Electoral Coalitions and Policy Reversals in Portugal and Italy in the Aftermath of the Eurozone Crisis

This paper links patterns of deregulatory reforms and post-crisis reversals in Italy and Portugal with the electoral constituencies of political parties. Combining insights from the social coalitions and electoral behaviour debates, we link reform outcomes to the class set-up of the electorate in th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inSouth European society & politics Vol. 24; no. 2; pp. 233 - 257
Main Authors Afonso, Alexandre, Bulfone, Fabio
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Routledge 03.04.2019
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Aftermath
Coalitions
Constituents
Core groups
Crises
Elections
Eurozone crisis
Italy
policy reversals
Political parties
Portugal
Reforms
social blocs
social classes
Voter behavior
Voters
Italy
Portugal
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Summary:This paper links patterns of deregulatory reforms and post-crisis reversals in Italy and Portugal with the electoral constituencies of political parties. Combining insights from the social coalitions and electoral behaviour debates, we link reform outcomes to the class set-up of the electorate in the two countries by using the class schema developed by Daniel Oesch. We find that governments in both countries reversed austerity measures in order to protect core groups of voters within their electorate in spite of wide ideological differences between governing coalitions in the two countries. There is, however, some variation in the extent of the reversals across policy areas.
ISSN:1360-8746
1743-9612
DOI:10.1080/13608746.2019.1644809