OECD - Politics in the Age of Austerity

To the memory of Peter Mair, friend and model scholar, who passed away on 15 August 2011, while this book with his contribution was being prepared for publication

Copyright Armin Schfer & Wolfgang Streeck 2013

The right of Armin Schfer & Wolfgang Streeck to be identi ed as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7008-9

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Mabel Berezin is Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.

Colin Crouch is Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick and External Scientic Member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne.

Philipp Genschel is Professor of Political Science at Jacobs University, Bremen.

Peter Mair was Professor of Comparative Politics at the European University Institute, Florence.

Daniel Mertens is a Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne.

Claus Offe is Emeritus Professor of Political Sociology at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin, and of the Humboldt University, Berlin.

Armin Schfer is a Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne.

Fritz W. Scharpf is Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies, Cologne.

Peter Schwarz is Visiting Professor of Public Economics at the University of Gttingen and a former Research Associate at Jacobs University, Bremen.

Sven Steinmo is Professor of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute, Florence.

Wolfgang Streeck is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne.

Democracy depends on choice. Citizens must be able to influence the course of government through elections. If a change in government cannot translate into different policies, democracy is incapacitated. Many mature democracies may well be approaching such a situation as they confront fiscal crisis. For almost three decades, OECD countries have in fits and starts run deficits and accumulated debt. Rising interest payments and welfare-state maturation have meant that an ever smaller part of government revenue is available today for discretionary spending and social investment. Whichever party comes into office will find its hands tied by past decisions. The current financial and fiscal crisis has only exacerbated the long-term shrinking of the room governments have to manoeuvre. As a consequence, projects for policy change have lost credibility at least if they imply the redistribution of resources from old purposes to new ones. This is clearly the situation in those countries that were hit hardest by the Second Great Contraction (Reinhart and Rogoff 2009). In Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and of course Greece, governments of any colour will for decades be forced to cut and hold down spending.

In a number of farsighted articles, Pierson has outlined what he calls a fiscal regime of austerity (Pierson 2001a, 2001b). Permanent austerity, according to Pierson, results when the ability to generate revenues is limited while at the same time spending needs to increase. In the 1990s, three causes came together that were not present in the decades immediately following the Second World War: diminished growth rates, the maturation of welfare states and an aging population. The diminished growth rates had their start in the mid-1970s, and since then rates have been lower on average than during the trente glorieuses. After the easy financing era (Steuerle 1996: 416) had come to an end, revenues increased more slowly and, with few exceptions, public expenditure since then has exceeded government receipts (Streeck and Mertens, chapter 2 in this volume). In principle, governments could have counteracted this tendency through higher taxes. However, growing international tax competition has rendered it more difficult to raise taxes on companies and top income earners (see Genschel and Schwarz, chapter 3 in this volume). At the same time, taxing ordinary citizens more heavily through higher indirect taxes and social security contributions has become politically more costly, since real wages have also grown more slowly, if at all, than in the past (Pierson 2001b: 62).

On the expenditure side, Pierson emphasizes the maturation of the welfare state and demographic change, both of which he suggests are bound to keep expenditure at high levels. Welfare-state maturation means that today a much larger share of the population is entitled to receive pensions than when public pension programmes were created. In the beginning, a very limited number of people qualified for benefits, while the working population financed the welfare state through (payroll) taxes. This favourable demographic profile changes, however, once the first generation of contributors retires (Pierson 2001b: 59). What is more, in an aging society people will receive benefits for a longer period of time, whereas the number of contributors will stagnate or even shrink. In combination, these long-term trends lead to a mismatch of spending obligations and public revenue.

The financial and subsequent economic crisis of recent years has resulted in a vast deterioration in public finances. In all OECD countries except Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, the need to save banks and jobs has meant a sharp rise in public debt (figure 1.1). In some countries, it has more than doubled since the onset of the crisis, surpassing 100 per cent of GDP in eight countries in 2012 (Obinger 2012). High levels of public debt make it even more difficult to allocate resources from old to new purposes, since mandatory expenditures will tend to consume almost the entire budget. This puts pressure on governments to make unpopular choices. Responsible or, for that matter, fiscally prudent choices may be at odds with citizens needs and demands, in effect rendering governments less responsive to their constituencies (Mair, chapter 6 in this volume).

In parallel with the faltering capacity for discretionary spending, public fatigue with democratic practice and core institutions has grown. Turnout in parliamentary elections has been declining almost everywhere (Franklin 2004); electoral volatility is rising (Mair 2006); trust in politicians, parties and parliaments is on the decline (Putnam et al. 2000); party membership is collapsing (Van Biezen et al. 2012); and there is a noticeable gap between democratic aspirations and satisfaction with the way democracy actually works (Norris 2011). As opposition parties in heavily indebted countries can no longer promise not to cut expenditure in order to consolidate public finances, electoral choice becomes limited. At the same time, new anti-establishment parties have emerged or have gained new impetus in many countries (Norris 2005; Berezin, chapter 10 in this volume), and incumbent parties are finding it more difficult than in the past to stay in office. This book investigates what mechanisms may be at work to link rising debt and democratic disaffection. In this introduction, we focus more narrowly on the link between debt and falling turnout. After discussing each trend separately in the next two sections, we will discuss a number of direct and indirect pathways that seem to connect the two trends.