The Greek financial system was typical of a state-directed credit-based southern European model. Financial liberalization from the late 1980s and early 1990s was mainly state directed, aimed to serve the objectives of disinflation and the single European market. As a result of liberalization, the banks emerged as powerful players in the 1990s. The cheap-credit, rapid credit-growth period of 1998–2008 allowed banks to maximize sectoral profits, incomes and power. Debt-driven growth also served the government’s objectives of delivering relatively effortless rapid prosperity. The banks’ decline following the 2010 public debt crisis resulted mainly from the fiscal failure of the sovereign and the current account imbalances of the euro area. In crisis, the banks cannot escape the confines of their sovereign, which itself is heavily constrained by the surrounding euro area economic structure. Such structural limitations circumscribe the power of bankers.

What is responsible for the decline of democratically dominant parties and the corresponding growth of competitive party systems? This article argues that, despite a ruling party's dominance, opposition forces can gain by winning important subnational offices and then creating a governance record that they can use to win new supporters. It focuses on South Africa as a paradigmatic dominant party system, tracing the increased competitiveness of elections in Cape Town and the surrounding Western Cape province between 1999 and 2010. These events show how party strategies may evolve, reflecting how party elites can learn from forming coalitions.

Turkey is undergoing the most substantial constitutional reform process in its history, at the same time as carrying out significant peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. These two processes will have profound effects on the country’s future governance. Most importantly, the processes could contribute to bridging gaps in Turkey’s polarized society. As the processes take place in secret, their substantive contents are currently unknown. This article provides a critical analysis of the processes in the light of the new theory of constitutionalism, paying particular attention to the changing role of the European Union in Turkey’s reform discussions. This analysis leads to some sceptical conclusions: given the secrecy, exclusiveness and political hostility surrounding the processes, it seems that they are unlikely to achieve their potential. In addition, despite its contradictions, the weakening of European Union conditionality appears to have negatively affected the reform process.

When it comes to analyses of financial power in Latin America, there has been a tendency to assume it is mostly external, relatively homogeneous, and usually constraining of domestic policy autonomy. Increasingly, however, when speaking of financial power in the region, a focus exclusively on foreign capital misses a significant part of the empirical landscape, one inhabited by large domestic institutional investors: public and private pension funds. A focus on these funds reveals that a neat state–finance dichotomy is often unrepresentative of the type of blurred web of interests, influence and ownership that characterizes even those economies that have embraced a significant degree of liberalization. In fact, pension finance is far from uniform across countries. In order to capture this diversity in Latin America, a new typology is suggested that departs from the Anglo-American notion of ‘pension fund capitalism’ and further specifies pension finance as also revealing dynamics best described as ‘pension fund developmentalism and statism’. The typology is not only aimed at capturing more empirical nuance in Latin America; it can also serve as reference for cross-regional analyses of these often neglected, but increasingly powerful financial actors in emerging economies.

The main argument to be developed in this article posits that fundamental changes and variations in the financial market structure of East Asian economies have been predicated on the emergence and configuration of the dominant coalitions. The coalitions have been forged by private market agents, economic policymakers and political elites who have developed particular interests in financial market changes as a response to economic and political imperatives both at home and abroad. In East Asia, the dominant coalitions that have borne crucially on regulatory rules and market practices have differed in the policy preferences of key actors in the coalitions and the power structures of these coalitions. It is these differences that have exerted divergent shaping influences on financial market development.

This article examines financial innovation as a source of structural power of finance originally identified by Susan Strange. I build a synthesis based on complex network theory and the field of evolutionary finance which yields a conception of finance as a complex ecological habitat. On the one hand, the interaction between various entities inhabiting the financial system endows this complex habitat with a tangible degree of autonomy vis-à-vis politics, society and economy. On the other hand, the evolutionary process guiding this financial ecology is built on complexity and innovation and hence is fragile. The structural power of finance today, therefore, is necessarily twofold: it manifests the effects of the endeavours (intentional and otherwise) of financial agents; crucially, it also rests on the seemingly boundless ability of the financial system to adapt, change and evolve.