Irish and Portuguese Healthcare Reforms in the Context of Crisis: Between External Pressures and Domestic Politics

The paper analyses the healthcare reforms introduced in Portugal and Ireland in the context of the recent economic crisis. The two countries were strongly hit by the crisis and in exchange for financing assistance signed the Memorandum of Understanding with the Troika agreeing to implement specific sets of austerity reforms in their healthcare sectors. This paper will focus on three aspects. First, it will compare the extent of Irish and Portuguese health reforms and situate them in the context of recent historical developments of the healthcare sector in the two countries. Second, the paper will analyse and compare interpretations of the reforms by the Irish and Portuguese government. Existing literature on policy reforms in the context of the EU sovereign debt crisis suggests that governments have used specific political strategies trying to shift blame for these reforms to international actors and/or arguing that 'there is no alternative' (TINA) (e.g. Armingeon 2012, Fonseca and Ferreira 2013). The paper will test these explanations on the two cases. Thirdly, the paper will analyse the role of domestic politics. Previous research has found that despite the external pressures the governments were able to use the crisis as a window of opportunity for policy change (e.g. Asensio and Popic 2017) and that political opposition played an important role in this process (e.g. De Giorgi et al. 2015). In order to account for domestic politics around the crisis-driven health reforms, for paper will compare Portuguese and Irish domestic politics surrounding the crisis-driven health reforms.