Abstract
At the height of austerity in the UK, many writers argued that the public accepted painful debt reduction policies because they chimed with ‘common sense’ experience of personal debt. However, while surveys showed public acceptance of austerity, there was little political research asking people what they believed in any depth. This interpretivist study interviews sixty residents of a southern city and finds that while the political economists were right about the ‘common sense’ of higher-income participants, it was not shared by lower-income participants. They do not believe personal debt and government debt are comparable, that they are caused by profligacy or that debt can be reduced quickly. The study highlights how important it is to conduct interpretivist political research into what people believe.
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Killick, A. (2018). What Do UK Citizens Understand About Austerity?. In: Rhodes, R. (eds) Narrative Policy Analysis. Understanding Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76635-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76635-5_11
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