Mitigating climate change requires countries to provide a global public good. Using a novel approach to estimate support for historical austerity programs, we contend that governments’ strategic crafting of policy packages is a key factor underlying the support for austerity. Instead, we show that the preference for austerity is highly sensitive to its political backers and precise composition of spending cuts and tax hikes. We develop potential explanations for this surprising preference and demonstrate the empirical limitations of accounts centered on economic interests or an intuitive framing advantage. Using original survey data from five European countries, we show that austerity is in fact the preferred response among most voters. We explore this puzzle by distinguishing public acceptance of austerity as a general approach and support for specific austerity packages. Nonetheless, governments routinely adopt austerity when confronting economic downturns and swelling deficits. The effects of austerity in response to financial crises are widely contested and assumed to cause significant electoral backlash. These expectations largely reflect differences in core beliefs about the promise of a free-market approach. Instead, we find that the primary mechanism is that left and right voters have different expectations about the impact of a Grexit on the European economy as a whole. We find that the left-right divide over the Grexit is not driven by differences in attitudes on redistribution, levels of empathy, or general EU support. We then develop and test a set of theoretical explanations for this cleavage. Instead, we show that the key factor is the split between the left and right. We contend that differences in citizens' own economic interests, as well as the often-mentioned chasm between supporters of mainstream and extremist parties, provide little insight into the public divide over the Grexit. What explains the sharp divide among European publics over the Grexit? We explore this question using original surveys from four of the largest European economies.
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