"Budgetary speeches are the moments when our elected officials justify their choices to the voters. Karremans uses these moments of political rationalization to explore the trade-off between responsiveness to voters and responsibility to international economic commitments. His results will surprise you. This is a creative and insightful analysis of the interaction between the populist and technocratic impulses in eurozone democracies." -- Pepper Culpepper, University of Oxford"Based on an original comparative analysis of the justifications provided by European finance ministers for their annual budget plans, Jan Karremans makes a major contribution to the analysis of public finance. He convincingly demonstrates how fiscal policy in five European countries shifted from fiscal responsibility, under the spell of austerity during the sovereign debt crisis, towards more electoral responsiveness in its aftermath, increasingly taking into account the distinct policy preferences of national constituencies." -- Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute, Florence"To date, no scholarly work had systematically analysed governments' justifications for the policies contained in their annual budgets. This book is a novel and important contribution to the enduring debate about the relationship between (national-level) democracy and (international-level) economic integration, and provides one of the most advanced and detailed measurements of the balance between democratic responsiveness and institutional responsibility.

Jan Karremans relies on a rigorous comparative research design and mixed methods to speak with political scientists and political economists, economic sociologists and economists and the broader scholarship in European Union Studies." -- Zoe Lefkofridi, University of Salzburg.