Communicating austerity measures during times of crisis: A comparative empirical analysis of four heads of government
| Date | 01 August 2016 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148115625380 |
| Published date | 01 August 2016 |
| Author | Pascal D. König |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2016, Vol. 18(3) 538 –558
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148115625380
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Communicating austerity
measures during times
of crisis: A comparative
empirical analysis of four
heads of government
Pascal D. König
Research Highlights and Abstract
This article develops a coherent framework for analyzing policy communication;
Conceptualizes how policy communication can be understood as a function of contextual
factors;
Empirically maps the policy communication of four political leaders.
Points to the importance of political competition and welfare culture for systematic varia-
tion in policy communication.
To what extent are political leaders’ policy communications shaped by the context in which they act?
This article addresses this so far largely disregarded question by means of a systematic comparison
of broader communication profiles. Based on a content analysis, it empirically maps how Mario
Monti, Mariano Rajoy, Enda Kenny and David Cameron communicated austerity policies, which
meant considerable cuts in the welfare state, during the European debt crisis. The findings suggest
that a lower degree of political competition manifests in political leaders’ communication in terms
of a more consensual stance. The evidence is also partly in line with the assumption that liberal
welfare culture allows for a policy communication that is more strongly based on norm- and
value-based justifications. Surprisingly, the expectation that the crisis condition led to a stronger
emphasis on the costs/risks of the status quo is not borne out in the data.
Keywords
blame avoidance, policy communication, unpopular reforms, welfare state retrenchment
Introduction
There is a growing literature that points to the importance of policy communication
for how welfare retrenchment plays out. A number of studies have examined policy
Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
Corresponding author:
Pascal D König, Seminar für Wissenschaftliche Politik, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg,
Werthmannstraße 12, D-79098 Freiburg, Germany.
Email: pascal.koenig@politik.uni-freiburg.de
625380BPI0010.1177/1369148115625380The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsKönig
research-article2016
Article
König 539
communication as an independent variable to explain the occurrence of such policies and
their successful implementation (Cox, 2001; Elmelund-Præstekær and Emmenegger,
2013; Elmelund-Præstekær et al., 2015; Green-Pedersen, 2002; Kuipers, 2006; Schmidt,
2001; Wenzelburger, 2011; Zohlnhöfer, 2007). This research as well as experimental
studies on the effects of policy framing (see for example Kangas et al., 2013; McGraw,
1991; Slothuus, 2007) strongly suggest that how governments communicate their policies
matters for public perceptions and policy acceptance. However, little is known about this
kind of government action as a dependent variable and whether such communication
shows systematic variance or is more or less idiosyncratic.
Existing studies are conceptually diverse, and there is no uniform theoretical perspec-
tive that would permit research to be more straightforwardly cumulative. Moreover,
research has mainly focused on particularly instructive cases and on certain aspects of
policy communication, such as a dependency discourse (Kurzer, 2013; Ridzi, 2009;
Schram, 2012; Schram and Soss, 2001; Wiggan, 2012), crisis rhetoric (Kuipers, 2006) or
an emphasis on party consensus (Bhatia and Coleman, 2003; Green-Pedersen, 2002). As
only some aspects are of interest and thus registered, the relative weight of different ways
of presenting policies remains uncharted. Moreover, while a number of studies offer argu-
ments that concern the question of how policy communication relates to contextual factors
(see Ross, 2000; Schmidt, 2002; Wueest and Fossati, 2015), these contextual variables
are treated very generally as resources or limitations and are not clearly linked to specific
characteristics of policy communication.
This article aims to address the theoretical and empirical gaps sketched out above and
to contribute to the existing literature in three ways: first, it integrates disparate theoreti-
cal assumptions from existing studies to provide a comprehensive theoretical basis for
analyzing communication profiles and formulates hypotheses about how specifically
context variables should be reflected in specific elements of the communication. While
the assumptions and arguments largely stem from existing approaches, the developed
theoretical framework advances the literature in bringing together, in a consistent manner,
aspects that count as relevant but have not been treated all at once. Second, the study
draws upon ample textual data for an empirical analysis of political leaders’ communica-
tion of austerity policies that have meant cuts in the welfare state. These leaders are four
heads of governments that enacted reform and austerity agendas with clearly unpopular
policies after the beginning of the global financial crisis of 2008: Mario Monti (Italy),
Mariano Rajoy (Spain), Enda Kenny (Ireland) and David Cameron (United Kingdom).
Finally, the analysis employs a structure-identifying statistical method to map profiles in
their policy communication and provides evidence of a pattern of differences and simi-
larities between the cases that can partly be attributed to aspects of the context in which
these political leaders operated.
Theoretical framework for analyzing policy communication
The communication of public policies is an inevitable task for policy actors. It not only
serves the purpose of informing the public about their reforms and legitimizing their
policy decisions, but it is also used to win acceptance for policies and to overcome
public resistance against them (Cox, 2001; Green-Pedersen, 2002; Schmidt, 2001;
Wenzelburger, 2011). Especially with unpopular reforms, actors face a strong incentive
to ‘compensate for the disappointment and loss of legitimacy that usually accompany
the attrition of popular social supports’ (Ross, 2000: 170). The public endorsement of a
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