The paper analyzes the impact of economic crises on organized civil society. A number of empirical studies have shown that a financial crisis can inflict a serious damage on the nonprofit sector—mainly through a sharp decline in revenues. However, the Greek case shows that a crisis can also have some positive effects on NGOs: many nonprofits introduced reforms that increased efficiency, the number of volunteers reached record levels, and there was a spectacular rise in funding by private philanthropic foundations. However, Greek NGOs continue to be dependent on external funding, unable to raise large sums from their members and the wider public. Organized Greek civil society continues to be turned upside down: dependency on EU and state funds is being replaced by dependency on private foundations.

This short piece introduces four articles from a roundtable discussion on Small States and the Global Economic Crisis at the 2011 General Conference of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR) in Reykjavik Iceland. The discussants were each asked to consider the role of size and EU membership in determining the effect and response of small states to the current economic crisis. The lessons learned from the exchange are conditional: it is very difficult to generalise about the effects of either size or EU membership when considering small states and the global economic crisis.

Economic prosperity is the best recipe for an incumbent government to be re‐elected. However, the financial crisis was significantly more consequential for governing parties in young rather than in established democracies. This article introduces the age of democracy as a contextual explanation which moderates the degree to which citizens vote retrospectively. It shows a curvilinear effect of the age of democracy on retrospective economic voting. In a first stage after the transition to democracy, reform governments suffer from a general anti‐incumbency effect, unrelated to economic performance. In a second step, citizens in young democracies relate the legitimacy of democratic actors to their economic performance rather than to procedural rules, and connect economic outcomes closely to incumbent support. As democracies mature, actors profit from a reservoir of legitimacy, and retrospective voting declines. Empirically, these hypotheses are corroborated by data on vote change and economic performance in 59 democracies worldwide, over 25 years.

In order to contribute to the debate about social entrepreneurship, we take an empirical perspective and describe the phenomenon in Catalonia, Spain, during the financial crises of the early twenty-first century. For this aim, we conducted 43 in-depth interviews with social entrepreneurs, launched a web-based survey with 90 responses, and built a database with 347 organizations and/or ventures settled in Catalonia with an explicit social/environmental goal. The data show that many social/environmental initiatives emerged during the economic crisis, either as a self-employment alternative to unemployment, or as a commercial venture started by nonprofit organizations as a reaction to the reduction in public expense in this sector. In addition, the crisis fueled the emergence of ventures oriented to non-market exchange and social currencies. As a whole, we argue that this new reality can be conceptualized as the emergence of an unsettled Strategic Action Field where banks, business schools and public administrations alike promote the label of “social entrepreneurship” through awards and startup services, whereas other groups claiming the same social/environmental goals contest this market-oriented definition of the field.

This article investigates prime ministers’ communication strategies during the most recent economic crisis in Europe. It argues that when electoral risk is high but governments’ policy options are severely limited, prime ministers will use specific communication strategies to mitigate electoral risks. Two such communication strategies are analysed – issue engagement and blame shifting – by applying state‐of‐the‐art quantitative text analysis methods on 5,553 speeches of prime ministers in nine European Union member states. Evidence is found for both strategies. Prime ministers talk about the economy more in response to both high (domestic) unemployment and low (domestic) gross domestic product growth. Furthermore, it is found that the (domestic) unemployment rate is the most consistent predictor of blame shifting: as the domestic unemployment rate goes up, this is followed by an increase in blame shifting towards banks, Greece and the Troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Political economists usually study small states to understand the secrets behind their success. This article examines the reasons for their failure. Greece is the most obvious example of a small state that has not managed to navigate the global economic and financial crisis successfully. But Greece is hardly alone. Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, and Portugal have also struggled in the crisis although they have little in common with Greece. Meanwhile, countries that share many Greek characteristics, such as Italy, managed to hold out much longer. This suggests that the explanation for small country failure is structural rather than country-specific. The implication is that all countries are potentially at risk.

While the economic vote exists in Western democracies, the question of its stability remains a subject of controversy. This article focuses on two possible factors behind the instability observed: the endogeneity problem and the restricted variance problem. The former concerns the influence of partisan thinking on economic perception, while the latter concerns the influence of economic crisis, when virtually all voters may perceive a bad economy. These problems are examined using panel data from the Spanish national elections of 2008 and 2011. After various causality tests, it is concluded that the economic vote was influential in both contests, but apparently less so in 2011. It is shown in the article that the initial 2011 result misleads because of the statistical artifact presented by the restricted variance problem. Thus, an alternative strategy for exogenising economic perceptions is developed using aggregate economic measures in a pooled cross‐sectional design whereby it is demonstrated that the economy mattered greatly under the economic crisis of 2011. This estimation strategy could be applicable to other Western democracies experiencing such economic crisis.

Since the 2008 economic crisis, social service providers worldwide have reported funding cuts, while the need for some social services has been increasing. This paper examines the combined and longer-term effects of such divergent developments on the nonprofit social services sector. The empirical analysis uses Austrian administrative data on six subfields of the sector covering the years 2003–2017. We investigate significant changes in the trends of four growth indicators applying interrupted time series analysis. We find that the 2008 economic crisis is associated with persistently lower growth rates in Austria’s nonprofit social services sector. The magnitude of this dampening effect differs across subsectors. Additionally, our findings suggest an increase in market concentration. Hence, the study discloses a long-term scarring effect of the economic crisis on Austria’s social services sector, raising doubts on the sector’s future resilience.

Research on economic voting shows that negative economic events typically reduce government support. However, we argue that external economic shocks may have the opposite effect: when faced with a foreign economic threat, voters will rally behind their government despite worsening economic perceptions. Using the unexpected collapse of Lehman Brothers (15 September 2008) as a case, we analyze European Social Survey data from six countries and find that while satisfaction with national economies declined, satisfaction with governments gradually rose. We document that rising media and political attention coincided with a rally effect fueled by past opposition voters and muted opposition elites. These findings demonstrate that foreign economic shocks influence democratic accountability and the ability of governments to act during hard times.

Ageing populations and slower growth have compelled governments in mature welfare states to implement fiscal adjustments, but uncertainty persists about whether these measures have successfully curtailed the size of the welfare state. This letter documents that fiscal adjustments reduce social spending more effectively than previously thought. Using data from sixteen advanced economies between 1978 and 2018 and the narrative identification of adjustment plans, I estimate cumulative multipliers with local projections. I find that fiscal adjustments persistently lower social spending, including key components of social consumption and social investment. To explain why austerity does not shelter the welfare state, I present stylized facts about the timing and composition of adjustment plans. First, while public investment cuts concentrate at the beginning of the adjustment period, social consumption cuts accumulate over time. Second, large budget deficits and financial crises are frequent antecedents of the most ambitious fiscal reforms.

This article examines the adverse impact of the La Niña phenomenon in Argentina from 1988 to 1989 on the country’s economy, which led to a profound crisis. The severe drought significantly affected agricultural exports, exacerbating poverty and inflation. The resulting economic downturn was triggered in part by the drought and precipitated a political crisis, ultimately resulting in the resignation of President Alfonsín and paving the way for the election of Carlos Menem as Argentina’s president. This study sheds light on the intricate interplay between climatic events, economic performance, and political dynamics, highlighting the vulnerability of countries heavily reliant on agriculture and emphasizing the need for comprehensive strategies to mitigate the socioeconomic consequences of natural disasters.

This paper examines the strategic use of public news media – specifically television (TV) – as an instrument of political influence, focusing on Italy's 2011 financial crisis under Berlusconi's premiership. Using an original large corpus of over 20,000 hours of televised news transcripts and a quasi-experimental design, we investigate how political influence altered media coverage and, subsequently, public opinion and electoral outcomes. Our difference-in-differences analysis, complemented by unsupervised text scaling of news content, reveals a significant shift from “hard” political news to “soft” news on public TV during Berlusconi's tenure. Findings suggest a deliberate reduction in hard news coverage by an average of 107 seconds daily, which significantly increased voter support for Berlusconi's party. In the conclusions, we discuss the broader implications of our findings for media independence in Western democracies amid the emergence of artificial intelligence-generated news contents and the prevalence of algorithmically tailored news feeds.