Festschrift für Fritz W. Scharpf - MPIfG

On Democracy and “Public Interest” in the
European Union
Andrew Moravcsik and Andrea Sangiovanni
For three decades now, Fritz Scharpf has ranked among our leading analysts
of national policy-making under conditions of globalization. His writings,
which have contributed much to our understanding of how interdependence
creates new constraints and possibilities for national economic policy, are
distinguished by three qualities.
The first is a keen sense of institutional dynamics. While most analyses
of globalization focus primarily, sometimes exclusively, on the constraints
markets impose on domestic redistribution and regulation, Scharpf balances
the analysis of markets with a subtle understanding of the constraints and
possibilities afforded by political institutions. Thus his classic critiques of
German federalism and macroeconomic policy, while acknowledging the
autonomous power of market forces, lay primary emphasis on the institutional
incentives and constraints that restrict “problem-solving capacity” –
the ability to realize optimal policy choices. For Scharpf, the particular constraints
imposed by German federalism and the Bundesbank statute – as well
as the ideologies and expectations that form around them – ultimately have
a decisive impact on policy. 1
The second distinctive quality, related to the first, lies in Scharpf’s consistent
normative commitment to a particular conception of legitimate political
order. There is no mistaking his intent to offer a defense of social democracy
viewed very much from the perspective of a late twentieth century
advanced industrial democracy in Continental Europe – indeed, very much
1 E.g. Fritz Scharpf (1991); this focus on institutions may very well reflect the fact that
Scharpf, almost alone among leading European political economists, received graduate
training not primarily as an economist or public policy analyst, but as a lawyer – and, importantly,
at Yale University in the United States at the apogee of American “legal realism.”