Welfare State Retrenchment Research Articles

Partisan Effects on Welfare State Retrenchment: Empirical Evidence from a Measurement of Government Intentions

AbstractThe effect of partisanship is disputed in the literature on welfare state retrenchment. The ‘new politics’ school argues that partisan conflicts are irrelevant to the understanding of retrenchment, but the second generation of retrenchment research concludes that such conflicts are still important. We engage in this debate by introducing a new empirical approach. Our method provides a necessary but currently missing link in the second generation of retrenchment studies which theorize on the input side of welfare state reform but conduct empirical studies on the output side. Our empirical approach entails a new type of data, compiled on the basis of content analysis of adopted laws, and we analyze the intentions pursued by incumbent governments in social policy‐making. Based on an empirical study, we find partisan effects in programmes protecting against social risks that are disproportionally distributed among social strata.

Why Do Social Democrats Retrench the Welfare State? A Simulation

Why do social democrats retrench the welfare state? Next to violating core social democratic principles, recent studies show that social democratic parties - and not so much other parties - are systematically punished after retrenchment by (severe) vote losses. We propose and show that the strategy a party employs - policy-seeking, office-seeking or vote-seeking - is crucial for explaining why and when social democrats retrench, because it influences how they respond to environmental incentives (economy, public opinion, activist opinion and opposition strategy). The intra-party balance of power determines which strategy a party employs. We simulate an agent-based model to examine the implications of the different party strategies for the behavior of social democrats regarding welfare state retrenchment. This model includes 1) agents (here: parties) with specific decision heuristics that operationalize the different strategies, 2) voters who use a proximity-rule and 3) a coalition formation model. To mimic reality as much as possible, we calibrate the model with real economic data, whereby these data affect voters' policy preferences. We find that social democrats with a vote-seeking strategy retrench when inflation pushes the mean voter to the right. Office-seeking social democrats behave similarly, but respond with a strong time lag to the economy and to public opinion. Policy-seeking social democrats do not retrench. Moreover, we find that when faced with a radical left-wing competitor, social democrats shift towards the centre - irrespective of their strategy -, increasing the likelihood that social democrats retrench. An empirical illustration of the behavior of five social democratic parties corroborates the simulations' results. To the welfare state literature, we offer a dynamic model that predicts under which conditions social democrats engage in welfare state retrenchment. To the literature on simulations, we offer an application of a model that makes predictions for a specific policy field, using real economic data and party decision rules.

Can Families Compensate for Welfare State Retrenchment?

Can Families Compensate for Welfare State Retrenchment?

Social partners and the welfare state: Recalibration, privatization or collectivization of social risks?

What has been the extent of welfare state retrenchment? One strand of the comparative political economy literature argues that welfare states have not undergone outright retrenchment, but recalibration. Another strand identifies a shift towards the privatization of risks and increased reliance on the market. Our article seeks to contribute to these debates with an alternative argument: collectivization of social risks. We employ a method of contextualized comparisons, examining three cases of collectivization across diverse contexts: the financing of disability insurance in the Netherlands, training provision for employed and unemployed in Greece, and regulation of atypical contracts in Italy. We conclude by discussing the ensuing political dynamics that the wider relevance of the argument brings to debates in comparative political economy and comparative industrial relations.

How It Works: Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia by Robert P. Fairbanks II

How It Works: Recovering Citizens in Post-Welfare Philadelphia by Robert P. Fairbanks II

Signalling a change of heart? How parties’ short-term ideological shifts explain welfare state reform

Do Social Democrats still expand the welfare state? This article argues that a time-constant policy-oriented expectation of Social Democratic behaviour neglects parties’ aspiration for other goals such as votes and offices, and therefore cannot explain why some Social Democratic parties have introduced welfare state retrenchment measures. Social Democrats can win votes and join coalitions by shifting rightwards. In contrast, they can pursue policy objectives by shifting leftwards. To communicate these shifts, in other words, ‘changes of heart’, parties send signals to voters and other parties before elections. This study analyses the effect of these party signals on the welfare state. Party manifesto data are used to compute the positive and negative signals parties send on welfare issues in their electoral manifestos. A pooled time-series analysis of 14 parliamentary democracies between 1972 and 2002 shows that Social Democrats enact retrenchment measures after having sent a negative signal on a welfare issue in election time, especially in the case of unemployment benefits. Most importantly, this study identifies when Social Democrats choose to retrench (part of) the welfare state, namely after having signalled ‘a change of heart’.

A discourse analysis of the social determinants of health

The social determinants of health (SDH) concept is common to Canadian policy documents and reports. Yet, little effort is undertaken to strengthen their quality and promote their more equitable distribution through public policy action. Much of this has to do with the SDH concept conflicting with current governmental approaches of welfare state retrenchment and deference to the dominant societal institution in Canada, the marketplace. In addition, many SDH researchers and implementers of SDH-related concepts are reluctant to identify the public policy implications of the SDH concept. The result is a variety of SDH discourses that differ greatly in their explication of the SDH concept and their implications for action. This article identifies these various SDH discourses with the goal of noting their contributions and limitations in the service of advancing the SDH agenda in Canada and elsewhere.

Narrowing of Public Responsibility in Finland, 1990–2010

AbstractPublic responsibility in Finland has narrowed in the last 20 years while the sphere of the private sector has been increased. The economic crisis of the early 1990s was not the cause, but an accelerator of public sector/welfare state retrenchment in Finland. Based on which, it was easy for the advocates of neo‐liberal reforms to argue that the changes were a must. The welfare state programmes however, are popular among the Finnish population and therefore large one‐time cutbacks have not been possible beyond the immediate aftermath of the economic crisis. This article looks into three different methods through which the Finnish welfare state has been gradually cut since then: (1) by not raising income transfers along with the rising cost of living and wages; (2) by reducing funding of public services; and, on the other side of the coin (3) through regular tax cuts contracting the revenue side. Welfare state retrenchment in Finland has therefore been achieved in a subtle fashion through slow gradual weakening of social programmes on one hand, and through cuts in revenue on the other that have left proportionally more in the hands of the wealthier. These combined movements have resulted in a drastic reversal in the trend in income inequality in Finland.

The Politics of Justification. Party Competition and Welfare-State Retrenchment in Denmark and the Netherlands from 1982 to 1998, Christoffer Green-Pedersen

The Politics of Justification. Party Competition and Welfare-State Retrenchment in Denmark and the Netherlands from 1982 to 1998, Christoffer Green-Pedersen

The electoral consequences of welfare state retrenchment: Blame avoidance or credit claiming in the era of permanent austerity?

This article challenges the dominant assumptions in the literature that cutting social policy incurs voter wrath and that political parties can efficiently internalise electoral fallout with blame avoidance strategies. Drawing on the diverse literature on the role of partisanship in the period of permanent austerity, several partisan hypotheses on the relationship between social policy change and electoral outcomes are posited. The results indicate that religious and liberal parties gain votes, and thereby are able to ‘claim credit’, for retrenching social policy. None of the other coefficients for the effect of social policy cuts reach significance, raising the question of whether parties excel at blame avoidance or the public fails to place blame in the first place.

Do voters punish the government for welfare state retrenchment? A comparative study of electoral costs associated with social policy

This paper studies the claim that social policy retrenchment has tremendous electoral consequences. It analyzes the electoral impact of social policy attitudes in a comparative design (20 elections in Western OECD countries between 2001 and 2006). I find that punishment is conditional on the performance of governments, indicating that people punish or reward a government for its past actions. However, empirical comparison shows this to be true not only for social policy, but for all types of issues. This study shows that social policy does not have the outstanding relevance for voters as assumed by the social policy literature; accordingly, the electoral impact is only limited and not equally strong in all contexts. The context shapes the link between social policy attitudes and vote choice, but the variance in effect strength is not explained by differences in the institutional setting or the campaign saliency of social policy.

Health Care Politics in the Age of Retrenchment

AbstractThis article examines the debate between the power resources and ‘new politics’ scholars concerning the politics of welfare state retrenchment in advanced industrial democracies. Both approaches make competing claims concerning the relevance of partisan differences in the current age of welfare reform. This article tests the new politics hypothesis that partisanship has had a declining impact on welfare politics over time through an analysis of the growth in the public share of health care spending in 18 countries from 1960 to 2000. Consistent with the new politics approach, the results reveal that the partisan character of government no longer plays a significant role in determining changes in public responsibility for health care during the new politics period. This suggests that the current period is characterised by general agreement across party lines on the broad parameters of the health care system, reducing the intense partisan conflicts of the past to debates over reform at the margins of the health care system.

How and why industrial relations influence party effect upon welfare state retrenchment. A comparison of the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and France

In the analysis of redistribution, not only models based on the territory principle should be considered, but also functionally structured redistribution like collectively negotiated welfare benefits. Combining the methods of difference and agreement with process tracing the article shows that, in the Netherlands and Denmark, the high level of development of functionally arranged redistribution explains the strong party effect on processes of retrenchment in pension; on the other side, the smaller room for manoeuvre for political parties in Germany and France can be linked to the dominance of territorially organized redistribution. Industrial relations and models of functional redistribution affect the influence of political parties on welfare state retrenchment.

Social Rights, Civil Rights, and Health Reform in Canada

This article challenges the conventional wisdom that health programs have been largely insulated from welfare state retrenchment. Health care entitlements have in fact been transformed and diminished, albeit in more subtle ways. Employing rhetorical discursive constructions about the nature of social rights, and capitalizing on passive policy drift, reformists have succeeded in altering the right to health care away from a set of collective obligations and toward the competing claims of individuals. As a result, public health insurance programs are abandoning universalistic principles in favor of a narrower conception of rights that is consistent with and supportive of increased privatization of health care financing. Discursive constructions aimed at persuading target audiences to change their ideas aid and abet systemic and institutional factors, making policy changes seem both necessary and inevitable. Using the case of Canada, I contend that such changes are a form of retrenchment.

Collective agreements on pensions as a source of solidarity

Within the literature of welfare state retrenchment, the “solidarity-decline thesis” is discussed. It is argued that the privatisation of pension schemes leads to a decrease of solidarity. On the basis of an empirical analysis of collective agreements on pension in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and France, this article discusses this thesis. It reviews concepts of solidarity used in the literature and develops a two-dimensional scheme of four different concepts. It is argued that pensions based on industrial agreements may compensate to a certain degree for solidarity losses caused by retrenchment policies.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Resisting the Neo‐liberal Poverty Discourse: On Constructing Deadbeat Dads and Welfare Queens

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Resisting the Neo‐liberal Poverty Discourse: On Constructing Deadbeat Dads and Welfare Queens

Even in Sweden: The Effect of Immigration on Support for Welfare State Spending

While the politics of globalization and welfare state retrenchment have garnered much attention in recent years, scholarly research on public support for welfare state expenditure is comparatively sparse. Furthermore, new pressures, specifically international immigration and resulting ethnic heterogeneity, add a new challenge to the welfare state. In this article, I analyse support for social welfare expenditure in Sweden—the country that spends the greatest percentage of its GDP on social expenditure and, until recently, remained relatively ethnically homogeneous. Results from multilevel models reveal that multiple measures of immigration at the county-level have significant negative effects on support for the welfare state. Moreover, recent immigration has a negative effect on attitudes towards universal spending. Thus, this analysis provides clear evidence that ethnic heterogeneity negatively affects support for social welfare expenditure—even in Sweden.

Radical welfare state retrenchment: a comparative analysis

PART 1: RETRENCHMENT REVISITED Introduction The Politics of Retrenchment PART 2: NEW ZEALAND: AN EXTREME CASE From the Post-War Settlement to the First Cutbacks Radical Retrenchment and Restructuring Retrenchment in New Zealand: Empirical Pattern, Causes, Consequences PART 3: RETRENCHMENT IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE Putting an Extreme Case in Perspective: Retrenchment Across Countries Explaining the Cross-National Pattern Conclusion

Veto Players and Central Bank Gold Sales

In this article I explore the effects of veto players in formal government institutions on gold sale policies in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Germany. One of the most active areas of recent ...

The Rise of Pension Fund Capitalism in Europe: An Unseen Revolution?

The pension funds have become America's new ‘tycoons’ – surely the most unlikely masters any society ever had. They have attained this position without any struggle, any crisis, any major ‘problems...