The End of Austerity as Common Sense? An Experimental Analysis of Public Opinion Shifts and Class Dynamics During the Covid-19 Crisis

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 pandemic is disrupting the international political economy unlike any event since WWII. Consequently, France reversed years of fiscal consolidation by instating, at least temporarily, a costly emergency furlough scheme reaching a third of the workforce. This provides a natural setting to investigate a potential ‘critical juncture’, and whether the French public still accepts austerity politics today, as it seems to have after the Global Financial Crisis. We observe crisis narratives’ salience across social classes, employing an original quantitative approach for Critical Political Economy, which uses panel data and two experiments. We test if citizens’ viewpoints are sensitive to the trade-off between health and economics, receptive to austerity and conditioned by their socioeconomic status. We find that public opinion shifted after an authoritative and dire economic forecast at the pandemic’s first peak in April 2020, but that acquiescence to austerity did not occur during the phase-out of the first lockdown in June, with the exception of the upper class. Overall, public support favours increased social spending, and pro-austerity crisis narratives might not shape the majority’s ‘common sense’, as they had after the GFC. We conclude with implications for the study of class and public policy in a post-pandemic world.

KEYWORDS:

• Austerity
• covid-19
• France
• public opinion
• class

Acknowledgements

The authors’ names appear alphabetically, as this is truly joint work. We must first thank the entire Coping with Covid-19 (CoCo) research team, including Ettore Recchi, Marta Pasqualini, Mirna Safi, Jen Schradie, and Katharina Tittel, along with other collaborating OSC scholars, notably Olivier Godechot and Philippe Coulangeon. Nicolas Sauger, Emmanuelle Duwez, Mathieu Olivier, and Laureen Rotelli-Bihet at the Centre de données socio-politiques (CDSP) have been indispensable from start to finish in regard to our data. In particular, we are deeply grateful to Katharina Tittel for helping us to understand the ins and outs of our data and for providing constant technical support. Additionally, we would like to thank Alessandro Arrigoni for his insightful comments on earlier drafts of our paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 5.9% and -13.8% respectively (Insee 2020b).

2 Or more bluntly, as Giles (2020b) has hypothesized, the narratives of the ‘age of austerity’ may be dead.

3 On the distinction between the use of ‘common sense’ in the English language and the Gramscian meaning, see Crehan (2011).

4 Welfare state expansion literature is rich and presents different explanations for the exceptional development of the welfare state after WWII and in particular during the 1960s in high-income countries. The main explanatory approaches include: ‘functionalist theories’ (the logic of industrialisation and modernisation, see Cutright 1965, Wilensky 1974; neo-marxist approaches, see Gough 1979, O’Connor 1973, Offe 1984); ‘politics matters’ theories ('simple democratic’, see Flora and Alber 1981; ‘popular protest’, see Piven and Cloward 1977; ‘power resources’, see Castles 2009, Esping-Andersen 1985, Korpi 1983, Shalev 1983, Stephens 1979; the role of Christian Democracy, see Van Kersbergen 1995); ‘state centred theories’ (e.g. path dependence, see Skocpol 1992; see also Evans et al. 1985); theories based on the role of culture and political ideas (Lipset 1996, Stjernø 2004).

5 See, for example, the continued justification of austerity measures after the GFC in the work of mainstream economists like the symposium edited by Corsetti (2012).

6 Research on public opinion on austerity in the UK informed our collection of these observational survey data (Cf. Barnes and Hicks 2018).

7 Additionally, because agree-disagree survey questions can be subjected to possible acquiescence or extreme response biases, and social desirability bias (Weijters et al. 2010), we complement these direct questions with experimental questions that help to confirm the public opinion shifts observed in this first approach.

8 For example, assisting with the transfer of critically ill patients out of overburdened regions.

9 There were a few exceptional categories that did not demonstrate statistical significance upon being treated, including those with lower-middle education levels and those who are concerned about personal debt. However, these categories were associated with respondents who relatively preferred economic reopening in the control group, suggesting that these groups were already convinced by this choice before being treated.

10 If it is the case that wealthy individuals support austerity because it tends to fit with their understandings of macroeconomic functioning, we find that the only other sociodemographic groups that acquiesce to pro-austerity narratives in the current context are those with a zero-sum conception of finances and budgeting. This includes people who strongly disagree with the installation of a universal basic income and those who disagree that social justice can be achieved by taking from the rich and giving to the poor (analysis not shown). Among those groups, pro-austerity narratives may find salience because an every-man-for-himself view towards personal finances maps easily onto conceptions of macroeconomic functioning.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche: Flash Covid-19 Call, March 2020.

Notes on contributors

Emanuele Ferragina

Emanuele Ferragina is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po Paris. Prior to Sciences Po, he was a Departmental Lecturer at the University of Oxford where he also received his DPhil. Emanuele is interested in the political economy of the welfare state, family policy and social capital. Besides academia, he is a columnist for the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Andrew Zola

Andrew Zola holds a Master's of Sociology from Sciences Po Paris, where he wrote his thesis on welfare attitudes and the political economy in France during the Covid-19 pandemic. He holds a BA from Columbia University in Economics-Political Science.