosure statement

The authors do not report any conflicts of interest and have not received any outside funding apart from the financial support acknowledged.

Notes

1 This is in line with the plea of van der Zwan (2014) to bring more agency into the study of financialization that owes a lot to economic sociology (Krippner 2005).

2 A reverse mortgage means that households receive a regular income on loan from a bank that is secured by a mortgage on their home. This can be a way for pensioners to liquidate their house that eventually becomes the property of the bank.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Waltraud Schelkle

Waltraud Schelkle is Professor in Political Economy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She has widely published on European monetary integration. Her recent monograph on The political economy of monetary solidarity. Understanding the euro experiment has been published in 2017 by Oxford University Press. ORCID

Dorothee Bohle

Dorothee Bohle is Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute, Florence. She has widely published on the comparative political economy of East Central Europe. Her book Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery (Cornell University Press 2012, with Béla Greskovits) is the winner of the 2013 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.