Gendering Ideational Political Economy in the European Union

That ideas matter has become cliché in political economy scholarship (Hall, 1989). In particular, a key focus of the political economy literature on the European Economic Crisis and the Global Financial Crisis has been on the role of specific ideologies; austerity and neoliberalism (Blyth, 2013; Mirowski, 2013). Ideas are viewed as central to explanations of the politics of economic reforms, informing the literature on power centralisation, inequality and legitimation of authority (Snaith and Rosamond, 2015) However, this literature does not consider how social identity and constructed difference such as gender, class, race and ethnicity inform and interact with hegemonic ideologies. The role of gender politics in entrenching neoliberalism or the gendered impacts of austerity are absent from mainstream ideational political economy accounts of the crisis and subsequent reforms in the EU. This Paper follows those accounts by bringing ideology to the centre of analysis of the politics of crisis and reform. However, it departs from this literature by introducing the concept of gender norms to the examination of economic ideology. Using a combination of computerised content analysis and critical framework analysis, this paper examines the discourses of the EU’s new economic governance. This case study questions whether gender norms play a role in the legitimating communications of this new regime. It outlines findings in three key narratives to conclude that, indeed, the ideas of contemporary economic policy in Europe are deeply gendered. This paper illustrates a research design that brings ideational political economy and feminist political economy together, informing the debates in feminist EU studies and in European political economy.