Democracy in Times of Crisis: Power and Discourse in a Three-Level Game

While many studies have examined the content and effects of the reforms passed during the crisis in different countries (the 'what'), still very little is known about the process leading to their adoption (the 'how'). Moreover, two contradictory narratives co-exist in the scarce literature addressing this topic. On the one hand, scholars argue that governments have been forced to implement very specific reforms against their will, in return for bail-out loans (Ladi 2014) or after implicit blackmail by the ECB (Sacchi 2014). By contrast, other studies claim that the crisis empowered governments to pass reforms they wanted all along (Moury and Freire 2013). So which narrative is correct? Or, better: under which circumstances would one prevail? And which accountability issues do these processes raise?