Sebastian Dellepiane

The politics of fiscal effort in Ireland and Spain: market credibility versus political legitimacy

National governments within the eurozone have had to face tough choices between the need to devise policy responses to stabilise market expectations and the pressure to maintain responsiveness and accountability to their own voters. As Hindmoor and McConnell argue in Chapter 1 of this volume, the dynamics of political competition between the main political parties are central to accounting for what governments choose to do. We wish to show that crisis conditions heighten the difficulties governments experience in bridging the twin demands of economic stabilisation and political legitimacy, and this plays out rather differently depending on the nature of the political cleavages and the degree of policy convergence across the main political parties.