From Blame Avoidance to Victim Blaming - How the Rhetoric of the Inefficient Public Sector Enabled Austerity in Ireland

That public service employees have become the main targets of EU-wide austerity defies some of the expectations of the welfare state retrenchment literature. Since 2008, European governments have implemented wage and employment cuts in public services, targeting a large and well-organized constituency of the welfare state. Moreover, instead of trying to avoid blame, governments openly took credit for the confrontation with public service unions: they abandoned bargaining institutions and implemented cutbacks through highly salient legislative measures. This is the politics of victim blaming rather than the politics of blame avoidance. Using the case study of Ireland, the paper argues that it was the rhetoric of efficiency that allowed governments to attribute blame to the victims of austerity. This rhetoric enabled them to simultaneously pursue two strategies that Paul Pierson deemed crucial in the politics of retrenchment: obfuscation and division. The rhetoric of efficiency obfuscated the link between cutbacks and the decline of service quality, and it created divisions between workers along sectoral lines. It soothed the concerns of service users and demobilized private sector workers by referring to the allegedly inefficient operation and wage premia of the public sector. The efficiency narrative was also enhanced by the weakness of private sector unions and patient associations so that governments could speak on behalf of these constituencies. Finally, while professional unions in public services communicated an alternative narrative of service quality, this narrative could not encompass the entire public sector and therefore was not able to challenge the dominant government view.