Honeymoon in the Crisis?

As a consequence of the recent financial and economic crisis, many countries have reacted with harsh expenditure cuts. These cuts have also touched welfare and education policies, which can be electorally highly risky. Under such circumstances, literature on welfare state retrenchment suggests that use blame avoidance strategies to prevent electoral punishment. This paper investigates a specific policy strategy, namely “strategic timing”, which refers to the so-called “honeymoon effect”: Governments implement harsh cuts in the first years of the mandate and hope to reap the fruits of the efforts when the next elections approach. This implies that governments have to make decisions with a view to uncertain positive or negative long-term effects. We investigate the issue of strategic timing using qualitative case studies on the UK, Spain and Ireland, and analyze to what extent governments used this approach and how public opinion shifted during the mandate.