An ‘Economics’ window on an interdisciplinary crisis

Abstract

The euro area crisis cannot be understood without combining insights from a variety of disciplines — economics and political science first and foremost. This introduction aims at explaining how the essays in this collection map onto a number of important debates in political science. We sketch four well-known areas for the political science community: the framework for multilevel governance, the role of ideas in policymaking, the interaction between power politics and distributive bargaining, and the challenge of popular legitimation. These critical themes in the current crisis are important areas of overlap in economic and political analysis. Hence, the aim of this introduction is to show how these themes emerge in the essays that follow.