Whispers Aloud: How Democratic Values Shapes Narrative During Austerity

What makes countries behave differently when they are forced to implement contested policies? I use the cases of Spain and Portugal in the aftermath of the Great Recession – the austerity era – to see how countries with similar economic hardship, political history and the same governments at the time followed opposing paths to austerity imposition. Although the Troika intervened in Portugal, evidence shows that Spain implemented more stringent austerity policies than Portugal. Why? I argue that the different types of transition to democracy - reform and continuity in Spain and radical change through a revolution in Portugal - explain their diverging implementation of austerity measures in the future. Building on Robert Fishman’s “democratic practices” concept, I expect that the effect of each transition creates a cultural legacy that intervenes in how Spain and Portugal understand the economic and policy changes of the moment, thus adapting different strategies to navigate hard economic times. I provide evidence from a Computational Text Analysis based on the mainstream media (El País and El Mundo in Spain and Público and Diário de Notícias in Portugal) to confirm how national discourse around austerity is presented is still related to the democratic expectancies set in the 1970s.