Corporatist Countries Research Articles

A Cross-National Comparison of the Gender Gap in Income

This article examines national labor-market samples from two dualist countries (the United States and Canada) and two corporatist countries (Norway and Sweden). Labor-market location is less powerful in predicting income in Norway and Sweden where they have more inclusive employment policies. In Sweden, though, the labor-market variables are more important in explaining the income gap. Family effects (marital status and number of children) are weak everywhere but especially in Scandinavia. Nevertheless, because it is encouraged by policies designed to integrate employment and family, part-time paid work has a major effect on the gender gap in income in Norway and Sweden. Women, however, pay more of a penalty than men for part-time employment in North America.

The Politics of Growth Reconsidered

Our August 1985 lOP article directly examined a theoretical proposition which had been proposed but not tested in a number of previous studies within the field of the new political economy. Scholars had suggested that the effects of labor's political and organizational power on policy outcomes might be interactive and conditional, but had eschewed systematically testing this hypothesis, primarily for methodological reasons. We presented theoretical reasons for believing the conditionality thesis might be correct not just for unemployment and redistributive policies, on which most earlier studies had focused (but see Whiteley, 1983), but also for economic growth. We then employed interaction regression models and conditionality tables based on them to test the derived hypotheses. The small number of cases and presence of constant structures posed methodological risks. Nonetheless, the possible importance of the proposed interaction effects seemed worthwhile exploring, especially in light of the central role these variables had assumed not only in specific policy studies but more generally in discussions of whether parties or even politics matter. Jackman has now sharply questioned the results of our study. He argues that a factor external to our analysis, the outlier status of one case within our fifteen, and the operationalization of our dependent variable, all bias our results unjustifiably; and that once these faults are corrected for, the data fail to support the positive causal relationship between Left government (in interaction with encompassing union organization) and relative economic growth which we proposed. This was only one of the types of interaction we examined, but it is an extremely important one in light of the other studies which have shown that these variables (as embodied in corporatist countries) appear strongly associated with lower rates of unemployment and other policy outcomes. Jackman has also offered an understanding of politics which he claims explains why partisanship should not be expected to be associated with growth, or with other policy outcomes.