The impact of parties and unions on welfare statism

Abstract

This article analyses the behaviour of parties and trade unions within the boundaries of formal and informal institutional frameworks and relates it to changes in the balance between social and economic welfare (the dependent variable). The analysis seeks to improve the existing models that account for variations in welfare statism by paying special attention to the varying room to manoeuvre of parties and unions and to the dynamic and cyclical character of the policy process. The analysis is configurative and based on bivariate regressions, thereby resulting in a hypothetical model that represents the relationships between parties, trade union power and the balance and level of social and economic welfare. One of the conclusions is that parties cannot influence the level of social and economic welfare, but only the pay‐off or trade‐off structure between these two components of welfare state performance, whereas the degree of corporatism can influence the level of social and economic performance, but not ...