ABSTRACT:
How do political decision makers sell austerity packages to their populations that cut across their economic interests? This paper examines this critical question from a political economy of ideas perspective, and concentrates in particular on identifying and explaining the social mechanisms that shape how elite actors have sought to build social legitimacy for the necessity of fiscal austerity measures in the case of IMF bailouts in Ireland and Greece. Rather than empowering norm entrepreneurs to push for systemic changes in the nature and scope of economic governance, the paper shows how elite actors have seized the ‘window of opportunity’ for change presented by the Global Financial Crisis in Ireland and Greece to instead build a coalition of support for sharp fiscal retrenchment, with varying degrees of success in each country. By framing crisis management in terms of economic necessity and attempting to shift blame to regional and global institutions such as the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund, national actors have circumscribed the discursive limits of the crisis as primarily a problem of domestic spending rather than a problem of international financial and monetary integration. Overall, the paper demonstrates how the politics of ideas drives the policy consequences of systemic crisis rather than the other way around.
