The role of the European Parliament in managing the international economic crisis

Abstract

Economics and finance cannot be separated from the political and social system and the institutions within which they are embedded. This has been stressed by an array of approaches which attempt to disclose the role of institutions in shaping economic behaviour and policy. As North, who extensively researched the socio-economic role of institutions, states, ‘[i]nstitutions are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction’ (North, 2011, p. 3). With regard to European integration studies, there has been considerable use of the following approaches: rational choice institutionalism, sociological institutionalism and historical institutionalism (Aspinwall and Schneider, 2001; Jupille and Caporaso, 1999).