A comparative study of budgetary discourse in the Eurozone

This project aims to study the balance between partisan responsiveness and governmental responsibility in the speeches with which finance ministers present their yearly budgets towards the national parliament. It does so against the background of the new European fiscal rules, which strengthen the institutional obligations that European member states have towards the European community, particularly in the field of budgetary policy. Against this setting, this project aims to explore the extent to which the partisan character of national governments has exited the budgetary policy-making process, and the extent to which meeting European budgetary targets has become the main criterion in legitimizing national fiscal and spending policies. Understanding this changing balance is an important contribution to the debate about whether and how the European framework for economic governance affects democratic accountability at the national level. The project consists in a comparative analysis of the arguments used by finance ministers to justify their budgetary plans towards the parliament in five Western European countries between 2008 and 2018. The countries selected are Austria, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. The dimension on which these countries are selected is their budgetary situation during the given time period, with Italy and Spain being cases of countries featuring large public debt and deficits, Germany and Austria being cases with a more positive budgetary situation, and France being an intermediate case. This variation allows exploring the extent to which the European fiscal rules reduce partisan responsiveness across all European member states, or whether instead this changes according to the country`s financial situation. The presentations of the yearly budgets have various comparative advantages. These speeches follow recurrent formats that are fairly similar in the countries selected. Most importantly, they are given in a setting wherein the finance ministers are confronted with a very diverse set of expectations, ranging not only from parliamentary majority to opposition, but also from European institutions to local constituencies. These speeches are thereby informative about the logic of appropriateness that governments follow in the drafting of the yearly budgets, and thus about the extent to which they aim to respond to partisan preferences or to adhere to institutional obligations. The method employed is a self-developed policy-claim analysis that allows mapping both the budgetary policy courses pursued in the five selected countries, as well as the criteria with which governments have tried to gain support for their policies. Thereby, the project will be able to make detailed descriptive inferences about the extent to which in the different EU member states there is evidence of a convergence of budgetary policy-criteria that is attributable to European fiscal rules, or whether instead there is a divergence that is attributable to partisan redistributive preferences.

Are governments more attentive to the demands of domestic constituencies, or to international budgetary rules? This project has explored this question for five Eurozone countries between 2008 and 2020. The countries analysed are Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The growing importance of supranational rules for national fiscal and spending policies has raised questions about the potential consequences for the functioning of national democracies. In particular, the theory had been advanced that under the new European economic governance rules, governing parties would be no longer able to be responsive to the demands of their voters, and that instead they were going be increasingly responsible towards European institutions. In other words, governments could no longer pursue socio-economic policies on the basis of domestic political preferences, as they are strictly bounded by the commitments undertaken at the European level. The findings of this project largely disconfirm this expectation. The research of this project has relied on a novel and original method for analysing how governments present their yearly budgets to the parliament. Governments' yearly budgetary plans are highly informative about the criteria that governments follow when developing their spending and taxation policies. Through a comparative content analysis of these texts, the project has assessed the extent to which budgets are presented as responsive to domestic redistributive concerns or as compliant to European institutional commitments. The expectation was the European economic rules agreed at the beginning of the past decade would induce governments to be increasingly and mainly attentive to complying with such rules. The evidence, however, shows the contrary. The analysis of governments' yearly budgetary plans, their policies and their justifications, shows that governments were particularly attentive to (international) rules between 2009 and 2013, but that from 2014 onwards they were increasingly attentive to the demands of domestic constituencies. This finding confirms that one of the foundational principles of representative democracy - namely the balance between responsiveness and responsibility - has remained intact during the 2010s, and disconfirms that the coordination of macro-economic policy at the European level necessarily reduces responsiveness at the domestic level. In addition to offering new insights into socio-economic policy-making during the 2010s, the project has also analysed governments' budgetary plans in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings suggest that the trend of the late 2010s of rising responsiveness towards domestic redistributive concerns was strengthened even more during the pandemic. Furthermore, the contemporary budgetary plans also signal a different understanding among governments about fiscal responsibility. While during the 2010s this was mainly understood in terms of short-term reduction of public deficits, in the early 2020s fiscal responsibility seems to be taking the form of investments for future returns.