The effect of austerity packages on government popularity during the Great Recession

Abel Bojar, Björn Bremer, Hanspeter Kriesi, Chendi Wang

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

During the Great Recession, governments across the continent implemented austerity policies. A large literature claims that such policies are surprisingly popular and have few electoral costs. This article revisits this question by studying the popularity of governments during the economic crisis. The authors assemble a pooled time-series data set for monthly support for ruling parties from fifteen European countries and treat austerity packages as intervention variables to the underlying popularity series. Using time-series analysis, this permits the careful tracking of the impact of austerity packages over time. The main empirical contributions are twofold. First, the study shows that, on average, austerity packages hurt incumbent parties in opinion polls. Secondly, it demonstrates that the magnitude of this electoral punishment is contingent on the economic and political context: in instances of rising unemployment, the involvement of external creditors and high protest intensity, the cumulative impact of austerity on government popularity becomes considerable.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)181-199
Number of pages19
JournalBritish Journal of Political Science
Volume52
Issue number1
Early online date21 Jan 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2022

Funding

The authors acknowledge funding by the ERC project Political Conflict in Europe in the Shadow of the Great Recession (POLCON) (Project id: 338875). Previous versions of this article were presented at the 2018 annual SASE conference, the 2019 SPSA annual conference and Dreil\u00E4ndertagung, and at workshops at the European University Institute (EUI), Sciences Po Paris, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne. We are very grateful for insightful comments that we received at each occasion, and we specifically thank Lukas Haffert, Thomas Sattler, Liisa Talving, four anonymous reviewers, and the editors of the BJPolS for excellent feedback. All remaining errors remain our own.

FundersFunder number
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Seventh Framework Programme338875
Seventh Framework Programme
European Research Council
European University Institute

    Keywords

    • austerity
    • fiscal consolidation
    • economic voting
    • time series analysis
    • government popularity
    • economic crisis

    VU Research Profile

    • Governance for Society

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