Making ends meet. A bottom-up approach to austerity's impact on policymaking in defence

Abstract : Political science accounts of the debt crisis in Europe have highlighted the changes observable in national and European policymaking. These changes have vastly showed an emphasis on economic imperatives and more precisely on the crisis' impact on public expenditure. Defence policy offers a particularly interesting perspective on the politics of state adaptation to spending cuts. While being at the core of state sovereignty, this policy has not been immune to attempts at decreasing public expenditure. Yet, we argue that contrary to many accounts so far, the crisis' impact cannot be solely analysed through the mere budget numbers. Based on neo-institutionalism and public policy analysis, this paper demonstrates that actors have lessened the crisis' impact through their use of defence acquisition instruments. They have shown three strategies to decrease the impact of budgetary cuts: compensation, delaying and re-categorizing acquisition procedures.