Title: When the Party's Over: The Politics of Austerity in Public Services
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: Background The prospect of a new era of public service austerity in the 2010s as governments aim to reduce debt and deficits presents intellectual and policy challenges that are central to the challenges identified in ESRC's 2009-2014 strategic plan. Yet there has been very little research on public service austerity in recent years. So what can we learn about how the party politics and bureaucratic politics of austerity works from previous periods of austerity in public services, to the extent that those previous eras reveal common features? How does international experience with cutbacks match UK experience, and how well can propositions about cutback management that have been formulated in earlier periods be applied to a new age of austerity? Aims The study aims to explore (a) whether the politics of austerity requires a reversal of normal political and bureaucratic routines (b) what shapes cutback outcomes when expenditure needs to be reined in (b) what if anything is common across different cases (c) how governments shift or avoid blame from voters, and (d) what are the effects of such cutbacks? Those questions come at the intersection literatures on long-term government growth, on bureaucratic politics and budgeting behaviour, on crisis management and on blame-avoidance. The aim is to examine those questions across five different time periods in the UK and to put the UK's experience in international context. Empirically and historically, the study will: (a) Look at four twentieth-century periods of public service austerity in the UK, namely the 1920s/30s, the later 1940s, the later 1970s and early 1980s and the early 1990s. (b) Match that historical study with real-time observation of the politics of austerity in the 2010s. To do that, I plan to draw on the work done by the ESRC Public Services Programme under my direction in the later 2000s to draw out what is the same or different about periods of spending growth and austerity for performance metrics, incentive systems and performance regulation. (c) Put UK experience into comparative context, by convening an international workshop on the politics of fiscal pressure, combining the four literatures mentioned above, and drawing on contacts to explore cases such as the New Zealand cutbacks of the mid to late 1980s, the Canadian federal spending review of the early 1990s and the Swedish welfare cutbacks of the 1990s. Materials The materials to be used will be (a) Historical and contemporary documentary materials relating to what and who was cut across UK executive government in the four twentieth-century cases and the real-time 2010s case; (b) Material in the national archives on three of the twentieth century cases (i.e. the 1920s, the post-1945 period and the 1970s/80s), to ascertain the options that were considered, what reactions they received and what the beliefs and expectations of the key players were. (c) Interviews with surviving civil servants and politicians from the last two twentieth-century cases, and interviews where available with those currently serving for the real-time analysis of the 2010s (d) Comparative information on key cases from an international group of scholars in a cross-national workshop, as noted earlier. Expected Impact The study is intended to be a culmination of several decades studying executive government, and I expect it to have both academic and policy impact, both in the UK and internationally. I will reach and dialogue with a national and international group of relevant scholars through the workshop project, as well as through conferences and published academic writing. The combination of historical, international and real-time cases also lends itself well to dialogue with practitioners, and I will organize several workshops for that purpose and/or speak in established


Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE