With the benefit of hindsight: what did political science teach us about the challenges of the Eurozone?

Although the Economic and Monetary Union has always been in the centre of the political and academic debate, the scientific engagement with EMU has changed significantly with the outbreak of the Eurozone crisis since 2010. Many structural deficiencies of EMU – such as the heterogeneity of the Eurozone or the lack of automatic fiscal transfers – were widely debated in recent years. However, they have been less prominent in the in the pre-crisis period. The objective of this article is to provide a systematic literature review of political science articles analysing whether and how the academic engagement with questions concerning the Economic and Monetary Union has changed over time. It conducts a review for a ten-year period (2005-2014) covering six leading political science journals from Europe and the United States (N= around 200 articles). We assess how intensively, and with what focus, political science journals analysed the monetary union and the Euro crisis. The analysis is inductive, but builds on the assumption that different narratives and interpretations exist as to why the Eurozone faces the challenges it is in today. Although these interpretations partly overlap, each of them offers competing explanations for the crisis as well as different solutions to reform the Eurozone. Specifically, we ask: which different interpretations for the structural deficiencies of the Eurozone have been dominant over time? Which EU institutions, countries or policy instruments have been in the focus of the academic engagement with the economic and monetary union? And did these patterns change over time