TY - BOOK A1 - Woll, Cornelia T1 - The Power of Inaction: Bank Bailouts in Comparison N2 - Bank bailouts in the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the Great Recession brought into sharp relief the power that the global financial sector holds over national politics, and provoked widespread public outrage. In The Power of Inaction, Cornelia Woll details the varying relationships between financial institutions and national governments by comparing national bank rescue schemes in the United States and Europe. Woll starts with a broad overview of bank bailouts in more than twenty countries. Using extensive interviews conducted with bankers, lawmakers, and other key players, she then examines three pairs of countries where similar outcomes might be expected: the United States and United Kingdom, France and Germany, Ireland and Denmark. She finds, however, substantial variation within these pairs. In some cases the financial sector is intimately involved in the design of bailout packages; elsewhere it chooses to remain at arm's length. Such differences are often ascribed to one of two conditions: either the state is strong and can impose terms, or the state is weak and corrupted by industry lobbying. Woll presents a third option, where the inaction of the financial sector critically shapes the design of bailout packages in favor of the industry. She demonstrates that financial institutions were most powerful in those settings where they could avoid a joint response and force national policymakers to deal with banks on a piecemeal basis. The power to remain collectively inactive, she argues, has had important consequences for bailout arrangements and ultimately affected how the public and private sectors have shared the cost burden of these massive policy decisions. Y1 - 2014 SN - 978-0-8014-7115-5 PB - Cornell University Press ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Woll, Cornelia A1 - Jacquot, Sophie T1 - Usage of European Integration - Europeanisation from a Sociological Perspective JF - European Integration online Papers (EIoP) N2 - The effect of European integration on its member states constitutes the new research agenda within the study of European integration. Marked by the "the institutionalist turn" of Anglo-Saxon political sciences, the most dominant theories on europeanisation focus on structural arrangements. Institutional incompatibility between the European and the national level, so the hypothesis, creates pressures for change. Actors are often only considered as mediators of these pressures. Consequentially, few approaches try to explain adaptational change initiated by policy actors in the absence of institutional pressures. Using a political sociology approach, the central concern of this paper is to insist on the political discretion of national actors in translation of European requirements. We believe that understanding not only "adaptation to" but also "usage of" the process of European integration is important to understanding the transformation of European member states. By insisting on usage, we aim at analysing both the strategic interaction of rational actors with the European institutions and the more sociological effect of "usage" - as "daily practice" - on the interest and identities of the actors. Y1 - 2003 UR - https://ssrn.com/abstract=485983 N1 - Also translated and published as: “Implementarea conceptului de integrare europeana sau europenizarea din perspectiva sociologica,” Studii de securitate Vol. 2 No. 3, 2004. VL - 7 IS - 12 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Woll, Cornelia T1 - Offshore Finance and State Power. By Andrea Binder. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2023. 240p. JF - Perspectives on Politics Y1 - 2025 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S153759272510159X VL - 23 IS - 3 SP - 1171 EP - 1172 PB - Cambridge University Press (CUP) ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Woll, Cornelia T1 - Firm Interests: How Governments Shape Business Lobbying on Global Trade N2 - Firms are central to trade policy-making. Some analysts even suggest that they dictate policy on the basis of their material interests. Cornelia Woll counters these assumptions, arguing that firms do not always know what they want. To be sure, firms lobby hard to attain a desired policy once they have defined their goals. Yet material factors are insufficient to account for these preferences. The ways in which firms are embedded in political settings are much more decisive. Woll demonstrates her case by analyzing the surprising evolution of support from large firms for liberalization in telecommunications and international air transport in the United States and Europe. Within less than a decade, former monopolies with important home markets abandoned their earlier calls for subsidies and protectionism and joined competitive multinationals in the demand for global markets. By comparing the complex evolution of firm preferences across sectors and countries, Woll shows that firms may influence policy outcomes, but policies and politics in turn influence business demands. This is particularly true in the European Union, where the constraints of multilevel decision-making encourage firms to pay lip service to liberalization if they want to maintain good working relations with supranational officials. In the United States, firms adjust their sectoral demands to fit the government's agenda. In both contexts, the interaction between government and firm representatives affects not only the strategy but also the content of business lobbying on global trade. Y1 - 2008 SN - 9780801446092 PB - Cornell University Press ER - TY - EDBOOK A1 - Clift, Ben A1 - Woll, Cornelia ED - Clift, Ben ED - Woll, Cornelia T1 - Economic Patriotism in Open Economies N2 - The recent financial crisis has demonstrated that governments continuously seek to steer their economies rather than leaving them to free markets. Despite the ambitions of international economic cooperation, such interventionism is decidedly local. Some politicians even proudly evoke "economic patriotism" to justify their choices. This volume links such populism to a specific set of tensions the paradox of neo-liberal democracy and argues that the phenomenon is ubiquitous. The mandate of politicians is to defend the economic interests of their constituents under conditions where large parts of economic governance are no longer exclusively within their control. Economic patriotism is one possible reaction to this tension. As old-style industrial policy and interventionism gained a bad reputation, governments had to become creative to assure traditional economic policy objectives with new means. However, economic patriotism is more than just a fashionable word or a fig leaf for protectionism. This volume employs the term to signal two distinctions: the diversity of policy content and the multiplicity of territorial units it can refer to. Comparing economic interventionism across countries and sectors, it becomes clear that economic liberalism will always be accompanied by counter-movements that appeal to territorial images. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy. Y1 - 2012 SN - 9780415624749 N1 - Reprinted from special issue: “Economic Patriotism: Political Intervention in Open Economies,” Journal of European Public Policy, special issue, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2012 (with Ben Clift). PB - Taylor & Francis ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Emiliano, Grossman A1 - Woll, Cornelia T1 - Saving the Banks: The Political Economy of Bailouts JF - Comparative Political Studies N2 - How much leeway did governments have in designing bank bailouts and deciding on the height of intervention during the 2007-2009 financial crisis? By analyzing the variety of bailouts in Europe and North America, we will show that the strategies governments use to cope with the instability of financial markets does not depend on economic conditions alone. Rather, they take root in the institutional and political setting of each country and vary in particular according to the different types of business–government relations banks were able to entertain with public decision makers. Still, “crony capitalism” accounts overstate the role of bank lobbying. With four case studies of the Irish, Danish, British, and French bank bailout, we show that countries with close one-on-one relationships between policy makers and bank management tended to develop unbalanced bailout packages, while countries where banks negotiated collectively developed solutions with a greater burden-sharing from private institutions. Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414013488540 VL - 47 IS - 4 SP - 574 EP - 600 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Woll, Cornelia T1 - Bank Rescue Schemes in Continental Europe: The Power of Collective Inaction JF - Government and Opposition N2 - Comparing bank rescue schemes in France and Germany during the banking crisis of 2008–9, this article argues that collective inaction is a little-studied aspect in the exercise of power in business–government relations. Contrary to studies that focus on lobbying, structural power or the influence of beliefs, the comparison highlights that governments depend on contributions from the financial industry during crisis management. In the negotiations to design bank support schemes, some countries, such as France, succeeded in engaging their financial sector collectively. Such public–private burden-sharing arrangements alleviate the public budget and increase mutual surveillance between banks during government support. In other countries, such as Germany, a collectively organized industry response failed, which forced the government to design an entirely public support scheme. The German government reacted to this perceived imbalance by imposing tighter banking regulation to avoid a repetition of the impotence it experienced in 2008. Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2014.5 VL - 49 IS - 3 SP - 426 EP - 451 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Thatcher, Mark A1 - Woll, Cornelia ED - Fioretos, Orfeo ED - Falleti, Tulia G. ED - Sheingate, Adam T1 - Evolutionary Dynamics in Internal Market Regulation in the European Union T2 - The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism N2 - The chapter shows how European internal market regulation expanded and was transformed from a limited and often non-binding set of policies to an integrated and wide-ranging framework. Incremental but profound change was possible because critical junctures, in particular judgments by the European Court of Justice, allowed the European Commission and its allies to advance new policy proposals with new default positions. This affected the preferences of major member states, created new coalitions, and also led to the emergence of new actors. Feedback loops reinforced the orientation of previous agreements and created changes that most observers would have qualified as impossible three or four decades earlier. Y1 - 2016 SN - 9780199662814 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199662814.013.30 SP - 504 EP - 516 PB - Oxford University Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Woll, Cornelia T1 - Politics in the Interest of Capital: A Not-So-Organized Combat JF - Politics & Society N2 - In recent debates about inequality, many have pointed to the predominant position of the finance. This article highlights that structural power, not lobbying resources, are key to explaining variations across countries. It examines finance-government negotiations over national bank rescue schemes during the recent financial crisis. Given the structural power of finance, the variation in bank bailouts across countries cannot be explained by lobbying differences. Instead of observing organized interest intermediation, we can see that disorganization was crucial for the financial industry to get off the hook and let the government carry the burden of stabilizing the economy. Put differently, structural power is strongest when finance remains collectively inactive. In contrast to traditional accounts of the lobbying influence of finance, the comparison highlights that the lack of organization can have crucial redistributive consequences. Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329216655318 VL - 44 IS - 3 SP - 373 EP - 391 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Woll, Cornelia ED - King, Desmond ED - Le Galès, Patrick T1 - State Action in Financial Times T2 - Reconfiguring European States in Crisis N2 - The financial crisis revealed the vulnerability of states with financialized economies, but also the extraordinary measures they had recourse to in order to reign in market forces. This chapter argues that this paradox is based on another contradiction: the ambiguity of government–finance relations. While financial institutions are considered to be the culprits of the recent crisis, they were also necessary to support government action and enable a quick recovery. Undoing the ties between banks and states is thus not only a response to conflicts of interests. Uncoupling banks from states through European financial integration also contains risks for future crisis management. Y1 - 2017 SN - 9780198793373 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198793373.003.0010 SP - 201 EP - 214 PB - Oxford University Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - EDBOOK A1 - Jacquot, Sophie A1 - Woll, Cornelia ED - Jacquot, Sophie ED - Woll, Cornelia T1 - Les usages de l’Europe : acteurs et transformations européennes N2 - Comment s'impose l'Europe? Par sa production législative et politique uniquement ou également grâce aux divers usages qui en sont faits? Ce livre s'attache à analyser qui s'implique dans l'intégration européenne, comment et dans quels buts. En mettant en évidence le rôle des acteurs en tant que vecteurs de transformations et en développant la notion d'usages de l'Europe, ce travail collectif entend apporter une perspective supplémentaire à l'agenda des recherches sur l'européanisation et l'impact de l'intégration européenne. Y1 - 2004 SN - 9782747564991 PB - L’Harmattan CY - Paris ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Johnson, Juliet A1 - Mugge, Daniel A1 - Seabrooke, Leonard A1 - Woll, Cornelia A1 - Grabel, Ilene A1 - Gallagher, Kevin P. T1 - The future of international political economy: Introduction to the 20th anniversary issue of RIPE JF - Review of International Political Economy Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2013.835275 VL - 20 IS - 5 SP - 1009 EP - 1023 ER -