Varieties of Capitalism - Varieties of Responses? Comparing Fiscal Policy Responses to the Global Financial Crisis in the US, Australia, Switzerland and Germany

From 2008 to 2010, economic disruptions swept across OECD-countries with an apparent disregard to government partisanship and national economic philosophies. In late 2008 and 2009, the affected countries reacted with economic stimulus packages of various sizes and designs. The paper traces the size, the spending-/revenue-sidedness and the composition of national fiscal stimulus packages back to the respective dominant national partisan ideologies and national degrees of economic coordination. In this respect, we put a special emphasis on our assumption that incumbent right-governments – in case they govern in a Coordinated Market Economy - do their utmost to compensate for a left issue-ownership in the field of welfare policy. To refine the insights of Varieties of Capitalism-theory, our analysis includes its two archetypical economic antonyms Germany and USA but also investigates the policymaking processes in Australia – a border case tending to the Liberal Market-Economy spectrum - and Switzerland – a border case tending to the Coordinated Market Economy spectrum.