The recent, individual-level literature has come to contradictory conclusions about mass political support for fiscal adjustment policies. Our analysis examines the origins of these diverging results. We expect that support for austerity critically hinges on how respondents think about the consequences of fiscal adjustments and public debt in a particular situation. First, we re-examine the results from previous, influential studies on the mass politics of austerity using surveys in three European countries. These surveys explore the economic reasoning that guided respondents in their fiscal choices, including their expectations of the national and personal economic consequences of spending cuts compared to higher public debt. In the second part, we study how respondents react when they are informed about the most likely consequences of additional public debt. We expect that they support austerity in times of crisis when a failure to reduce the deficit may result in severe outcomes, such as government default or high inflation, but not in normal times. These findings raise doubts about recent conclusions that austerity generally is the preferred option of voters. They also have important implications for the political incentives of governments and the political feasibility of austerity.