The politics of cutting public spending or raising taxes (or both) has dominated politics in many democracies in recent years. A new era of conflict has developed, with old political alignments being tested and new battles emerging over whose expectations are to be disappointed and who should be blamed for fiscal squeeze.
Do parties who cut spending always go down to defeat in elections? Are there 'best practice' cases that every government should follow when it has to cut spending or raise taxes to balance its public finances? Such issues have mainly been analysed from an economic or...

The UK is said to have been one of the most prolific reformers of its public administration. Successive reforms have been accompanied by claims that the changes would make the world a better place by transforming the way government worked. Despite much discussion and debate over government makeovers and reforms, however, there has been remarkably little systematic evaluation of what happened to cost and performance in UK government during the last thirty years.
A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less? aims to address that gap, offering a unique evaluation of UK government...

This volume identifies and compares 'fiscal squeezes' (major efforts to cut public spending and/or raise taxes) in the UK over a century from 1900 to 2015. The authors examine how different the politics of fiscal squeeze and austerity is today from what it was a century ago, how (if at all) fiscal squeezes reshaped the state and the provision of public services, and how political credit and blame played out after austerity episodes. The analysis is both quantitative and qualitative, starting with reported financial outcomes from historical statistics and then going behind those numbers to...