Browsing Working Papers (DBP) by Author "Seabrooke, Leonard"
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Seabrooke, Leonard; Hobson, John (, 2006)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Our everyday actions have important consequences for the constitution and transformation of the local, national, regional and global contexts. How, what, and with whom we spend, save, invest, buy and produce in our ordinary lives shapes markets and how states choose to intervene in them. The political, economic, and social networks with which we associate ourselves provide us not only with meaning about how we think economic policy is made, but also constitute vehicles for how economic policy, both at home and abroad, should be made. And while elite actors in politics and economics obviously have more direct influence, this should not obscure the point that peripheral actors can challenge the legitimacy of how power is exercised. Nor should it obscure the point that such actors have a good deal more agency in terms of determining their own life experiences as well as those of others through their everyday actions than is commonly recognised. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7912 Files in this item: 1
WP CBP 2006-26.pdf (156.3Kb) -
Policy Change in the Bank for International SettlementsSeabrooke, Leonard (København, 2005)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is the premiere international institution for the regulation of the world’s financial system. Originally established to handle German reparations payments, the BIS’s contemporary role is to provide global standards for prudential bank regulation and to facilitate information sharing among a range of state and non-state actors. While privately incorporated and underwritten by its member central banks, the BIS is fundamentally a service provider with quasi-non-governmental organization, ‘quango’, status. This paper traces the evolution of this unique international quango, stressing the development of the Basle Accords of 1988 and 2004, and how the BIS uses informal and formal networks of elite policymakers to create a normative consensus that compensates for its lack of formal enforcement mechanisms. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7370 Files in this item: 1
intl_quango_policy_change11.pdf (100.5Kb) -
Three Fevers and Two Tonics from Historical SociologySeabrooke, Leonard (København, 2006)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Much of the literature in political economy seeks to capture an essential insight into the evolution of political and economic systems to provide a foundation for policy advice. This article suggests that attempts to nut out the kernels of change often restrict rather than expand policy imagination. Three "fevers" are identified as involved in the narrowing of policy imagination and two "tonics" are offered to widen it. The three fevers are: 1. viewing the present as natural; 2. seeing history as overtly path dependent; and 3. viewing history as driven by "Great Men". These fevers limit our capacity to see political, social, and economic changes that do not conform to conventional theories, as well as distorting our understanding of how the contemporary world works. What policymakers want, more than prediction or recitation of conventional theories, is context to understand how policy can be implemented. Historical sociology provides a way to generate information about contextual constellations through two "tonics": intentional rationality and social mechanisms. With the assistance of these tonics, historical sociology widens political economy's policy imagination. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7327 Files in this item: 1
wp36_historical_sociology_ls.pdf (103.8Kb) -
The International Monetary Fund and Policy Reform Surveillance in Small Open EconomiesSeabrooke, Leonard; Broome, André (København, 2006)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The International Monetary Fund spends most of its time monitoring its member states' economic performance and advising on institutional change. While much of the literature sees the Fund as a policy enforcer in "emerging market" and "frontier" economies, little attention has been paid to exploring the Fund’s bilateral surveillance of its Western member states. This article proposes that "seeing like the IMF" provides a dynamic view of how the Fund frames its advice for institutional change. It does so through "associational templates" that do not blindly promote institutional convergence, but appeal for change on the basis of like-characteristics among economies. Many Western states, particularly small open economies, consider the Fund's advice as important not only for technical know-how, but because Fund assessments are significant to international and domestic political audiences. This article traces the Fund's advice on taxation and monetary reform to two coordinated market economies, Denmark and Sweden, and two liberal market economies, Australia and New Zealand from 1975 to 2004. It maps how the Fund advocated "policy revolutions" and "policy recombinations" during this period, advice that coincided with important institutional changes within these small open economies. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7323 Files in this item: 1
wp37_imf_denmark_ls.pdf (203.9Kb) -
Seabrooke, Leonard (København, 2005)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Who drives domestic institutional change in the face of international economic crisis? For rationalists the answer is powerful self-interested actors who struggle for material gains during an exogenously generated crisis. For economic constructivists it is ideational entrepreneurs who use ideas as weapons to establish paths for institutional change during crisis-driven uncertainty. Both approaches are elite-centric and conceive legitimacy as established by command or proclamation. This article establishes why domestic institutional change in response to international economic constraints must be legitimated by non-elites and how their everyday actions alter policy paths established in crisis. This is illustrated by re-examining a case frequently associated with punctuated equilibrium theories of crisis and institutional change: interwar Britain. In contrast to conventional explanations, I argue that the "legitimacy gap" between elite and broader public understandings about how the economy should work informed institutional experimentation during the 1920s and 1930s and fertilized the "Keynesian Revolution" of the 1940s. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7381 Files in this item: 1
legitimacy_gaps_british_eco_no14.pdf (211.7Kb) -
Seabrooke, Leonard (København, 2008)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Quasi-public institutions are significant but unsung players in the contemporary international financial order. What can be understood as quasi-public institutions (QPIs) have been created by states or private associations to provide a means of mediating private capital with public value, typically attracting domestic and international investment in order to foster and further a domestic agenda that has strong support from the broader population. As such they fit awkwardly with common perceptions of the international political economy as dominated institutions that reflect either state or market interests. QPIs do both and have emerged as institutional responses to domestic crises that then go on to have a role in shaping the world economy. QPIs that issue collaterized securities from mortgage credit, be they public or private in origin, reflect this institutional form given that their purpose is to bring together private capital and public value. This purpose also makes QPIs sensitive to everyday politics, given that they were created to reflect a broad social purpose rather than only elite interests. This article discusses the development of QPIs for mortgage bonds in a liberal market economy, the U.S., and a coordinated market economy, Denmark. I suggest that QPIs’ values have been challenged by de-regulatory and re-regulatory trends in recent decades. I suggest that QPIs call upon us to question how we identify actors in the international financial order as either public or private, and the importance of everyday politics in fostering institutional innovations that have significant knock-on effects for the world economy. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7333 Files in this item: 1
wp cbp 2008-43.pdf (196.9Kb) -
Seabrooke, Leonard (København, 2006)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998 the International Monetary Fund (the Fund) has been embroiled in an international crisis of legitimacy. Assertions of a crisis are premised on the notions that the Fund’s voting system is unfair, and that the Fund enforces homogenous policies onto borrowing member states and that loan programs tend to fail. Seen this way, poor institutional and policy design has led to a loss of legitimacy. But institutionalised inequalities or policy failure is not in itself sufficient to constitute an international crisis of legitimacy. This article provides a conceptually-driven discussion of the sources of the Fund’s international crisis of legitimacy by investigating how its formal "foreground" institutional relations with its member states have become strained, and how informal "background" political and economic relationships are expanding in a way that the Fund will find difficult to re-legitimate. The difference between the Fund's claims to legitimacy and how its member states, especially borrowers, act has led to the creation of a "legitimacy gap" that is difficult to close. However, identifying the sources of the Fund's international crisis of legitimacy allows us to explore what avenues are available to resolve the crisis. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7321 Files in this item: 1
wp35_imf_ls.pdf (172.3Kb) -
Standards of Civilization in the Development of International Financial OrdersSeabrooke, Leonard (København, 2005)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The use of a ‘standard of civilization’, a preferred form of socio-political organization, in global capital markets presents both constraints and opportunities for creditors and borrowers. When imposed, civilizing standards may change how a borrower would prefer to conduct their affairs. Creditors, after all, do not have the time and money to check every little detail and want clear performance benchmarks in economic life. At the same time, borrowers may present themselves as conforming to a civilizing standard to access capital and give themselves a greater capacity to conduct their own affairs. As long as they stay within the parameters of legitimate financial practice to signal institutional isomorphism, the ‘groove’, creditors may well allow borrowers room for change in self-determined ways. This paper maps out the historical and conceptual terrain concerning civilizing ideas about the legitimacy of financial practices within global capital markets, and investigates relationships between Western ‘civilizers’ and Emerging Market Economies during the last two periods of financial globalization, the late-nineteenth/ early-twentieth centuries and the late-twentieth century. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7322 Files in this item: 1
room_to_groove_13.pdf (110.1Kb) -
A Survey of the FieldSeabrooke, Leonard (København, 2006)[More information][Less information]
Now showing items 1-9 of 9