Daniel Mügge is a political economist and associate professor (UHD) at the political science department of the UvA. His research concentrates on finance and its governance. His new project Fickle Figures analyses the political economy behind the calculation of macroeconomic indicators.

In 2009, Daniel's dissertation on European financial markets was honoured with the ECPR Jean Blondel prize as best European political science dissertation of the year. He spent the first half of 2012 as a visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University and will return there for a year starting September 2014.

Daniel is also lead-editor of the Review of International Political Economy and comments on current economic affairs through his Twitter account.

Research interests

• The political economy of economic indicators
• Financial markets and their regulation
• Global political economy
• European Integration
• Comparative political economy

GR:EEN: Global Re-ordering: Evolution through European Networks

With colleagues from the PETGOV research group, Daniel is part of the international, FP7-sponsored GR:EEN research project that runs from 2011 until 2015. GR:EEN is a global collaborative research project seeking to define the role of the EU in the emerging global order. Daniel is a member of GR:EEN's international steering committee and coordinates GR:EEN's subworkpackage on finance.

GR:EEN website

Selected Publications

Europe and the Governance of Global Finance

This volume, edited by Daniel, has been published by Oxford University Press in 2014 and is one of the main outputs of the finance-subworkpackage in the GR:EEN project. Its point of departure is that the European Union (EU) has emerged as a central actor in financial governance. Hardly any corner of  European financial markets remains untouched by EU rules, and key regulatory competences have been shifted from national authorities to supranational ones. At the same time, the global context has become ever more important for how and to what effect the EU regulates its financial markets. On the one hand, EU policymaking is embedded in global initiatives such as the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. On the other hand, the EU now rivals the USA in its ability to shape global rules. Scholars and practitioners cannot make sense of EU rulemaking without studying its links to global financial governance, just as to understand how global initiatives evolve they have to appreciate the rise of the EU as a global regulatory force.

This book charts and analyses this centrality of the European-global link in financial governance for the first time. Its chapters, written by experts in the specific fields, cover the whole breadth of financial markets. They range from banking, auditing and accounting to derivatives trading, money laundering, and tax governance. This book offers comprehensive coverage of: how and why global and European financial governance have co-evolved over time; how global and European rules, institutions, and actors are linked today; and what this implies for future global and European financial governance. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of either global or European financial regulation.

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Widen the Market, Narrow the Competition

The European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) has awared Daniel the 2009 Jean Blondel prizefor best dissertation in politics. It has published a book-version of his research in mid 2010.

Widen the Market, Narrow the Competition analyses the radical changes inEU capital markets over the past 20 years. In the 1980s, countries had their own financial industries and rules. Now there is one 'Champions League' of banks, and member states have transferred crucial regulatory powers to Brussels.
Drawing on policy documents and more than fifty in-depth interviews, this book argues that financial industry interests have been key to this power shift. Continental banks initially feared a single European market, and governments followed their protectionist impulses. In the 1990s the mood changed, and the likes of ABN AMROandDeutsche Bank rushed into international investment banking. They emerged as the crucial lobby for the supranational governance in place today.

Linked by the interests of centrally placed firms, EU financial integrationand supranational governance have been two sides of the same coin. At the same time, national parliaments and ordinary citizens have been pushed to the sidelines.
ECPR Jean Blondel prize
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Global Financial Integration Thirty Years On

In mid-2010, Cambridge University Press published Global Financial Integration Thirty Years On: From Reform to Crisis , co-edited with Geoffrey Underhill and Jasper Blom.

Early in the new millennium it appeared that a long period of financial crisis had come to an end, but since 2007 the world faces renewed and greaterturmoil. This volume analyses the past three decades of global financial integration and governance and the recent collapse into crisis.

An interdisciplinary group of scholars illuminates the economic, political and social issues at the heart of devising an effective and legitimatefinancial system for the future. The chapters offer debate around a series of core themes which probe the ties between public and private actors andtheir consequences for outcomes for both developed markets and developing countries alike.

The contributors argue that developing effective, legitimate financial governance requires enhancing public versus private authoritythrough broader stakeholder representation, ensuring more acceptable policy outcomes. 

Like Widen the Market, Narrow the Competition , Global Financial Integration Thirty Years On has tremendously benefited from the skillful text-editing of Takeo David Hymans.
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