Welfare state reform in times of austerity is notoriously difficult because most citizens oppose retrenchment of social benefits. Governments, thus, tend to combine cutbacks with selective benefit ...expansions, thereby creating trade-offs: to secure new advantages, citizens must accept painful cutbacks. Prior research has been unable to assess the effectiveness of compensating components in restrictive welfare reforms. We provide novel evidence on feasible reform strategies by applying conjoint survey analysis to a highly realistic direct democratic setting of multidimensional welfare state reform. Drawing on an original survey of Swiss citizens’ attitudes toward comprehensive pension reform, we empirically demonstrate that built-in trade-offs strongly enhance the prospects of restrictive welfare reforms. Our findings indicate that agency matters: governments and policy makers can and must grant the right compensations to the relevant opposition groups to overcome institutional inertia.
While we have many studies on social investment policies and their effects, we still know fairly little about the politics of social investment, especially in conservative welfare states, which ...provide the hardest ground for these reforms. What are the key conflicts in social investment politics? How do they intersect with compensatory welfare state conflict? Which coalition potentials exist? Based on a newly collected dataset, this contribution analyses actor configurations in German family policy reform processes since 1979. It shows that the development of social investment in conservative welfare regimes can only be understood if we conceptualize its politics in a multidimensional space. Income protection and social investment can be, and oftentimes are, two distinct conflict lines. Hence, political exchange and ambiguous agreements were conducive to a hybrid policy development: income support expansion coexists with social investment reforms. The findings show how a social investment turn can happen even in a least likely case.
The central political claim of Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism is that class actors, through the instruments of the democratic process, can modify capitalism. Where working-class mobilization is ...strong, left parties have sufficient electoral support in the political arena to alter markets politically in ways that decommodify and thereby empower workers. The decline of traditional class voting, however, has profoundly changed this dynamic of welfare politics. We show that the political support coalition for welfare states has been reconfigured through two processes. On the one hand, the Left may have lost support among the traditional working class, but it has substituted this decline by attracting substantial electoral support among specific parts of the expanding middle class. On the other hand, the welfare support coalition has been stabilized through increasing support for the welfare state among right-wing political parties. We discuss the possible consequences of this ‘middle-class shift’ in the welfare support coalition in terms of policy consequences.
Poverty, increased inequality, and social exclusion are back on the political agenda in Western Europe, not only as a consequence of the Great Recession of 2008, but also because of a seemingly ...structural trend towards increased inequality in advanced industrial societies that has persisted since the 1970s. How can we explain this increase in inequalities? Policies in labor markets, social policy, and political representation are strongly linked in the creation, widening, and deepening of insider-outsider divides--a process known as dualization. While it is certainly not the only driver of increasing inequality, the encompassing nature of its development across multiple domains makes dualization one of the most important current trends affecting developed societies. However, the extent and forms of dualization vary greatly across countries. The comparative perspective of this book provides insights into why Nordic countries witness lower levels of insider-outsider divides, whereas in continental, liberal and southern welfare states, they are more likely to constitute a core characteristic of the political economy. Most importantly, the comparisons presented in this book point to the crucial importance of politics and political choice in driving and shaping the social outcomes of deindustrialization. While increased structural labor market divides can be found across all countries, governments have a strong responsibility in shaping the distributive consequences of these labor market changes. Insider-outsider divides are not a straightforward consequence of deindustrialization, but rather the result of political choice. A landmark publication, this volume is geared for faculty and graduate students of economics, political science, social policy, and sociology, as well as policymakers concerned with increasing inequality in a period of deep economic and social crisis. Available in OSO:
This article discusses recent research on party politics and the welfare state that differs from traditional ‘partisan politics theory’. The traditional approach states that left-wing and right-wing ...parties hold contrasting positions on welfare issues, depending on the interests of their respective electorates. This view has recently been challenged by three strands of research, which emphasize (1) the effects of electoral change on parties’ policy positions, (2) the role of context, notably electoral institutions, party competition and the configuration of party systems, and (3) the impact of different linkages between parties and electorates (particularistic versus programmatic). The implications of these arguments for the applicability of partisan theory are presented, and theoretical and empirical issues are identified for further research.
The last decades have seen the emergence of a divide pitting the new left against the far right in advanced democracies. We study how this universalism-particularism divide is crystallizing into a ...full-blown cleavage, complete with structural, political and identity elements. So far, little research exists on the identities that voters themselves perceive as relevant for drawing in- and out-group boundaries along this divide. Based on an original survey from Switzerland, a paradigmatic case of electoral realignment, we show that voters’ “objective” socio-demographic characteristics relate to distinctive, primarily culturally connoted identities. We then inquire into the degree to which these group identities have been politicized, that is, whether they divide new left and far right voters. Our results strongly suggest that the universalism-particularism “cleavage” not only bundles issues, but shapes how people think about who they are and where they stand in a group conflict that meshes economics and culture.
Recent studies of welfare state attitudes in the knowledge economy find very high generalized support for generous welfare state policies, both among the working and the middle classes. Has class ...become irrelevant as a predictor of social policy preferences? Or do we simply mis‐conceptualise today's class conflict over social policy? To what extent has it changed from a divide over the level of social policy generosity to a divide over the kind of social policy and – more specifically – over the relative importance that should be given to different social policies? Answering these questions is not only relevant to understand welfare politics in the twenty‐first century, but electoral politics as well: only when we understand what working‐ and middle‐class voters care about, can we evaluate the role distributive policies play in electoral processes. We use original survey data from eight West European countries to show that middle‐ and working‐class respondents indeed differ in the relative importance they attribute to social investment and social consumption policies. Middle‐class respondents consistently attribute higher absolute and relative importance to social investment. We also show that this emphasis on investive policies relates to the middle class expecting better future economic and social opportunities than the working class. This divide in anticipated opportunities underlies a new kind of working‐ versus middle‐class divide, which contributes to transforming the class divide from a conflict over the level of social policy to a conflict over the priorities of social policy.
Welfare chauvinism and welfare populism as characteristic features of radical right parties’ welfare stances have become challenges to the welfare state. However, in order to understand how these ...claims may indeed affect welfare politics, it is essential to study whether welfare chauvinism and welfare populism attract voters beyond the radical right, especially among the mainstream right or even parts of the left. Results based on original public opinion data in eight Western European countries show that, contrary to widespread assumptions, welfare chauvinism and welfare populism divide the right more than the left. Electorates of not only green, but also most social democratic and radical left parties are consistently most opposed to discriminating welfare rights between natives and immigrants, although this opposition is weaker among left working-class voters than among left middle-class voters. Even voters of most mainstream right parties show only moderate support for welfare populism and welfare chauvinism, leaving the fervent support of radical right voters for welfare chauvinism and populism unmatched by any other electorate. These findings have important implications for the strategic situation of left parties and for understanding how welfare chauvinism and welfare populism may challenge welfare states.
Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policymakers’ main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on ...future-oriented “social investment” policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive variance in the development of social investment strategies. This is the second of two volumes of the World Politics of Social Investment (WOPSI) project, which systematically maps and explains different welfare reform strategies in democratic countries around the world. This volume traces the development of social investment reforms across the regions of Nordic, continental, and southern Europe, as well as central and eastern Europe, North and Latin America, and northeast Asia. The chapters in this volume study the impact of different structural drivers for social investment (e.g., demographics, poverty, demand for skill, or lack of an available workforce), the salience of social investment in the public debates, and the different political coalitions that led to or prevented the adoption of social investment strategies. The chapters are written by leading social policy scholars from different world regions. They all apply a joint theoretical framework (developed in the first of the two volumes) to explain the politics of social investment in a range of contexts and policy fields. Jointly with the first volume, the WOPSI project offers the first analysis of social investment reforms around the globe.
With the post-industrialization and flexibilization of European labour markets, research on social and economic correlates of labour market vulnerability and weak labour market attachment is growing. ...Part of this literature conceptualizes these correlates in terms of dualization and insider–outsider divides in an attempt to explore their political implications: this article is written in order to contribute to this strand of research. In this article, we propose a conceptualization and measurement of labour market insiders and outsiders, based on their respective risk of being atypically employed or unemployed. We propose both a dichotomous measure of insiders/outsiders and a continuous measure of the degree of an individual’s ‘outsiderness’. We argue that such risk-based measures are particularly suited for research on the policy preferences and political implications of insider–outsider divides. On the basis of EU-SILC and national household panel data, we provide a map of dualization across different countries and welfare regimes. We then explore the correlates of labour market vulnerability – that is, outsiderness – by relating it to indicators of income and upward job mobility, as well as labour market policy preferences. The results consistently confirm an impact of labour market vulnerability, indicating a potential for a politicization of the insider/outsider conflict.
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