In addition to introducing and contextualizing the four other contributions to this symposium, this article makes three arguments. Firstly, the Icelandic case has shown up severe weaknesses in the internal market for financial services, including liquidity risk regulation and intergovernmental conflict resolution mechanisms. Echoing Scharpf's analysis of EU decision making, a deep asymmetry has been revealed: It was much easier to grant actors access to each other's domestic markets than to create a pan-European financial regulation creating a clear division of responsibilities and the ability to pool resources and share burdens. The second argument is that political economy has developed a supply-side bias. This has decreased attention to the mechanisms that inject instability into economic performance at the macro level and distribute risk and instability at the level of households and firms. The third point made is that while spectacular boom and bust cycles (reasonably) strengthen the case for less rationalistic micro foundations in the study of economic behaviour, this also entails the risk of losing sight of how perfectly rational (but immoral) financial actors take advantage of their less savvy counterparties – be they creditors, shareholders or taxpayers. The article concludes that financial stability is ultimately about governance and therefore about power.

Iceland's boom and bust replicate in miniature the causes, development and trajectory of the absolutely larger but proportionately smaller American boom and bust, except for Iceland's costly lack of a reserve currency and its banks’ preference not just for speculating in but also overpaying for shaky assets. In the aggregate, both the US and Icelandic economies sold short-term, passive, and liquid assets to the world, consumed part of that borrowing, and reinvested outward in fixed, long-term and active investments. The key differences between Icelandic and US banks are that Iceland's banks made their titanic gambles without the benefit of an international reserve currency. The United States survived its catastrophe and continues to have access to global credit markets without much penalty because the dollar is the international reserve currency. By contrast, Iceland has mortgaged its economy and economic independence for decades to bail out banks that had overpaid for dodgy assets.

This article seeks to understand the 2008 economic crisis in Iceland in light of the ‘animal spirits’ framework as pioneered in the 2009 book by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller. Rooted in a Keynesian perspective it analyses the micro-foundations of a boom and bust sequence. It demonstrates how human attributes such as confidence, reliance on stories and bad faith can help explain the decisions taken in Iceland in the time leading up to the crisis. The combination of high levels of confidence and a new era story spurred a development that morphed into a mania. Actions based on bad faith also contributed as they gave the impression of success even though, in the long run, they undermined the whole system.

This article looks beyond economic explanations of the financial crisis in Iceland, and focuses on the political preconditions for the crisis. The argument is that liberalization of the economy, privatization of the banking sector and lax regulation, together with looting strategies from investors, explain both the rise and fall of the financial sector in Iceland. By examining the historic development of the Icelandic financial sector from 1991 until 2008, I show how fundamental changes, through liberalization and Europeanization, in the economic system made the crisis possible. Data have been collected from official government documents, newspapers, research papers and published reports.

The article, written from a post-financial crisis vantage point, applies Katzenstein's democratic corporatist model to the case of Iceland, and asks if it overlooks an essential message from theory, namely that small states need an external protector in order to survive, economically and politically. The article claims that the model convincingly made the case for how small states can buffer from within but fails to grasp their need for external shelter to cope with risk. In a financialised world economy, small states need economic and political shelter in order to prevent risk from spiralling out of control and they need support in order to clean up after a crisis.

Doing justice to the often-ridiculed medieval catechism, this article identifies individual-level barriers to an efficient publication strategy in political science and beyond. I argue that becoming a successful and innovative academic writer needs a clear understanding of the (unholy) trinity between authors, reviewers and editors. Based on the analysis of the publication market, I introduce the ‘seven deadly sins of academic writing’ and conclude with uncle G.'s official list of publication virtues that promise increasing research productivity.

Constitutional courts play an increasing role in policymaking and the concepts of comparative politics. Traditionally, research has focused on the Judicialization hypothesis for European courts. This article argues that there is a major research gap regarding justices’ preferences, intra- and inter-institutional rules and that it is necessary to move beyond the Judicialization hypothesis to integrate courts in concepts of comparative politics. It outlines four theoretical and methodological challenges for future research on constitutional courts.

The financial crisis has generated contrasting policy responses to the financial crisis in the EU and US, the significance of which is discussed by the contributors to this Debate. In the US, the regulatory response involves a partial reversal (although too limited for its critics) of deregulation in the 1980s–1990s. In the EU, the transformation of a banking crisis into a sovereign debt crisis has led to a major shift in political and economic management, including a reinforcement of regulatory capacity and a potentially substantial shift towards ‘economic government’ in the eurozone.

Regional governance systems may resolve the dilemmas of global financial integration, and the Eurozone is the most advanced attempt to do so. The Euroland sovereign debt crisis is a test of this proposition but the outcome finds the EU wanting. The first section places EMU in the broader context of financial liberalisation. The next section shows that we have long known that financial liberalisation is associated with financial instability, demanding robust governance. The subsequent section examines the reaction to the Eurozone crisis, and argues that the lessons available were poorly learned. Although the EU and ECB revealed leadership and crisis management capacity in the financial market phase, the sovereign debt phase of the crisis was less successfully handled, producing conflict among Eurozone members. As a result the Eurozone hangs in the balance.

One puzzle that the crises of the past three years have thrown up is why the financial crisis of the period 2008–09 and the sovereign debt crisis of 2010 had such a different political-institutional fall-out on the Euro area. In both, governments were essentially trying to avert a banking collapse. The Euro area passed the stress test of the financial crisis in the period 2008–09 surprisingly well, especially when compared with the US. By contrast, the turmoil in peripheral countries’ bond markets since late 2009 required the suspension of constitutive principles of economic governance and was a disaster for European political integration. This paper tries to offer an explanation.

The financial crisis increased the importance of the member states at the expense of European Union (EU) rules on the single market and Economic and Monetary Union. The commission allowed exceptions that could become lasting if the economic downturn persists. At the same time, the EU has supported stronger financial market regulation, but not in corporate governance, where the member states retain reserved powers. The EU only gets and keeps institutions that the member states support.

US government authorities permitted extensive financial sector de-regulation in the two decades prior to the 2007–2008 financial crisis. The last step in this de-regulatory trend was the switch to risk-weighted captial adequacy from fixed leverage ratios for US investment banks in 2004. Combined with a highly decentralised government regulatory structure that is lauded for the regulatory competition it allows, this de-regulation created considerable scope for regulatory arbitrage. Political compromise de-railed several important reform initiatives in the wake of the crisis. The reform failed to consolidate US regulatory institutions in any material way, backed away from original intentions to mitigate the ‘too big to fail’ problem and limit banks’ investment activities, and left the clean up of the mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for further study. The greatest change came in the reform of consumer protection, derivatives trading and macro-prudential oversight.

It has been suggested that interaction in online learning programmes promotes student-centred learning, encourages wider student participation, and produces more in-depth and reasoned discussions than traditional face-to-face programmes (Karayan and Crowe (1997) and Smith and Hardaker (2000) cited in Davies and Graff (2005: 1)). In this article, the participation rates and usage patterns by undergraduate political science students of online discussion forums are examined. The study is guided by a number of questions: (1) Are students willing to participate in online discussion forums? (2) Do students enjoy participating in such forums? (3) What discourages a student from participating in online discussion forums? (4) Is there a link between participation in discussion forums and grade performances in coursework? and (5) Does class size have an impact on forum participation rates? The study focuses on two groups of students studying introductory Irish politics courses in University College Cork, Ireland. The article considers student feedback on the use of online discussion forums, compares the level of participation with course grades, and finally presents an account of the author's reflections on the use of online discussion forums in teaching.

It has become the new truth of our age that the western world we have known is fast losing its pre-eminence to be replaced by a new international system shaped by China and increasingly determined by the economic rise of Asia. This at least is how many economists, historians and students of world politics are now viewing the future of the larger international system. This essay does not dispute some self-evident economic facts nor assume that the world will look the same in 50 years time as it does now. It does, however, question the idea that there is a power shift in the making and that the West and the United States are in steep decline. The world has a long way to go before we begin to live in a ‘post-western’ world.