Crisis management, new constitutionalism, and depoliticisation: recasting the politics of austerity in the US and UK, 2010–16
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Political economy literature has sought to explain the rapid shift from fiscal stimulus to austerity after the 2008 crisis. Influential contributions highlight the relative explanatory value of ideational or structural factors in contributing to post-crisis austerity. Drawing on Stephen Gill’s (1998) analysis of new constitutionalism and Peter Burnham’s (2001) understanding of depoliticisation, I contend that these frameworks offer a more useful lens to understand how post-2010 austerity in the US and UK was shaped by an enduring consensus on macroeconomic policy governance consolidating during the 1990s. Examining the role of fiscal mechanisms such as PAYGO in the US and the ‘Fiscal Golden Rules’ in the UK, and the operational independence conferred to central banks, I illustrate how Third Way governments institutionalised budgetary reforms and distanced macroeconomic policymaking from popular political contestation. Despite temporary lapses with this logic of fiscal restraint, as well as the rollout of historic monetary policies after 2008, I argue that these practices became deeply embedded within state institutions. Focusing on PAYGO in the US and the OBR in the UK, I show how policymakers redeployed policies and practices from the 1990s amidst the 2008 crisis to externalise responsibility for implementing austerity measures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".