Responsibility and Responsiveness of Political Parties during the Financial Crisis

The reform process of the European economic governance has become politicized in all societies of the eurozone states: never before European economic or monetary issues featured so high on the public agenda, never before trust in national and European institutions – and the assessment of their efficiency – featured so low. Yet, the legal reform process continued despite rapidly growing social contestation. Scholars explained the persistence of political actors in implementation of unpopular reforms with the notion of international interdependence (Rose, 2014; Bohle, 2014). It has been observed that political parties in debtor and creditor states accommodate the tension between the domestic and international demands in a different manner, namely, while governments of the bailout states give priority to international obligations sacrificing their voters’ interests, governments in creditor states attain their international obligations unless their voters accept it (Bohle, 2014). However, that relationship has not been analyzed systematically yet: by now the literature focused rather unsystematically either on governments' politics or public opinion. This article aims to fill the gap by analyzing how national parliamentary opposition and governing parties in creditor and debtor states voted on the following anti-crisis measures: the EFSF (establishment of the fund and the increase of its budgetary capacity), the ESM and the Fiscal Compact. The article test the impact of domestic variables (public opinion, institutional and ideological factors affecting national parliamentary parties) and the impact of international financial obligations. The states under study are: Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxemburg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.