Professor Christopher Hood awarded an ESRC Professorial Fellowship

The study aims to explore (a) whether the politics of austerity requires a reversal of normal political and bureaucratic routines (b) what shapes cutback outcomes when expenditure needs to be reined in (b) what if anything is common across different cases (c) how governments shift or avoid blame from voters, and (d) what are the effects of such cutbacks? Those questions come at the intersection literatures on long-term government growth, on bureaucratic politics and budgeting behaviour, on crisis management and on blame-avoidance. The aim is to examine those questions across five different time periods in the UK and to put the UKs experience in international context.