Popular Austerity

• In Event: Which Distributive Policies Resonate with Working Class Voters in Europe?

Abstract

The political economy of austerity since 2010 raises a fundamental empirical puzzle
for scholars of the welfare state. Despite the ongoing popularity of much of government
spending, some governments across the advanced industrial democracies have pursued
drastic cuts with little electoral punishment. (Others have been less successful). In
this paper we develop a theoretical framework for understanding this variation and the
counterintuitive popularity of austerity.
We contend that it is possible to design an austerity programme such that (a) its
costs are relatively focused on an electoral minority of the population – indeed one that
potentially was not likely to vote for the governing party, anyway – and (b) there are large
and widespread perceived benefits of the programme in terms of reducing government
budget deficits and levels of debt. This distributive pattern can make austerity electorally
successful: when the costs of austerity are concentrated on the politically impotent and
the benefits are felt by the politically important, it is possible to construct a coalition
in support of austerity in the mirror image of the traditional Olsonian logic of collective
action.We use evidence from the UK to empirically demonstrate our argument.

Authors

• Lucy Barnes, University College London

• Timothy Hicks, University College London