How have social democratic parties responded to the recent economic crisis? For many observers, the Great Recession and the prevalence of austerity in response to it have contributed to a crisis of social democracy in Europe. This article examines the programmatic response of social democratic parties to this crisis in 11 Western European countries. It uses an original data set that records the salience that parties attribute to different issues and the positions that they adopt with regard to these issues during electoral campaigns and compares the platforms of social democratic parties before and after 2008. For this purpose, the article disentangles economic issues into three different categories and shows that this is necessary in order to understand party competition during the Great Recession: while social democratic parties shifted to the left with regard to issues relating to welfare and economic liberalism, they largely accepted the need for budgetary rigour and austerity policies.

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.

This article links the consequences of the Great Recession on protest and electoral politics. It innovates by combining the literature on economic voting with social movement research and by presenting the first integrated, large-scale empirical analysis of protest mobilisation and electoral outcomes in Europe. The economic voting literature offers important insights on how and under what conditions economic crises play out in the short-run. However, it tends to ignore the closely connected dynamics of opposition in the two arenas and the role of protests in politicising economic grievances. More specifically, it is argued that economic protests act as a 'signalling mechanism' by attributing blame to decision makers and by highlighting the political dimension of deteriorating economic conditions. Ultimately, massive protest mobilisation should, thus, amplify the impact of economic hardship on the electoral losses of incumbents and mainstream parties more generally. The empirical analysis to study this relationship relies on an original semi-automated protest event dataset combined with an updated dataset of electoral outcomes in 30 European countries from 2000 to 2015. The results indicate that the dynamics of economic protests and electoral punishment are closely related and point to a destabilisation of European party systems during the Great Recession.

In this study we analysed the patterns and covariates of public support for the European integration of core state powers based on an original new survey. We found considerable variation across integration instruments, member states and policy issues. Horizontal transfers are supported more than vertical capacity building; member states from the EU's South‐East are more supportive than states from the North‐West; and support increases from debt relief to unemployment assistance, sharing the burdens of refugees, and military defence to disaster aid. Identity is a strong and fairly consistent predictor for individual variations in support. The association with respondents’ interest is less consistent, but can be quite strong with respect to specific policy issues such as debt and unemployment. Overall, support for the integration of core state powers is higher and more variable than expected. This suggests there is considerable room for political agency rather than a general constraining dissensus.

Even though social investment is highly popular, welfare state recalibration remains an uphill battle. When resources are scarce in times of austerity, welfare recalibration involves multidimensional trade-offs. Existing research primarily studied preferences toward individual policies or trade-offs in specific policy fields, failing to capture citizens’ overall social policy priorities. Using two novel survey experiments in three European countries, we show that citizens have clear social policy priorities: pensions and education enjoy a high, family policies a medium, and labor market policies a low priority. However, policy constituencies differ in their relative priorities. Our findings suggest that welfare state recalibration is difficult because trade-offs are unpopular, and distributive conflicts in mature welfare states are mainly about distributing resources to specific social groups.

The ‘austerity settlement’ has come to define the post-crisis European political economy. Since 2010, parties from across Europe’s political mainstream have implemented austerity and despite the apparent conflict with the interests of their traditional constituents, even social democratic parties have acquiesced to this settlement. However, within the existing literature ‘social democratic austerity’ is currently under-theorized as it is assumed to involve a rather straightforward adaptation of social democrats to neo- and/or ordoliberal ideas. Utilizing rich and original evidence from over 60 elite interviews with key social democratic stakeholders in France, Germany and the UK, this article contests this view. It demonstrates instead that a distinct set of ideas based on New Keynesianism, supply-side economics, and the social investment paradigm provide the ideational foundations for social democratic austerity post-crisis. Understanding this, it is argued, is critical in order to fully appreciate how and why austerity has become dominant in post-crisis Europe.

In the wake of the European sovereign debt crisis, governments across the continent pursued fiscal consolidation. Existing research claims that fiscally conservative citizens support such fiscal policies. However, this literature largely ignores that fiscal consolidation carries substantial trade-offs. In hard times, governments have to cut spending or raise taxes to reduce government debt. We account for these trade-offs by using a split-sample and conjoint survey experiment conducted in four European countries. The results show that fiscal consolidation is not a priority for citizens: When forced to make a choice, support for reducing debt at the cost of lower spending or higher taxes is smaller than in an unconstrained setting. Revenue-based consolidations are especially unpopular, but expenditure-based consolidations are also contested. Moreover, the public has a clear priority order: People do not favor lower debt and taxes, but they support more progressive taxes to pay for higher government spending.

Ever since the Great Recession, public debt has become politicized. Some research suggests that citizens are fiscally conservative, while other research shows that they punish governments for implementing fiscal consolidation. This begs the question of whether and how much citizens care about debt. We argue that debt is not a priority for citizens because reducing it involves spending and tax trade-offs. Using a split-sample experiment and a conjoint experiment in four European countries, we show that fiscal consolidation at the cost of spending cuts or taxes hikes is less popular than commonly assumed. Revenue-based consolidation is especially unpopular, but expenditure-based consolidation is also contested. Moreover, the public has clear fiscal policy priorities: People do not favor lower debt and taxes, but they support higher progressive taxes to pay for more government spending. The paper furthers our understanding of public opinion on fiscal policies and the likely political consequences of austerity.