Austerity, Crisis and Welfare State Adjustment

Abstract

A decade of financial and fiscal crises have stirred academic debates over the politics of fiscal retrenchment and welfare state reform. This panel evaluates the according sea changes in the economic governance of advanced capitalist countries and particularly in the European Union. How do we understand the recent reform trajectories of the interventionist state, both with regard to its tools and its social base? How do policy-makers justify changes in the fiscal stance of capitalist democracies in the face of crisis and new rules? Who carries the distributional costs of these changes? Comparative and historical perspectives in this panel introduce qualitative and quantitative data to address these questions that lie at the heart of a political economy of contemporary economic crisis.