Abolishing politics in the shadow of austerity? assessing the (De)politicization of budgetary policy in crisis-ridden Spain (2008–2015)

Depoliticization has emerged as a key concept for explaining the legitimation of austerity during the euro crisis: in the face of growing social unrest over their austerity-based crisis management, EU and national policy elites would attempt to remove the political character of economic policy-making, thus insulating budgetary issues from public deliberation and party competition. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the actual success of depoliticizing strategies in effectively achieving these aims. By setting up a dialogue between two research programmes on (de)politicization that have developed so far in isolation, the article articulates a new framework for studying the impacts of depoliticization. Empirically, the analysis focuses on the process of discursive depoliticization of budgetary policy in Spain in the context of the austerity-oriented budgetary reforms implemented between 2010 and 2013. Methodologically, this process of (contested) discursive depoliticization is examined by developing a relational content analysis of the parties’ electoral manifestos and newspapers’ opinion articles on budgetary policy that were published in the three electoral campaigns held in Spain before, during and after the euro crisis. The analysis shows that the EU-led depoliticization of budgetary policy encountered important political limits in Spain, in fact paradoxically promoting a re-politicizing backlash