This article examines how two dynamics, one global and one domestic, have interacted to shape the politics of banking in Europe. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, European governments were subject to renewed structural incentive to promote TBTF banks: in financialized economies, the growth of these banks is perceived as an essential element of a national economy's global competitiveness. Yet, this incentive was subject to enhanced political contention at home. Factions—often led by actors from within the state itself—have opposed governments’ impetus to promote TBTF banks. The specific identity, preferences and resources of these factions are determined by distinctive political institutions and vary across countries. Through the comparative analysis of banking structural reform and banking competition policies in the UK, France and Germany, I argue that varieties of regulatory outcomes are explained by the differentiated institutional capacity of “anti-TBTF” factions to carry weight in policymaking processes across jurisdictions.

This article contributes to our understanding of how and why developing countries would comply with international banking regulatory standards, Basel standards. The article demonstrates the interplay between opportunity structures constituted by transnationalization of public policymaking and domestic institutional setting, and how forces of compliance resonate in the domestic politics of compliance. The empirical findings are based on Turkey's compliance with Basel standards. It relies on fieldwork that involves semi-structured qualitative interviews with senior regulators and bankers, which are complemented with analysis of secondary data. The article shows that a capable and willing regulator could capitalize on the top-down policymaking style which restricts the regulatee's access to international negotiations, and sets the terms at the domestic level. Direct access to international negotiations, resource asymmetry in favor of the regulator, and superior “negotiation knowledge” helped the regulator pacify a critical, skeptical regulatee, and drive the compliance process. The article also shows that the compliance process takes place at three stages: policy formulation at the international level, an “interpretation stage” in between the international and the domestic levels, and finally the domestic policy process.

After the subprime financial crisis, the countries who were worst affected set about reforming legacy financial regulations. Given multiple similarities in the way they experienced the crisis and the similar complexions of their post-crisis economies and politics, the contrast between the UK and the Netherlands' approaches to breaking up their largest banks presents a puzzle for prevailing theories in the politics of financial regulation. Both countries explored a range of reform options using similar expert committees, but while UK policymakers determined that commercial and investment operations should be ring-fenced in the largest British banks, the Dutch reform program centered on the banks’ own recommendations to change banking culture from the bottom up by developing a code of conduct and banker's oath. The paper traces this divergence to two related effects produced by the countries’ contrasting majoritarian and consensus party systems: power sharing and coalition formation. Under conditions of high issue salience, both worked to encourage British policymakers to prioritize reform, while in the Netherlands each factor reduced party political responsiveness and de-emphasized alternatives to the banks’ own reform prescriptions. The paper ultimately suggests that institutional democratic variables are worthy of greater recognition among scholars of business power and financial regulation.

After the global financial crisis of 2007–9, policymakers hailed macroprudential policy as the solution to financial markets’ boom-bust patterns. Financial regulations would have to operate countercyclically, increasing in stringency during a boom while becoming lenient in a bust. Simultaneously, the procyclical effects of pre-crisis rules would have to be eliminated. Actual reforms, however, do not live up to these high hopes. In addition to the countercyclical policy framework's limited scope and ambition, its open-endedness is particularly striking. As policymakers have not specified when supervisors should (de)activate what instruments and how firms should measure risk, there is an inbuilt indeterminacy at macroprudential policy's core. I argue that obstacles inherent to the nature of systemic risk are key to understanding this policy outcome. As the financial system is reflexive, adaptive, and complex, there are hard limits to supervisors’ ability to “read” the financial cycle. Furthermore, as macroprudential policy itself becomes “part of financial markets,” countercyclical interventions may have systemically significant unintended consequences. This article empirically shows how policymakers at the global and EU level, confronted with these measurement and mitigation problems, ultimately opted for a limited and open-ended policy framework.