Dealing with Austerity: a case of local resilience in Southern Europe

ABSTRACT

Southern countries are undergoing a severe economic crisis that has renewed debates about the available strategies to economise their public resources. Political leaders have launched a wide range of different strategies aimed at reducing spending. According to generally accepted political discourse, drastic actions should be taken to guarantee economic and financial sustainability in times of austerity. We explore the main measures adopted by Spanish municipalities in order to examine their impact in budgetary terms. First of all, we identify the most frequently implemented mechanisms including organisational structure, public services and operational economic restructuration. After their quantification, we monitor the presence and impact of each set of policies to analyse the relationship between concrete measures and effective economic impact. The effective reduction of budgets is being implemented but data show that local governments are resilient to non-compulsory changes. The ‘government at a distance’ policy pursued by the central state administration has effectively reduced budgets but has not affected the institutional core of Spanish local governments.

KEYWORDS:

• Austerity measures
• economic crisis
• local government resilience
• local restructuration

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the comments made to previous versions of this work by the participants in the 2015 ECPR Joint Sessions in Poland and the EGPA 2015 in Toulouse. We also acknowledge the comments made by department colleagues in our research seminar. As a final step, we recognise the huge improvements made to the paper with the comments of two anonymous reviewers. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy under Grant CSO2013-48641-C2-2-R; and AGAUR, Catalan Government, under Grant SGR-838.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Grant CSO2013-48641-C2-2-R; and AGAUR, Catalan Government, under Grant SGR-838.

Notes on contributors

Lluís Medir

Lluís Medir lectures in the Department of Political Science at the University of Barcelona, Spain. His research interests include local government and public policy, and his most recent publication is ‘Patterns of gender representation in councils at the second tier of local government’ in Policy Making at the Second Tier of Local Government in Europe: What is happening in provinces, counties, départements and landkreise in the ongoing re-scalling of stathood? ed. Xavier Bertrana, Björn Egner and Hubert Heinelt, Routledge, 2015.

Esther Pano

Esther Pano is the project coordinator of the Local Government Observatory at the Carles Pi i Sunyer Foundation, and an associate lecturer at the University of Barcelona, Spain. She is the author of ‘Cambios en la escala y gasto: una aproximación a los servicios de bienestar comunitario en los Ayuntamientos de la Comunidad de Madrid’, in Anuario de Derecho Municipal, 2013.

Alba Viñas

Alba Viñas is a researcher at the Carles Pi i Sunyer Foundation, Barcelona, Spain. She is the author of ‘Cambios en la escala y gasto: una aproximación a los servicios de bienestar comunitario en los Ayuntamientos de la Comunidad de Madrid’, in the Anuario de Derecho Municipal, 2013.

Jaume Magre

Jaume Magre is a professor at the University of Barcelona, Spain. He is Director of the GREL research group on local studies and Director of the Carles Pi i Sunyer Foundation, and his research interests include local government and electoral systems. His most recent publication is ‘Moving to suburbia? Effects of residential mobility on community engagement’, Urban Studies, 2016.