Responsible government and representation in the Eurocrisis
Abstract
Peter Mair argued that increased demands for governments to work within constraints imposed from outside the formal chain of delegation, in conjunction with the declining strength of parties, were compromising the representative process. He recognised that the conditions of the economic crisis had increased these constraints and, in one of his last papers, he used the extreme case of Ireland between 2008 and early 2011 to explore this. More than three years on from his case study of Ireland, what has the unfolding crisis told us about Mair’s observations and about the political face of that crisis? This chapter examines the politics of the economic crisis and, more precisely, the relationship between representative politics and responsible government in a number of ‘extreme’ cases of constrained governments: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.