What explains the variation in countries’ propensity to engage in austerity policy? Economic and political country-level factors are the paramount explanations in the literature. Nevertheless, variation in fiscal preferences at the executive level remains underexplored, except for ideology. Moreover, budget decisions are endogenous to the state of the economy, thus casting doubt on standard measures based on the debt and/or deficit ratio. This article contributes to the literature in two ways. First, I turn to the individual level of analysis and suggest that leaders with business experience are more likely to pursue a balanced budget and tend to implement fiscal consolidation policies based on spending cuts. Second, I ease concerns about individuals’ self-selection into office by relying on fiscal adjustments that are weakly orthogonal to the economic cycle. The statistical analysis of a panel of 17 OECD countries between 1978 and 2014 confirms the theoretical expectations. The results are robust to a variety of specification and statistical methodologies and hold for a subset of as-if random leadership transitions following close elections. A case study of Brian Mulroney's governments in Canada (1984–93) further illustrates the argument.

This article studies the impact of the 2012 British austerity policies on youth political attitudes using a difference-in-differences. The study achieves this by combining longitudinal survey data from “Understanding Society” with a district-level estimate of the austerity shock that each individual faced between the years 2013 and 2015. The findings indicate that the welfare cuts had a negative impact on the political efficacy of young people, as they were more inclined to believe that public officials did not care about them and that they had no say in the actions of the government. Additionally, their satisfaction with politics, as determined by their perceived level of political influence, also decreased. Overall, the results suggest that the implementation of austerity measures increased the likelihood of political disenfranchisement among young people in Britain.

This is the first academic paper to consider the role that parliamentarians play in access to justice. Under austerity, England and Wales has seen cuts to legal aid and local authority budgets that have impacted the ability of people to get help for legal problems in social welfare law from the advice sector. Members of the UK Parliament and Members of the Senedd Cymru are increasingly being called upon by their constituents to fill the resultant gap in advice. This paper draws on interviews with parliamentarians that draw out the nature of the role they are now playing in access to justice across three key areas of civil justice: welfare benefits; housing; and immigration. The growth of parliamentarians as figures in access to justice has thus far been largely neglected but is crucial to grasp, as the implications for the future of access to justice are massive. The paper calls for more research to better understand the phenomenon but urges caution that elected representatives should not be considered as an adequate substitute for a properly functioning, adequately funded advice sector.

Over recent years, a preventative approach has been promoted within adult social care policy and practice in England. However, progress has been somewhat inconsistent, in part due to issues around conceptualising what exactly prevention means within this context. Particularly since the financial crisis, there have emerged tensions between seeing prevention as a positive strategy to build assets and capability; as part of a neo-liberal project to roll back expectations for state support; or simply as a technocratic strategy to increase efficiency by deploying resources ‘upstream’ where they might have greater impact. This paper provides a critical perspective on how policy has unfolded over the last 15 years, which provides the context for an analysis of findings from a national survey of English local authorities and interviews with key stakeholders. These findings demonstrate a substantial commitment to preventative activity, but also some serious confusions and contradictions in how this agenda may be taken forward in the current policy environment.

This article analyses the 2008 economic crisis and its outcomes for the Baltic states. It then gives a genealogy of European economic policy responses to the crisis, tracing them from the emerging ‘freshwater’ school of economics (e.g. University of Chicago) that arose in opposition to Keynesian theory. The more immediate cause of the 2008 crisis, long in the making, was its reliance on private debt to sustain economic demand in light of profit-enhancing wage suppression. Following the 2008 financial shock, European Union policymakers crafted policy that placed the burden of adjustment on labour. A programme of austerity was chosen in much of the European Union, at odds with the post-war European ‘social model’. This represented a retreat from the notion of a European project that encouraged liberalisation of economic policy but at the same time could be harmonised with a social dimension to create a distinctive ‘Social Europe’. Nowhere was this austerity more vigorously applied than in the Baltic states. Its effects are examined here, along with lessons to be derived from that experience.

This article understands contemporary austerity through historical comparisons informed by Marxist insights into the nature of the state. It argues that austerity policies make sense from the perspective of capital–labour, inter-capitalist and international competition. Differences among states over time, in terms of their size and international situation and contested domestic relations, produce varied imperatives towards austerity and prospects of effective resistance.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that public institutions and some households in the United Kingdom (UK) were in a vulnerable and weak financial position to mitigate its immediate outcomes. Public institutions did not have the necessary resources to support their communities and low-income groups were disproportionally affected by the economic contraction of 2020–2021. This paper explores how the disastrous consequences of the pandemic were exacerbated by the implementation of an austerity programme, that as an extension of a neoliberal ideology, supported the development of the market at the expense of reducing the welfare state. Through an assessment of four trends that were reinforced during austerity—the four ‘Ds’—this article shows that austerity influenced many of the struggles observed during the pandemic. These trends are disinvestment, decentralisation, decollectivisation and disintegration. Despite the lessons learnt in 2020–2021 and the evident need to move away from a neoliberal agenda that dismantled the capacities of the state, this article concludes that neoliberalism continues to threaten the welfare state and the formation of social collectivities. Some expenditure decisions taken by the British government in 2020–2021 could further deepen social class divisions and regional inequalities. More is needed from the government to tackle these social problems and to build a fairer and more equal society.

The COVID-19 pandemic is sending shockwaves through communities and economies, and public servants have risen to the novel policy challenges in uncharted waters. This crisis comes on top of considerable turmoil for public services in recent decades, with public management reforms followed by the global financial crisis (GFC) leading to considerable change to public sector employment relations and a deprivileging of public servants. The research adopts the lens of the ‘public service bargain’ to examine the effects of the pandemic across Australian public services. How did Australian public service jurisdictions approach public employment in 2020, across senior and other cohorts of employees? How did this pandemic response compare to each jurisdictions’ response to the GFC a decade earlier? The research also reflects more broadly of the impact on public sector employment relations and to what extent pandemic responses have altered concepts of the diminished public service bargain or the notion of governments as model employers?

The great recession of 2008/2009 had a huge impact on unemployment and public finances in most advanced countries, and these impacts were magnified in the southern Euro area by the sovereign debt crisis of 2010/2011. The fiscal consolidation imposed by the European Union on highly indebted countries was based on the assumptions of so-called expansionary austerity. However, the reality so far provides proof to the contrary, and the results outlined in this article support the opposing view of a self-defeating austerity. Based on a model of the input–output relations of the productive system, an unemployment rate/budget balance trade-off equation is derived, as well as the impact of a strong fiscal consolidation based on social transfers and the notion of a neutral budget balance. An application to the Portuguese case confirms the huge costs of a strong fiscal consolidation, both in terms of unemployment and social policy regress. The conclusion is that too much consolidation in anyone year makes consolidation more difficult in the following year.

The article raises questions about how the economic crisis is being played out ‘in place’, taking an embodied, generational and gender perspective. ‘Place’ is used in a political context by examining how global realities are experienced in place, and the author argues the need to look at the everyday realities of the crisis from a gendered ontological perspective in order to counter grand narratives of gloom and doom where women (whether old, young, migrant, heterosexual or otherwise) are particular victims. By discussing local contexts of the gendered realities of the crisis in three southern Europe areas, the author shows the possibility of changing the crisis narrative from one of overwhelming paralysis to one of potential transformation. The focus is on the rise of resistance, solidarity economies and new types of communities in the search by women in southern Europe for alternatives to neoliberal capitalism.

Green New Deals are being widely discussed as both a means to confront climate change and to improve aspects of social well-being. An important facet of the discussion is how they should be financed. The negative impacts of Covid-19 on national budgets and sovereign debt question whether the implementation of Green New Deals is feasible if austerity needs to be introduced to achieve sustainability. This article assesses whether a wealth tax based upon the work of Michal Kalecki could help avoid austerity measures and facilitate the introduction of Green New Deals. While wealth taxes have traditionally been defined on net worth or assets to reduce wealth inequality, the formulation is meant to be equitable by applying to gross wealth or assets. Estimates are calculated for the United States and turn out to be quite modest. The approach not only generates revenue to cover expected net interest outlays on national debt, but additional revenue to pay down portions of it and/or support green initiatives, such as Biden’s de-carbonisation policy. The article concludes with a discussion of challenges for the tax’s effectiveness.

Based on the material obtained from focus group interviews conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the article analyses the mechanisms used by employers towards employees, as well as the adaptation strategies applied by those in precarious employment in Poland. The authors’ considerations refer to anti-worker changes introduced under the pretext of the pandemic in the capitalist labour market: layoffs and cuts in wages, manifestations of discrimination against precarious workers and the potential attitudes of employee self-defence. The authors conclude that it is almost certain that under the conditions of post-pandemic capitalism, the number of the precariat will grow and the neoliberal system will want to retain as many of the anti-worker solutions introduced in the shadow of the pandemic as possible.

This article proposes an account of how two teachers’ labour federations have been reacting to austerity measures in public education. Current austerity measures have coincided with the renewal of collective agreements, thus allowing the study of how unions link bargaining stances to wider issues of service quality and accessibility. Union responses are the result of at least three influences: the institutional framework for public sector collective bargaining and worker representation, the previous orientation of members and their organisations towards social and work relations, and ongoing innovations for renewal and member engagement. We posit that union responses can contribute to renewal if they are guided by concerns to redefine union purpose, union organisation and building capacities. Under these conditions, unions are able to engage members and push forward an alternative agenda to that of the government. In doing so, they may be able to forge temporary alliances with outside stakeholders, namely parents. Analysis of union responses should consider the dialectic between union renewal effort and the opportunities and constraints of the institutional framework for public sector collective bargaining. The challenge for these two labour federations is in sustaining member engagement and activism beyond the current context of collective bargaining.

This is a study of the renegotiation of pay, employment security, and of the relationship between government and public sector unions, in an Australian state public service during and after the global financial crisis. It examines the extent to which this renegotiation of the ‘public service bargain’ was necessitated by austerity requirements, and the extent to which the crisis provided an opportunity for the deprivileging of public employment that has been an enduring feature of the neoliberal state. A case study of the different approaches of two Queensland governments to their relationships with public sector workers between 2009 and 2014, it tracks two key measures of wages and staff numbers, as well as the consequences of breaches of the trust relationships of the traditional public sector bargain. Given the moderate nature of Australia’s economic downturn, the implementation of public service austerity measures was less an economic necessity than an opportunity for a conservative government to alter employment policies and sever union relationships. This continuation of public sector employment relations favoured by previous conservative governments had electoral consequences.

The impact of the financial crisis has reignited debate about the scope and scale of public sector restructuring and its consequences for the workforce in Britain. The economic crisis precipitated austerity measures concentrated on expenditure reductions with the intention of reducing the public deficit. Because the public sector pay bill comprises over half of current public spending, achieving deficit reduction has major consequences for the total pay bill and the workforce. This article assesses the restructuring of the public sector and public sector employment relations in Britain and identifies underlying continuities in public sector restructuring over recent decades. Drawing on and repositioning New Labour’s legacy, the Coalition government used the economic crisis to establish a pro-austerity frame that has legitimated deep cuts in public sector employment and involved measures to refashion public sector employment relations. The article considers the consequences of this agenda and responses by trade unions and indicates some of the limits and uncertain prospects for public sector restructuring under conditions of austerity.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, austerity measures have been introduced in many national contexts to reorganise public sector work and redesign labour laws and labour policies. At the same time, right-populist discourses and movements have arisen in ways that give both legitimacy and voice to the politics of austerity. Toronto, Canada, provides a world-renowned case of populist experimentation at the metropolitan scale, as the actions of Mayor Rob Ford typified this nexus of austerity and populism. Set in the context of Ford’s term as Mayor of Toronto (2010–2014), this article asks how the combined rise of austerity and right populism creates both new challenges and new opportunities for public sector labour in urban spaces. We argue that public sector unions are central in both the making and unmaking of populist austerity and identify potential trajectories for organised labour in the face of the continuation of austerity-driven politics.