Capitalising on Constraint: Bail Out Politics in Eurozone Countries (2008-2019)

In this paper, we explore the constraints on national executives in the five bailed out countries of the Eurozone - namely Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, Portugal and Spain since the beginning of the crisis until today (2007-2020). Additionally, we shed light on the policy-makers’ discretion and motivations to revert, or alternatively to keep, policies that had been taken under conditionality. We depart from the premise that, although undoubtedly constrained by external actors, the executives of bailout countries, have room for manoeuver. Consequently, the bail out provides reformist ministers with an opportunity to pass reforms that they personally favour but could not previously have passed. We also argue that the bargaining context and partisanship matter. We finally posit that, after a bailout, executives will select the measures taken earlier that are worth reverting (enabling ‘affordable credit claiming’). To test our proposals, we rely on the congruence method in combination with process-tracing and on the coding of all-important policies adopted under conditionality.