Political Legitimation in Times of Crisis: Legitimating Economic Adjustment in Spain and the UK

European left-wing and right-wing governments made unpalatable policy choices during the Great Recession. As a consequence, almost every government had to justify unpopular decisions to increasingly sceptical electorates. The arduous task of legitimating the economic adjustment was complicated by two factors. First, policy choices were often antithetical to the partisan identity of the governing parties: in many countries austerity policies were implemented by social democratic parties, while the nationalisation of banks and rescues with public funds were supported by conservative and liberal parties. In those circumstances, policy packages could not be coherently legitimised through appeals to ideological projects of the left and the right. Second, external constraints such as the need to regain the confidence of the markets, respect Eurozone rules or honour previous policy commitments were often invoked as catalysts of these decisions. Absent such constraints –it was commonly claimed by European governments– these policies would not have been enacted. Therefore, confronted with the challenge of justifying unpalatable policies that were either antithetical to the governments’ ideological identity or determined by external imperatives, the question becomes how governing parties could successfully legitimise the economic adjustment. This paper argues that how governing parties choose to legitimise an economic adjustment depends, among other crucial factors, on the extent to which EU membership has altered the political, legal and economic environment in which these parties operate. I examine this proposition with regard to two cases: Spain and the UK. Specifically, I identify and compare the post-crisis legitimation strategies of national governments in Spain and the UK from 2008 to 2014 in the context of broader structural transformations taking place in their political-economic systems. The selection strategy of the cases has the objective of maximizing variance along the dimension of EU-Eurozone membership: Spain is a member state that dealt with the financial crisis while constrained by Eurozone membership and the 2012 ESM financial rescue programme, while the UK retained more autonomy in macroeconomic policy by rejecting the euro –particularly in monetary affairs— yet was still constrained by its dependence on financial services. During this time, both countries had left-wing and right-wing governments in office implementing policies antithetical to their parties’ ideological identities.