This panel speaks directly to the conference theme of “Resilient Europe?” from the perspective of European policy elites’ ideas about good economic policy. While Europe has indeed shown resilience since the crisis hit in 2008-9, that resilience has manifested itself most of all in the maintenance of an elite consensus about the macro and micro-economic policies required for recovery despite any and all evidence to the contrary. From the empirical failure of ‘expansionary austerity,’ through the shift to ‘structural reform,’ and now on to the entire region running an export surplus as a growth model, disconfirming evidence seems plenty, but the resilience of bad ideas is indeed Europe’s main defining feature.

Matthijs and Blyth examine how the idea of strict fiscal rules has persisted since Maastricht, even though the euro’s survival has depended on the ECB’s going well beyond its narrow mandate. Henry Farrell and John Quiggin explain the sudden re-emergence of Keynesian ideas during the crisis and even more sudden collapse of those same ideas, by studying how the economics profession’s changing ideas interacted with economic policy makers’ understanding of their own toolkit. Jonathan Hopkin and Ben Rosamond problematize western governments’ fiscal deficit ‘fetishism’ as ‘political bullshit’ that should be analyzed based on the power of its rhetoric rather than the veracity of its claims. Vivien Schmidt, finally, looks at the resilience of ‘bad ideas’ in elite discourse during the euro crisis, even though rival ideas largely informed actual policy.