Coping with the risk of electoral defeat: – Greek and Spanish Parties in the Eurozone Crisis

For elected authorities, welfare state retrenchment is costly. The period of permanent austerity in the Eurozone Crisis is a case in point. Since 2009, governing parties in Southern Europe have to cope with the risk of electoral punishment for imposing budget cuts. And especially in Greece, the crisis has dramatically changed the domestic party system. How do governing parties cope with the risk of electoral punishment and what explains differences? Work on welfare state retrenchment has shown how communication strategies gain importance in times of fiscal stress. In particular, blame avoidance strategies are employed to distract responsibility and to justify unpopular reforms in front of the critical public. While this general expectation holds for all governing parties alike, left-right ideology (traditional party preferences in welfare state policy) and the party position in coalition governments (junior vs. ‘senior’ coalition partners) are expected to influence the perception of electoral risk and hence to impact both the general propensity to engage in blame avoidance strategies and the direction of the external blaming pattern: Research about responsibility allocation in times of welfare state retrenchment has shown that electoral punishment is stronger if government policies are opposed to traditional party preferences and hence, I expect stronger blame-avoiding incentives for left wing parties. Moreover, junior coalition parties are expected to behave in an oppositional way and to target its larger coalition partner whereas ‘senior’ partners have to find other ways to distract blame. In this paper, I compare strategies of blame avoidance for Greek and Spanish governing parties between 2009 and 2016. Left-right ideology as well as coalition structures help to hypothesize differences in terms of the general propensity to engage in blame avoidance strategies in the public sphere and in terms of the directions of (national and Europeanized) blame shifting. Overall, the analysis helps to understand party strategies of blame avoidance in times of crisis and moreover, it points to implications for the restructuration of party conflicts in Greece and Spain along national and transnational lines. The paper is based on a standardized content analysis of Greek and Spanish newspapers partly conducted in the Greek-German research project GGCRISI resulting in several thousand attributions of responsibility from party politicians in the public debate on the Eurozone crisis between September 2009 and March 2016.