Asymmetric Governance and the Transformation of Employment Relations in the Eurozone: The Contingent Influence of the Ideas of Policy-Makers

The governance of the Eurozone debt crisis has been characterised by the asymmetric distribution of the costs of adjustment, namely the imposition of austerity measures and the liberalisation of institutions of industrial relations in debtor countries that were awarded a bailout package coupled with the protection of banks from creditor countries. By presenting an ideational perspective, this article highlights the role of ideas in explaining these policy outcomes. The importance of ideas is contingent upon the manner in which they are framed. The process of framing enables policy-makers to build support for policies by presenting them in a manner that links an issue with a specific understanding of important economic and political developments. Equally, if not more important in the current context of the Eurozone debt crisis, the importance of ideas is also contingent upon their influence over the maintenance of extant institutional arrangements of Eurozone governance that distribute costs of adjustment in an asymmetrical manner. In particular, we illustrate the role of German Ordoliberalism in heightening the credibility of the threat of withholding financial assistance, in the event of non-compliance with strict conditionality criteria, in the current institutional architecture of Eurozone governance

The management of the Eurozone in crisis times: Actors, institutions and the case of bailout packages

The adjustment to the financial crisis was particularly brutal for Eurozone countries targeted by private bondholders. Financial assistance through the newly created Eurozone governance system was conditional on the implementation of austerity measures and the introduction of structural reforms in industrial relations (decentralization of collective bargaining and liberalization of employment protection). Our analysis focuses on the formation process and the structural features of Eurozone supranational institutions. Building from the insights of actor-centred institutionalism, we illustrate the importance of coalitions among some, but not all, important actors based on the overlapping of their non-monolithic preferences in the process of institutional innovation. The structural features of Eurozone institutions curtailed member states’ ability to effectively resist the imposition of internal devaluation policies. A contested outcome, these institutional features were secured by a specific coalition of important actors – most notably, the German government and the European Central Bank – based on their overlapping interests around internal devaluation policies

The matching problem within comparative welfare state research: How to bridge abstract theory and specific hypotheses

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Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements