Governments have great difficulties to design politically sustainable responses to rising public debt. These difficulties are grounded in a limited understanding of the popular constraints during times of fiscal pressure. For instance, an influential view claims that fiscal austerity does not...

The European debt crisis has uncovered a serious tension between democratic politics and market pressure in contemporary democracies. This tension arises when governments implement unpopular fiscal consolidation packages in order to raise their macroeconomic credibility among financial...

Governments have repeatedly adjusted fiscal policy during the past decades. We examine the political effects of these adjustments in Western countries since the early 1990s using both district-level election outcomes and individual-level voting data. We expect that austerity increases populist...

Political opposition to fiscal adjustments has varied significantly across countries. Our analysis links this variation to differences in congruence of voter attitudes towards fiscal trade-offs across political blocs. These differences in attitudes, in turn, coincide with the implications of...

Though governments regularly implement fiscal adjustments to avert crisis, voter attitudes towards competing adjustment strategies are still poorly understood. A conjoint experiment with 8,000 survey respondents in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Peru confirms that individuals prefer spending-...