Economic change and labour market policy: Corporatist and dualist tendencies in britain and Sweden

This article explicates John Goldthorpe's recent analytical distinction between ‘corporatist’ and ‘dualist’ tendencies in Western political economies. By linking these categories to macro‐economic strategies, the role of trade unions and the circumstances under which state policy is initiated, this dichotomy can be of value in the analysis of these polities. The article examines the major characteristics of British and Swedish labour market policy in the areas of wage policy, trade unions and training and education as they relate to the respective macro‐economic policies adopted by British and Swedish governments. These provide examples of the presence and development of corporatist and dualist tendencies in these two countries.     

Election News Coverage in Democratic Corporatist Countries: A Comparative Study of Sweden and Norway

The study of political communication and election research has been closely intertwined ever since the end of the Second World War. However, there is still a troubling lack of comparative research with regard to election news coverage in different countries. Thus, the purpose of this article is to compare election news coverage in Sweden and Norway. More specifically, this study focuses on the use of different frames, such as game versus issue framing, episodic versus thematic framing, the journalistic style and the origins of the news stories in the two countries. As Sweden and Norway are very similar, and both belong to the democratic corporatist model of media and politics, this study follows the most similar systems design. Thus, the main hypothesis is that similar political and media systems will produce similar news coverage. The results, however, show that although the election news coverage was rather similar in Swedish and Norwegian newspapers, some significant differences were found. The article discusses these results using the concepts of structural and contextual biases.     

Sweden: The Fall of the Strong State

From the 1930s to the 1980s, Swedish politics was based on the assumption that social change could be accomplished through a specific political and administrative process. National politicians decided the aims of policy, government commissions of inquiry engaged experts who compiled available knowledge, Parliament turned the resulting proposal into law, a civil service agency implemented the policy and local authorities put it into effect. This rationalistic model of social steering can be called 'the strong state'. This article documents the fall of the strong state. It also argues that these changes to the output side of government have troubling im-plications for the operation of democracy. The reason is that the strong state model provided citizens with a reasonably clear idea of how public policies were – or should be – produced and implemented. As a result of the strong state's decline, the link from elections to policy is partly obscure, partly broken. The question for the future is whether the strong state will be replaced by some new model that provides the necessary focal points for debates on public policy, or whether stable norms will remain absent due to an inherently obscure division of labour within Sweden's policy-making and administrative structures.     

The Puzzle of Gender-equal Political Participation in Sweden: The Importance of Norms and Mobilization

Political participation is higher among men than women in most parts of the world. However, earlier research has shown that this does not hold true in Scandinavia, including Sweden, where gender differences are remarkably small. This article studies the causes of the Swedish situation. A conventional hypothesis is formulated based on research from other parts of the world. It assumes that gender-equal participation in Sweden can be explained by the lack of gender differences in certain political resource and motivational factors that are often analyzed. However, this hypothesis is not supported by the data, which instead indicates a female disadvantage with regard to both resources and motivation. Two alternative hypotheses are developed and shown as empirically viable. The first assumes that women more often adhere to norms that emphasize the importance of being politically active, which promotes their participation in politics. The second focuses on collective mobilization based on interests specific to women. In line with this hypothesis, only women are shown to be members of women's organizations and hold more radical opinions on issues related to gender equality and reproduction. These factors have a positive impact on women's participation, and together they explain a noticeable amount of the male advantage with regard to conventional explanatory factors. Therefore they are important contributory causes of gender-equal participation in Sweden, although other factors, not discussed here, also contribute. Quantitative methods are used in the analyses, and the study material is the 1997 Swedish Citizenship Survey.     

The Universal Welfare State: Theory and the Case of Sweden

In the existing literature on welfare state typologies, the concept of the universal welfare state is not defined precisely enough to allow for comparisons of universality over time and between countries. In this paper, I discuss some problems with the way the term 'the universal welfare state' has been used and I suggest possible solutions. Among other things, I propose that the term 'universality' be used to describe the provision of a specific welfare benefit independently of individual income and/or other individual characteristics. It should also be used to describe the coverage of welfare benefits rather than their size. Based on the theoretical discussion, a number of possible indicators of universality are applied to the case of Sweden in the 1990s. The conclusion is that, despite its economic crisis, universality in Sweden did not decrease.     

The Variety of State Capital Budgets: A Survey

In 1986 the staff of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget reviewed issues concerning the possible development of a federal capital budget. As part of this study, a survey of all 50 states was conducted concerning state capital budgets. This paper summarizes the results of the survey. According to the survey responses, 42 states have capital budgets. Of these 42, 37 generally borrow to finance some public capital and 5 generally do not. Of the 8 states that said they do not have a capital budget, 4 generally borrow to finance some public capital and 4 generally do not. The survey also found that the form of a governor's capital budget, the way legislatures enact capital spending, the coverage of the capital budget, and the method of financing capital vary widely among states, making it virtually impossible to define a state capital budget in a precise way. Large amounts of state capital spending, especially for transportation, are generally not included in state capital budgets.     

Differences Between State and Federal Public Forest Management: The Importance of Rules

In United States federalism, public policy responsibilitiesbelong to multiple jurisdictions. This article compares statewith federal public forest management. Data come from four cases,each comprising two forests sharing similar physical characteristicsbut under the authority of different governments. Systematiccomparisons suggest that officials in the national forest agencyface greater statutory, regulatory, and planning constraintsthan do state agency officials. These constraints require morepublic input and higher levels of environmental protection.Outcomes reflect these differences: federal officials provideless limber, at lower net profit, than do state officials, andthey transfer less revenue to local governments. Concurrently,federal officials make greater environmental protection efforts.     

The Impacts of State Capital Management Programs on State Economic Performance

Although the normative literature advocates systematic capital management practices, empirical studies investigating the tangible benefits of these practices are rare. Based on previous findings that public investment affects economic growth, this study extends the model of government spending and economic growth to investigate the effect of systematic capital management programs on state economic performance. Using panel data from 1997 to 2004 and the Government Performance Project's data on state capital management practices, the empirical results indicate that highly systematic capital management programs positively alter the relationship between the state's capital spending levels and the state's economic growth rate.     

Linking Social Capital to Political Participation: Voluntary Associations and Networks of Recruitment in Sweden1

That organizational involvement has a positive impact on political action is a well‐established finding in empirical research around the world. To account for this, theorists since Tocqueville have pointed to the returns in human capital, in particular ‘civic skills’, yielded by associations. This article, by contrast, is a study of whether social capital theory can help explain the same effect. According to the logic of ‘weak ties’, organizational involvement provides bridging social capital by connecting the individual to a wider range of people. As a result, the input of requests for participation increases and this ultimately leads to more activity. Unspecified in this argument, however, is what aspect of associational memberships is most conducive to such weak ties: the sheer number of memberships, or the extent to which one's memberships provide links to people of dissimilar social origin. In an unprecedented empirical test based on survey data from Sweden in 1997, it is shown that being connected to multiple voluntary associations is what matters for political activity, not the extent to which one's memberships cut across social cleavages. Moreover, the social capital mechanism of recruitment is more important in explaining this effect than the human capital mechanism of civic skills, since the former can account for why even passive members, not just organizational activists, may become more prone to take political action.     

The Politics of Occupational Pension Reform in Britain and the Netherlands: The Power of Market Discipline in Liberal and Corporatist Regimes

The politics of occupational pension reform has attracted less attention than state pension retrenchment. Yet, in countries with large occupational welfare sectors changes in company provision can be equally important for welfare system generosity. This paper compares recent occupational pension developments in the Netherlands and Britain, exemplars of coordinated and liberal capitalism. The paper argues that despite regime-typical differences in the nature and process of change, recent developments have also been remarkably similar. In both countries retrenchment and individualisation has left most citizens at risk of being less well off in retirement. Corporatist governance in the Netherlands has not challenged the overall orientation of this process, but has merely distributed the costs of retrenchment more fairly than liberal Britain. Instead, the constraints of the globalised financial market directed change: exposure to market discipline, reinforced by national policy actors and international market regulators, made occupational provision vulnerable to retrenchment regardless of regime type. Thus, the significance for levels of social protection of differences between liberal and corporatist governance models of occupational pensions may have been overrated.     

社会资本建构中的国家与社会关系问题

在社会资本建构中,应避免滑向忽视甚至排斥政治国家作用的社会中心化的误区。政治国家在良好的正式制度中使信任从特殊价值走向普遍价值中发挥着积极的作用。一个综合的社会资本建构模型应该是将国家和社会都纳入进来,在国家和社会的相互监督、相互协调、相互合作中克服国家干预的失效和社会的非自主性,既有自上而下的有效控制,又有自下而上的有力推动,真正实现上下的良性互动,提升社会资本存量,实现人际信任与制度信任的有机统一。     

Determinants of inflationary performance: Corporatist structures vs. central bank autonomy

Thanks go to John Aldrich, Robert Bates, William Bernhard, Richard Burdekin, Henry Chappel, Dudley Wallace and Thomas Willett for suggestions and to Ted Smith for computational assistance.     

Coping with economic integration: Corporatist strategies in Germany and Austria in the 1990s

While Germany is facing the wholesale disorganisation of sectoral collective bargaining, the Austrian social partnership has gained new strength in the 1990s. Comparatively, Austro‐corporatism proved able to undergo a process of skilful adaptation. This divergence in performance poses a puzzle, given Germany's commanding presence both in international markets and in the European Union, and given Austria's traditional hostility to modernisation. This article explains German—Austrian differences in the performance and resilience of corporatist governance in the face of modernisation and market integration in terms of (i) the organisational differences between German and Austrian corporatism (sectoral concentration versus vertical centralisation and little horizontal formalisation); (ii) the long term policy strategies employed by labour unions in either system (co‐determination versus macro‐level policy influence); and (Hi) by the different responses to modernisation chosen by German and Austrian corporatist actors (internal organisational reforms verus becoming modernisation brokers).