Issue-specific knowledge does not predict bailout attitudes, though general economic attitudes do play a role. Opinions on government spending within Germany extend to negotiations with Greece. Do Moral Values Have Borders? While much moral foundations research isolates each value or aggregates them into binding and individualizing dimensions, we contend that some moral principles can constrain others. In IPE and in foreign policy, state boundaries delimit how costs and benefits are distributed.
While authoritar- ian values tend to apply across targets, we expect that national loyalty will constrain the effects of caring and fairness. The results in Table 1 show that moral caring predicts support for policies that would ameliorate Greek suffering. Bailout opponents, however, might emphasize that each time Germany offers bail- out funds to relieve Greek citizens, it risks doing financial harm to its own public.
Both arguments stress the importance of caring for potentially vulnerable individuals but target different groups. We test our expectation that national attachment will weaken the positive association between caring and bailout attitudes by estimating the interaction between the two variables. Panels a , b , and c in Figure 3 plot the marginal effect of caring on bailout, austerity, and debt-relief support across national attachment.
Caring has a strong positive effect on support for aid to Greece and debt relief at low levels of attachment, but the effect diminishes as attachment increases. For the strongest German identifiers, moral caring has no effect on their support. Panel b suggests that caring drives opposition to austerity at the lowest attachment levels but not higher ones.
The results presented in Figure 4 provide mixed support for Hypothesis 4b. We find evidence for a strong, statistically significant interaction when predicting general bailout attitudes panel a.
Fairness predicts bailout opposition, but only among those who are attached to Germany and look- ing out for what is fair to their fellow citizens. Figure 3. The effect of caring conditional on national attachment. Figure 4. The effect of fairness conditional on national attachment. We present evidence that moral intuitions play a significant role in shaping individual attitudes toward a consequential issue in international political economy.
Moral values consistently predict preferences for the Greek bailout negotiations among German participants. Moreover, distinct moral considerations drive bailout support versus opposition. We therefore call for additional research that deepens the ties between political psychology, morality, and international political economy. Ethics are inextricable from economics, embedded in the very terms we use to describe economic phenomena—discipline, forgiveness, value, and moral hazard—and moral psychology can deepen our understanding of these links.
However, we add that authority, fairness, and retribution are key to a more comprehensive account of bailout attitudes and that fairness and caring are somewhat conditional on national attachment. Is this a uniquely German phenomenon born of the moralistic way in which Germans value thrift and fiscal stability? Germans are noted savers, which could have a cultural foundation. Yet morality played a similar role during the banking and housing crises of in the United States, a country known for its highly indebted households.
Those on the left decried rewards for highly leveraged financial institutions that played fast and loose with their capital and knowingly sold toxic assets for profit. Those on the right complained about irresponsible homeowners who took out sub- prime mortgages for houses they could not afford.
The bailouts remain tremendously unpopular in the United States despite likely having saved the financial system Harris Poll, A skeptic might also point to the role played by the German media, particularly the Bild Zeitung tabloid that was extremely opposed to the bailout. Was this perhaps a case of simple media framing, in particular tabloid press railing against the bailout? We offer both an empirical and a methodological response to whether German respondents were passive recipients of elite or media cues.
Another possibility is that the German narrative of the crisis has a preponderant effect on those who are predisposed to this framing in the first place.
We therefore test the extent to which interest in the crisis moderates the relationship between each moral consideration and bailout attitudes. We present the results in Appendix S6 of the online supporting information, where we interact interest with each moral variable in separate OLS models.
Across the three outcomes of interest, we find little evidence that interest affects the relationship between morality and bailout attitudes. In short: Morality shapes bailout at- titudes for both attentive and inattentive Germans, which suggests that citizens are not just passively replicating the government or media spin on the crisis. Perhaps more importantly, arguments that stress media narratives or elite cues presume a passive public easily molded in the desired direction, but predispositions matter Kertzer et al.
We believe that it is more likely that particular frames work better with some people given their preex- isting moral foundations. The Bild Zeitung, given the moral concerns of its readers, could not have articulated a probailout campaign that stressed the economic harm that austerity caused for Greek pensioners and widowers because it would not have resonated with its populist audience.
It is also likely that media outlets un- derstand their readers and choose frames they believe will strike a chord, thereby selling more papers or attracting more clicks. We do not claim that the media and elites played no role, only that if they did, it is nevertheless extremely important to know the properties of the clay they were trying to mold. We also stress that observational survey data is better suited to this task than experimental approaches.
We applaud experimental work on the bailout issue, which shows for instance that Germans in general react to who is receiving the bailout and what obligations it entails for Germany Bechtel et al. However, this does not tell us which subset of respondents are driving these re- sults and whether the effect of experimental manipulation hinges on preexisting moral foundations.
We see the necessity of both observational and experimental approaches as each has complementary strengths and weaknesses. Our findings have important policy implications. While some might doubt whether mass at- titudes on economic issues matter in practice, given the informational advantage of key economic constituencies and the low salience of trade in elections, neither condition holds in this case. The German public was highly engaged during the debt crisis, keenly aware of the debates, and over- whelmingly opposed to bailouts.
Even if the German government was not itself morally minded about debt—unlikely given the rhetoric—it is clear that the German people were. The moral attitudes of average Germans likely shaped the dynamics of one of the most important world economic events of the last century. Going forward, citizens may continue to constrain German leaders, who as recently as the time of this writing have stressed the need to meet austerity targets as a condition of the disbursement of loans and that debt relief is unacceptable.
Even if we think of political attitudes as a function of gov- ernment and media narratives rather than the reverse—something that neither this data nor extant research has fully adjudicated—we would imagine that once set, moral attitudes will resist revision. Morality will be hazardous indeed. This is one of several joint projects by the authors, and the order of names reflects a principle of rotation. Replication data and R code will be available at www. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Brian C.
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First, there is the social cost of a decade of failed austerity: the closed libraries; the mothballed care centres, the increased number of food banks. Second, there is the opportunity cost: all the infrastructure that could have been built or repaired had governments taken advantage of historically low interest rates and borrowed to invest.
Cutting corners to save money has consequences. Third, the global economy is far from healed. In fact, it has been the weakest recovery from any recession since the second world war. The US has done best of the developed economies because it was influenced by, but never wedded to, EFC. Last, but certainly not least, the old social contract between leaders and people has been stretched almost to breaking point.
Voters once believed that if they worked hard, they would earn a decent wage and the state would look after them if times were hard. If that belief no longer holds, what happened in Greece these past eight years has much to do with it.
It was even dubbed the Celtic Tiger, but it turned out to be little more than a massive property bubble. As a result when the credit crunch struck, the Irish property market rapidly collapsed, as did much of the tax revenue that it was bringing in. Ireland's banks, which had lent billions to builders, property developers and home owners then collapsed and the government bailed them out, took on their debts and almost went bust itself as a result. Ireland left the bailout scheme in , although it is now holding a public enquiry into why it bailed out the banks in a way that almost brought the country to its knees.
While there are plenty of countries both inside and outside the eurozone that have been in similar problems to Greece, the fact is that many of them used a period of tough austerity to force through painful reforms. This is not necessarily good news for Greece, because it is not just the Germans who are opposed to writing off Greek debt or bailing it out once again.
Ireland, Spain, Portugal and even Cyprus which is traditionally very close to Athens might all feel, with considerable justification, that they are being asked to give more of their money to a country that has failed to introduce the reforms they did. Certainly Latvia which not only reformed its economy but also joined the eurozone in is one of the harshest critics of Greece's performance and highly sceptical about why it should help pay to bail out Athens again.
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Volume Article Contents Acknowledgements. Bailouts, austerity and the erosion of health coverage in Southern Europe and Ireland. Alexander Kentikelenis Alexander Kentikelenis.
Oxford Academic. Select Format Select format. Permissions Icon Permissions. Conflicts of interest : None declared. Impacts of the economic crisis on access to healthcare services in Greece with a focus on the vulnerable groups of the population. Google Scholar Crossref. Search ADS.
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