Abolishing politics in the shadow of austerity? Assessing the (De)politicization of budgetary policy in crisis-ridden Spain (2008–2015)

ABSTRACT

Depoliticization has emerged as a key concept for explaining the legitimation of austerity during the euro crisis: in the face of growing social unrest over their austerity-based crisis management, EU and national policy elites would attempt to remove the political character of economic policy-making, thus insulating budgetary issues from public deliberation and party competition. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the actual success of depoliticizing strategies in effectively achieving these aims. By setting up a dialogue between two research programmes on (de)politicization that have developed so far in isolation, the article articulates a new framework for studying the impacts of depoliticization. Empirically, the analysis focuses on the process of discursive depoliticization of budgetary policy in Spain in the context of the austerity-oriented budgetary reforms implemented between 2010 and 2013. Methodologically, this process of (contested) discursive depoliticization is examined by developing a relational content analysis of the parties’ electoral manifestos and newspapers’ opinion articles on budgetary policy that were published in the three electoral campaigns held in Spain before, during and after the euro crisis. The analysis shows that the EU-led depoliticization of budgetary policy encountered important political limits in Spain, in fact paradoxically promoting a re-politicizing backlash.

KEYWORDS:

• Depoliticization
• euro crisis
• content analysis
• austerity
• Spain
• budgetary policy

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor change. This change do not impact the academic content of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Joan Miró is a PhD candidate in public policy at the Institute of Governance and Public Policies (IGOP) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). His dissertation research examines the legitimation of austerity in the Eurozone's periphery during the euro crisis.

Notes

1 However, these assumptions have been progressively challenged in recent years (Bojar 2018).

2 After being elected in 2011, Rajoy won the elections again in 2015 and in 2016, forming a cabinet after the latter. The other two cases of electoral survival of austerity in the EU periphery were the conservative Prime Minister of Portugal, Passos Coelho, who returned to power after the 2015 legislative vote, albeit for only 11 days, and the Prime Minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipras, who won his second election in September 2015, after having accepted the third memorandum with the Troika. In this sense, from a discursive-theoretical point of view, the Spanish case is even more compelling because, unlike these other cases, austerity was implemented without the institutional constraints of a (formal) bailout and, therefore, far more efforts were needed to legitimate reforms rhetorically.

3 The list of keywords can be viewed in the Online Appendix. Newspaper articles were selected via the MyNews database, using the search string formed by the keywords.

4 These categories have been constructed both deductively – by partially relying on the regrouping of budgetary policy issues proposed by Kriesi et al. (2008, 58) – and inductively, in an iterative way. Since in order to analyse polarisation we are interested in parties’ and columnists’ positions in relation to budgetary policy, we defined these different dimensions in the ordoliberal, austerity-oriented terms promoted by the depoliticising discourse, so that we can understand the direction of the position.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte [FPU 14/06498].