Martin Moland

Martin Moland

Postdoc focusing on trust in political journalism and EU public opinion

Blog posts

2023

Olof Scholz has a large (and unexpected) political problem

1 minute read

Published:

If there was one thing Southern European debtor countries got used to during the sovereign debt crisis, it was German politicians telling them no. Now, the German government, led by chancellor Olof Scholz (pictured below), may soon be put in a situation where austerity is the only way out. The reason is that the German constitutional court recently announced that the Scholz government’s plan to fund its ambitious program with funds existing outside of the main budget violated the rule that Germany’s budget deficits should not exceed 0.35% of its GDP. This makes it very reasonable to expect cuts to public budgets.

How contested is EU integration really?

2 minute read

Published:

One of the truisms of EU integration theory is that the EU’s expansion into integration of extremely salient policy areas, so-called “core state powers” like fiscal and migration policy, is more likely to be met with public contestation than comparatively “boring” harmonization of rules and regulations. However, my most recent paper paper “Constraining dissensus and permissive consensus”, which was recently published in the journal West European Politics (read an ungated version of the paper here) is the first paper to empirically test and challenge this proposition.