Introduction : politics in the age of austerity / Armin Schäfer and Wolfgang Streeck -- Public finance and the decline of state capacity in democratic capitalism / Wolfgang Streeck and Daniel Mertens -- Tax competition and fiscal democracy / Philipp Genschel and Peter Schwarz -- Governing as an engineering problem : the political economic of Swedish success / Sven Steinmo -- Monetary union, fiscal crisis and the disabling of democratic accountability / Fritz W. Scharpf -- Smaghi versus the parties : representative government and institutional constraints / Peter Mair -- Liberalization, inequality and democracy's discontent / Armin Schäfer -- Participatory inequality in the austerity state : a supply-side approach / Claus Offe -- From markets versus states to corporations versus civil society? / Colin Crouch -- The normalization of the right in post-security Europe / Mabel Berezin -- The crisis in context : democratic capitalism and its contradictions / Wolfgang Streeck.