Episodes such as the UK mini-budget crisis and the self-fulfilling sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone underline that fiscal credibility in advanced capitalist democracies depends not only on economic fundamentals, but on how institutional arrangements coordinate expectations across markets, experts, and publics. Democracies increasingly rely on “institutions of fiscal credibility”, such as Independent Fiscal Institutions (IFIs), Debt Management Offices (DMOs), and fiscal rule regimes, to secure market confidence and stabilise macroeconomic expectations. These bodies now play a central role in how states fund themselves, manage public debt, and justify long-term fiscal choices. Yet despite their growing importance, empirical and theoretical questions about their nature remain unresolved. How should we understand the relationship between IFIs and DMOs, which are usually analysed separately? Do these institutions enhance democratic accountability by clarifying commitments and disciplining governments, or do they instead redistribute monitoring power toward financial markets and expert communities? More broadly, what kind of democratic order emerges when fiscal credibility is increasingly defined and managed by technocrats? These questions matter not only for macroeconomic governance, but also for the long-term capacity of democratic states to sustain collective commitments across time.

This project challenges the theory of credible commitment which, after being applied to central banks, is now used to explain these institutions in terms of insulation, expertise, and rule-based discipline. Building instead on audience-cost theory, the working group reconceptualises fiscal governance as a dispersed “Leviathan of credibility”: an institutional ecology that structures who watches, who judges, and who can punish fiscal deviation. By integrating political theory, political economy, and public law, the project seeks to develop a common framework for analysing the democratic consequences of fiscal credibility institutions. Through two workshops, the research group will refine this framework, expand the collaboration, and prepare a special issue submission to Regulation and Governance.