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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
‘Legitimacy Gaps In The World Economy: Explaining The Sources Of The Imf’S Legitimacy Crisis’, Leonard Seabrooke
‘Legitimacy Gaps In The World Economy: Explaining The Sources Of The Imf’S Legitimacy Crisis’, Leonard Seabrooke
Leonard Seabrooke
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, that the Fund enforces homogeneous policies onto borrowing member states and that loan programmes 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 …
‘Exogenous Shocks Or Endogenous Constructions? The Meanings Of Wars And Crises’, Wesley W. Widmaier, Mark Blyth, Leonard Seabrooke
‘Exogenous Shocks Or Endogenous Constructions? The Meanings Of Wars And Crises’, Wesley W. Widmaier, Mark Blyth, Leonard Seabrooke
Leonard Seabrooke
This symposium addresses the role of wars and crises as mechanisms of international change. Over the past two decades, the international system has undergone a number of remarkable transformations, from the end of the Cold War to the emergence of an ongoing ‘‘War on Terror,’’ and from the collapse of statist development models to the emergence of a contested—if evolving—neoliberal ‘‘Washington Consensus.’’ This volatility exceeds any underlying shifts in economic structures or the distribution of capabilities, and raises important questions regarding the roles of agency, uncertainty, and ideas in advancing change. In this introduction we examine the role of wars …
‘The Everyday Social Sources Of Economic Crises: From “Great Frustrations” To “Great Revelations” In Interwar Britain’, Leonard Seabrooke
‘The Everyday Social Sources Of Economic Crises: From “Great Frustrations” To “Great Revelations” In Interwar Britain’, Leonard Seabrooke
Leonard Seabrooke
Who drives domestic institutional change in the face of international economic crisis? For materialists, self-interested actors struggle for material gains during exogenously generated crises. For constructivists, norm entrepreneurs strategically construct how crises should be interpreted to justify certain institutional reforms. While both these approaches are analytically powerful, they suffer from an implicit view of legitimacy as established by elite command or proclamation during periods of uncertainty. This article adds an extra piece to the puzzle of which institutional reforms are selected in the construction of a crisis. It suggests that everyday discourses constructed by mass public agents, or nonelites, provide …
‘Seeing Like The Imf: Institutional Change In Small Open Economies’, André Broome, Leonard Seabrooke
‘Seeing Like The Imf: Institutional Change In Small Open Economies’, André Broome, Leonard Seabrooke
Leonard Seabrooke
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. …