One of the many exceptional aspects of the global financial crisis of 2008 was the prominence policy-makers and commentators gave to the importance of history in helping to determine responses to the crisis. Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve System famously reached for his copy of Friedman and Schwartzs seminal volume on the 1930s depression to seek inspiration (Friedman and Schwartz, 1963). Comparisons with the great depression of the 1930s feature prominently in commentaries on the depth and spread of the global financial crisis and reveal the extent to which policy-makers seek to learn from the past (Calomiris and Haber 2014; Eichengreen 2015). But how relevant is the past as a guide to the present, or even the future, and how is it used when policymakers, bankers and the public are faced with difficult economic challenges? There is a growing literature on how the construction of heritage and nostalgia have been used to serve particular social and political interests (Waterton and Watson, 2015) but most economic historians seek lessons from history rather than examining how the past is constructed and used. Rather than following this path, UPIER will take an original approach by using archival evidence to focus on how and when participants in markets (bankers, policymakers, investors, regulators) actually construct an idea of the past and how they use that construction to guide their reactions to the challenges they face.

DEEPEN explores the democratic governance of capital-funded occupational pension schemes. We adopt Scharpf’s distinction between input legitimacy (are collectively binding decisions in line with citizens’ democratically expressed preferences?) and output legitimacy (do collectively binding decisions serve the common interests of the citizens?) to investigate how governments, regulators and labour market actors govern funded pensions (input legitimacy) and whether participants are satisfied with pension fund performance (output legitimacy). The project focuses on Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Ireland and Spain because the structure of funded pension provision varies along key dimensions relevant to input and output legitimacy. The project combines quantitative analysis of survey data with comparative case studies based on elite and expert interviews and analysis of primary and secondary documents. Four work packages investigate the following research questions: How does national policy define participant influence on funded pension provision? How do stakeholders use pension fund governance to influence investment policy? How have capital-funded pension schemes performed in terms of pension outcomes across European welfare states? To what extent are individual attitudes on pension investment aligned with these inputs and outputs? The project team includes researchers from the fields of Political Science, Social Policy, and Sociology, whose combined expertise includes pension politics and policy, financialization, and the politics and sociology of the welfare state. The project will contribute to academic and policy debates through journal articles, a special issue, conference presentations, and outreach activities aimed at national and European policymakers and other stakeholders.