Great Expectations, Slow Transformations: Incremental Change in Post-crisis Regulation

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, why have reforms been incremental, despite the fact that conditions for rapid transformation appeared to be available? Is there anything specific about financial policy that prevents more radical reforms? Drawing from comparative politics and historical institutionalism in particular, as well as international political economy, this book answers these questions by examining the particular institutional frictions which characterise global financial governance, and which influence the activity of change agents and veto players involved in global regulatory change. Chapters demonstrate that the process of change in financial rule-making, as well as in the institutions governing finance, do not fit with the punctuated model of policy change. They also show, however, that incremental changes can lead to fundamental shifts in the basic principles that inform global financial governance.

Manuela Moschella is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Turin. She is the author of Governing Risk: The IMF and Global Financial Crises published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. Her research interests include the politics of financial crises and processes of institutional change with a particular focus on the international financial institutions. She has published on these issues in a number of journals, including the Review of International Political Economy, New Political Economy, the Journal of Public Policy, Comparative European Politics and Comparative Economic Studies. She is currently co-editing the new Handbook of Global Economic Governance for Routledge.



Eleni Tsingou is Assistant Professor of International Political Economy at the Copenhagen Business School and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. She is the author of numerous chapters and articles on the governance of global finance and her work has appeared in Review of International Political Economy, International Politics and International Political Sociology. She was also a member of the Warwick Commission on International Financial Reform.