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Austerity and Anti-Austerity: The Political Economy of Refusal in ‘Low-Resistance’ Models of Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2017

David J. Bailey  and
Saori Shibata
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Abstract

In contrast to much of the political economy literature, this article explores acts of refusal that obstruct attempts to impose austerity measures on advanced industrial democracies. It thereby complements a literature that has thus far focused far more upon the (apparently unobstructed) imposition of austerity. In doing so, it uses two typically ‘low-resistance’ countries – Japan and the UK –as least-likely cases and finds that austerity is rarely uncontested. Using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, it highlights the ‘causal recipes’ sufficient for both (1) anti-austerity activity to have a significant impact on austerity proposals and (2) the smooth (unobstructed) imposition of austerity. The politics of austerity is shown to be better understood as an iterative interaction between proposals for austerity and the acts of refusal they encounter. These obstacles to austerity appear more straightforward to activate effectively in Japan’s coordinated model of capitalism, whilst the UK’s liberal market economy tends to generate more innovative forms of dissent that (if they are sufficiently militant) provide an alternative route towards the obstruction of austerity.

Keywords

austerityanti-austeritypolitical economyUKJapanfsQCA
Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 683 - 709
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham (email: d.j.bailey@bham.ac.uk); Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University (email: s.shibata@hum.leidenuniv.nl). Details of each of the fourteen austerity proposals discussed in this article are presented in full online (https://antiausteritylowresistancecapitalism.wordpress.com/), thereby allowing both transparency and replicability. Earlier versions of the article were presented at the CPERN mid-term conferences in 2014 (Vienna) and 2016 (Ljubljana), EISA Annual Conference 2015 (Sicily), BISA-IPEG Annual Conference 2015 (Manchester), Warwick New Directions in IPE 2015, SPERI conference 2016, Colloquium on European civil society, politics and democracy (University of Jyväskylä 2015), Leiden Political Economy Group 2016, and the Workshop on Resistance and Alternatives to Austerity, Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA) at De Montfort University 2016. We are grateful for comments from André Broome, Ian Bruff, Phil Cerny, Liam Clegg, Mònica Clua-Losada, Crystal Ennis, Adam Fishwick, Niilo Kauppi, Nicholas Kiersey, Markku Lonkila, Phoebe Moore, Len Seabrooke, Liam Stanley, Wanda Vrasti, Jue Wang and Matt Watson. The four anonymous reviewers each provided extremely helpful and detailed comments, and Hugh Ward assisted us enormously in his editorial guidance. All remaining errors are our own. Online appendices are available at http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0007123416000624

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