Description
Scholars in critical political economy have advanced numerous explanations of the rapid adoption of fiscal austerity measures in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, including the ideological salience of the ‘dangerous idea’ of austerity (Blyth, 2013), the politics of blame shifting and electoral governance (Gamble, 2015; Stanley, 2016), and the structural power of lenders (Streeck, 2014). This paper argues that post-crisis austerity in the US and UK cannot be explained solely as the outcome of electoral political strategies, nor by the abstract structural power of capital. Rather, I suggest that it should be understood as an extension and deepening of institutionally embedded state policies and practices of ‘new constitutionalism’ (Gill, 1998; Gill & Cutler, 2014). Throughout the 1990s, the US and UK adopted budgetary measures intended to establish credible commitments to ‘price stability’ and fiscal discipline by subjecting public borrowing and spending to mechanisms of automatic restraint and technocratic governance. I argue that these practices became deeply embedded within US and UK state institutions. In the aftermath of 2008, I contend that politicians and policymakers in both countries drew on and extended salient new constitutionalist fiscal and budgetary measures, establishing a range of executive oversight bodies and attempting to institutionalize budget balancing and deficit consolidation through rules-based restrictions. While the trajectories of austerity differed in each country, I argue that these policies and practices provided the institutional impetus to externalize responsibility for the imposition of austerity measures. This paper is comprised of four sections. The first section reviews literature in critical political economy on post-2008 austerity measures. The second section provides an historical analysis of ‘new constitutionalism’ within the US and UK throughout the 1990s. The third section then examines the fiscal responses of each country in the aftermath of 2008. The fourth and concluding section briefly examines the post-2016 period, assessing possible ruptures with the policies and practices of austerity.
