One of the key aims of “The Politics of Austerity and Public Policy Reform in the EU”, Political Studies Review symposium is to reconsider the theoretical tools available for understanding political and policy responses to the Eurozone crisis. Current EU developments and national reactions to it force us to revive and redesign classic theories such as corporatism but also to rethink and advance more recent approaches such as Europeanisation. A crucial point to be made is that interdisciplinary research and the exchange of approaches, data and results across the social sciences is a sine qua non given the increasing complexity of crises. The articles in this symposium draw upon the disciplines of politics, sociology, international relations, international political economy, economics, and EU studies, showing that it is exactly this plurality that can lead to theoretical innovation and the generation of valuable empirical data. The articles also demonstrate, the current policy course of extreme austerity has had dramatic distributional and economic circumstances, especially in Southern Europe. Specific cases of Greece and Spain are analyzed.