Seminar 14

Date:             22 July, 2014

Time:            4 - 5.15pm

Venue:        Building 24, Copland, Room 1171, LJ Hume Centre

Speaker: Iain McMenamin is an Associate Professor of Politics at Dublin City University.  He is interested in most topics in comparative politics and has worked on East-Central Europe, business and politics, political communication, and political economy.  He is the author of If Money Talks, What Does It Say? Corruption and Business Financing of Political Parties (Oxford University Press) and many articles in journals such as World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly and the  European Journal of Political Research.

Paper Title:  Democratic Risk, the Great Recession, and the Euro Crisis

Paper Abstract:  This paper estimates the impact of elections on government bond interest rates.  We calculate the scale and nature of event-country and spillover electoral impacts in ten euro zone countries and a group of four placebo countries including Australia.  Our analysis produces three conclusions.  First, democratic risk is not limited to the euro zone.  The great recession has brought about a return to historical levels of democratic risk outside Europe too.  The euro zone is different because democratic risk is so difficult to manage in a single currency.  Second, spillover is often asymmetrically distributed.  Therefore, it can be an obstacle to, rather than an incentive for, international co-operation.  Third, within the euro zone, the domestic impact of elections is greatest in vulnerable countries but the greatest range of spillovers is associated with elections in strong countries. These conclusions have implications for the EU’s debt crisis management policy