Institutional Fragmentation, Institutional Engineering and the Development of Elderlycare and Childcare in Sweden

This article seeks to identify institutional causes behind policy-specific retrenchments in the Swedish welfare state. During the austerity period of the 1980s and 1990s, the Swedish welfare state simultaneously experienced retrenchments in some fields and stability or expansion in others. Elderlycare is an example of tremendous retrenchment and childcare one of continuous expansion. A comparison of both fields suggests that the divergent trends might be related to different policy-specific levels of institutional fragmentation in the implementation process. In elderlycare, implementation was strongly fragmented between the central and local government level, with the central government providing only weak overarching regulation and the local governments enjoying considerable local implementation discretion. As a consequence, in this field, local governments had enough discretion to impose local retrenchment measures in order to adapt to the conditions of austerity. In childcare, a similar development did not take place because in this field the municipal implementation autonomy was severely circumscribed by strong central state regulations. It is probable that the different institutional preconditions in both fields have been shaped intentionally by means of governmental institutional engineering. The decentralized decision-making structure in elderlycare might have allowed the central government to induce blame-avoidant retrenchments on the local government level.     

Framing Deservingness to Win Support for Welfare State Retrenchment

Recent studies of welfare state retrenchment have argued that policy makers can win public support for welfare state reform by framing the issue in terms of deservingness of welfare recipients. However, this literature has not tested the argument at the individual level. Using a Scandinavian context, this experimental study investigates how alternative framing of a welfare state retrenchment proposal affects citizens' perception of welfare recipients' deservingness, policy support and whether perceptions of deservingness mediate policy opinion. A news story was manipulated to present welfare recipients as either deserving or undeserving of welfare benefits. This issue framing affected citizens' perception of deservingness as well as support for retrenchment policy. Opinion change was partly explained by differences in perceptions of deservingness. These results provide strong support for the effectiveness of the deservingness frame.     

Devine intervention? Lessons in systemic retrenchment from Canada’s most generous welfare state

This article tackles the importance of systemic retrenchment in welfare state research by focusing on two core elements neglected in the literature: the civil service and governmental revenues. Saskatchewan has possessed key ingredients associated with generous welfare states: a dominant left-wing party, a supportive bureaucracy and important non-visible fiscal revenues. According to the comparative welfare state literature, this is also an excellent recipe for maintaining a generous welfare state amid attempts, primarily by right-wing governments, to scale it back. Yet, most social indicators in the post-Devine years demonstrate that Saskatchewan can no longer be considered a leading welfare state in Canada. Reforms to the bureaucracy and a host of financial measures resulting in a near default explain why the Devine government was successful in its efforts to disrupt the CCF/NDP social legacy despite the fact that the NDP regained power for 16 years afterwards.     

‘Marx’ or the Market? Intra-party Power and Social Democratic Welfare State Retrenchment

Differences in the intra-party balance of power explain variation in social democratic responses to the economic crisis of the late 1970s. This article evidences this claim by analysing the case of welfare state retrenchment by social democratic parties. Welfare state retrenchment is electorally risky for social democrats and often contrary to their principles. Therefore cases of welfare state retrenchment by social democrats provide an excellent case study of the difficult trade-offs parties have to make between office, policy and vote pay-offs. The article claims that leadership-dominated parties advance office-seeking strategies and are therefore responsive to economic conditions and public opinion. Conversely, activist-dominated parties advance policy-seeking strategies and therefore support traditional social democratic policy platforms or seek more radical solutions. By comparing seven social democratic parties (Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK) between 1980 and 2005, this article explains variation in when social democrats introduced welfare state retrenchment.     

Choosing the path of austerity: how parties and policy coalitions influence welfare state retrenchment in periods of fiscal consolidation

What are the conditions under which some austerity programmes rely on substantial cuts to social spending? More specifically, do the partisan complexion and the type of government condition the extent to which austerity policies imply welfare state retrenchment? This article demonstrates that large budget consolidations tend to be associated with welfare state retrenchment. The findings support a partisan and a politico-institutionalist argument: (i) in periods of fiscal consolidation, welfare state retrenchment tends to be more pronounced under left-wing governments; (ii) since welfare state retrenchment is electorally and politically risky, it also tends to be more pronounced when pursued by a broad pro-reform coalition government. Therefore, the article shows that during budget consolidations implemented by left-wing broad coalition governments, welfare state retrenchment is greatest. Using long-run multipliers from autoregressive distributed lag models on 17 OECD countries during the 1982–2009 period, substantial support is found for these expectations.     

Different by Design? Analyzing How Governments Justify GMO Liberalization through the Lens of Strategic Communication

GMO liberalization can be seen as politically risky for policy actors; it confronts them with policy‐specific strategic challenges and incentives regarding their policy communication. This perspective has received much more attention in association with two other kinds of policies, welfare state retrenchment and foreign policy. The aim of this paper is thus to situate GMO liberalization within a larger framework and to examine how governments deal with this kind of policy through their communication. The analysis looks at the liberalization of GMOs in Norway and the UK to examine how their communication depends on policy characteristics as well as country‐specific conditions. The findings suggest that the communication of GMO liberalization differs markedly from the communication of welfare state retrenchment and foreign military interventions and that the typical features of GMO policies as well as the sociocultural context of the two countries mattered for how the governments have communicated GMO liberalization.     

Retrenchment of Social Policy by Other Means: A Comparison of Agricultural and Housing Policy in Turkey

Abstract

In many low- and middle-income countries, conventional welfare state institutions provide social protection only for the formally employed. In contrast, the rural and urban poor are often protected by “social policy by other means”. Based on a comparative analysis of two major unconventional welfare programs in Turkey, agricultural state support and access to squatter housing, this article explains retrenchment of social policy by other means. Agricultural retrenchment was the result of coercive policy transfer from international organizations in a post-crisis context, while the retrenchment of squatter housing was driven by domestic political entrepreneurs responding to decreases in the availability of urban land and the number of informal squatters. In both cases, retrenchment became politically sustainable due to functional replacement with more conventional welfare programs. This analysis challenges the narrow focus of mainstream welfare state research, provides an explanation of retrenchment of social policy by other means, and enhances our understanding of Turkey’s uneven welfare state development.     

Where Did the Bureaucrats Go? Role and Influence of the Public Bureaucracy in the Swedish and French Pension Reform Debate

This article has two key objectives. First, despite having been considered as a key element to favor the expansion and elaboration of the welfare state in industrial countries, bureaucrats have been largely ignored by the "New" Politics of the Welfare State. This article demonstrates that bureaucrats still matter in times of retrenchment, because they can facilitate or obstruct various phases of the policy process. The degree of independence of the bureaucracy vis-à-vis the government, the government's level of dependency and trust on public expertise, the locus of ministerial power, and political deadlocks contribute to either accentuate or decrease the influence of the bureaucracy in the retrenchment of social policies. Second, these elements are analyzed via a comparison of the pension reform processes in France and Sweden. This article argues that the French bureaucracy, despite its high degree of centralization and powers, has been far less successful than its Swedish counterpart. The Swedish institutional structure, the predominance of social ministries in pension affairs, and the trust given to an independent agency account for this puzzling outcome.     

Political Partisanship and Welfare State Reform in Advanced Industrial Societies

In this article we evaluate two claims made in recent studies of the welfare states of advanced industrial societies: first, that welfare states have remained quite resilient in the face of demands for retrenchment; and second, that partisan politics have ceased to play a decisive role in their evolution. Addressing the first claim, we present analysis from a new data set on unemployment insurance and sickness benefit replacement rates for 18 countries for the years 1975–99. We find considerably more evidence of welfare retrenchment during the last two decades than do recent cross-national studies. Second, we examine the "end of partisanship" claim by estimating the effects of government partisanship on changes in income replacement rates in sickness and unemployment programs. Our results suggest that, contrary to claims that partisanship has little impact on welfare state commitments, traditional partisanship continues to have a considerable effect on welfare state entitlements in the era of retrenchment .     

Why are the highly educated more sympathetic towards welfare recipients?

Stigmatising stereotypes about welfare recipients play a crucial role in building public support for welfare retrenchment. Existing literature finds that the highly educated are more sympathetic towards welfare recipients. This is surprising given the economic advantage associated with educational attainment. Furthermore, educational attainment has increased even as sympathy for welfare recipients has declined. I address these puzzles using three decades of British survey data and find that it is the socially liberal attitudes rather than the economic advantage associated with higher education that explains why this group is sympathetic towards welfare recipients. These findings reveal an educational cleavage in stereotypes about welfare recipients, which is based on non-economic concerns, and has implications for support for welfare retrenchment and policies such as increased conditionality. This cleavage is weaker in more highly educated regions, implying that there are diminishing returns from increasing educational attainment in terms of sympathetic attitudes towards welfare recipients.     

Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade-offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue-collar voters. Centre-right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre-right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.     

Political Reinforcement: How Rising Inequality Curbs Manifested Welfare Generosity

We propose a political reinforcement hypothesis, suggesting that rising inequality moves party politics on welfare state issues to the right, strengthening rather than modifying the impact of inequality. We model policy platforms by incorporating ideology and opportunism of party members and interests and sympathies of voters. If welfare spending is a normal good within income classes, a majority of voters moves rightward when inequality increases. As a response, the left, in particular, shift their welfare policy platform toward less generosity. We find support for our arguments using data on the welfare policy platforms of political parties in 22 OECD countries.     

Conditional Punishment: A Comparative Analysis of the Electoral Consequences of Welfare State Retrenchment in OECD Nations, 1980–2003

Do incumbent parties that retrench the welfare state lose votes during the next election? That is the guiding question for our paper. We analyse elections and social policy reforms in 18 established OECD democracies from 1980 to 2003. We show that there is no strong and systematic punishment for governments which cut back welfare state entitlements. The likelihood of losing votes is the same for governments that retrench the welfare state as for those that do not. Rather, electoral punishment is conditional on whether governments have the chance to stretch retrenchment over a longer period of time, and whether social policy cuts are made an issue in the electoral campaign. If other political parties and the mass media do not put the theme on the agenda of the campaign, and if the retrenchment can be carried out in small steps during a longer governmental term, governments may considerably reduce welfare state effort without fear of major electoral consequences.     

Welfare state reforms and mass media attention: Evidence from three European democracies

The mass media is conventionally assumed to play an important role in welfare state politics. So far, however, we have very little systematic theorizing or empirical evidence of when and how the mass media reports on welfare state reforms. Building on news value theory and the welfare state reform literature, we develop a set of hypotheses about mass media reporting on welfare state reforms. We argue that mass media attention is conditioned not only by the direction of reforms, with cuts getting more attention than expansions, but also by the election platform that the incumbent party ran on in the last election as well as by the policy reputation of the government. Drawing on a new dataset including about 4,800 news articles in British, Danish and German quality newspapers from 1995 to 2014, we find supporting empirical evidence of our expectations.     

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.     

How governments strategically time welfare state reform legislation: empirical evidence from five European countries

Abstract

Building on studies on the political business cycle, the literature on welfare state retrenchment has argued that governments which cut the welfare state try to avoid blame by implementing painful measures in the beginning of the mandate and expanding benefits as elections approach. In contrast to this linear relationship, this article argues that governments often feel pressured to fulfil (mostly expansionary) campaign promises during the first months in office. Consequently, cutting right away is not what should be expected. Instead, a more nuanced, U-shaped timing trajectory is probable with a period in the beginning characterised by both cuts and fulfilment of expansionary pledges, followed by a period of cutbacks, and finally an expansive phase towards the end of a mandate. This argument is tested on our new original dataset of legislative changes in five European countries – Britain, Denmark, Finland, France and Germany – during the last four decades.     

The Crisis of German Social Democracy Revisited

This article analyses the dramatic electoral decline of German social democracy since 2003. It argues that the SPD's decision, under the leadership of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, to engage in welfare state retrenchment and labour market deregulation during the ‘Hartz reforms’ (2003–05) demoralised the SPD electorate. The SPD subsequently lost half of its former electoral coalition, namely blue‐collar voters and socially disadvantaged groups, while efforts to gain access to centrist and middle‐class voters have failed to produce any compensating gains. While the SPD's decline from a large to a mid‐sized party is part of a larger transformation of the German party system, no political recovery is possible for social democracy without a fundamental change of strategy, namely efforts to regain former voters by offering credible social welfare and redistributive policies. The SPD will not be able to delegate such policies in a ‘convoy model’ to other parties, such as the Left Party; nor will a modest ‘correction’ of the earlier course, such as has been attempted since 2009 under the leadership of current party chairman Sigmar Gabriel, be sufficient to recover lost electoral ground.     

Governing diversity: Dutch political parties' preferences on the role of the state in civic integration policies

This article analyses political debates about civic integration policies in the Netherlands, so as to identify different conceptions of the role of the state in ensuring social cohesion by governing diversity. Drawing on the literature on party systems, it presents an analysis of political party positions on the role of the state in civic integration along two dimensions: economic distribution on the one hand, and sociocultural governance on the other hand. I find that while the large majority of Dutch political parties adopt authoritarian positions on the sociocultural axis in favour of state intervention to protect Dutch culture and identity, their positions diverge significantly on the classic economic Left–Right dimension. The most contentious issue in Dutch civic integration politics is whether the state, the market or individual migrants should be responsible for financing and organising courses. Thus, this article proposes an innovative model for analysing the politics of citizenship, which enables us to comprehend how citizenship policies are shaped not only by views on how identity and culture relate to social cohesion, but also by diverging perspectives on socio-economic justice.     

West European welfare states: The old politics of retrenchment

Analysing endeavours to restructure welfare provision, Paul Pierson proposes that the 'politics of retrenchment' is very different from the politics of welfare expansion. In particular, the difficulties of welfare retrenchment are not to be explained by existing theories of welfare expansion; and the 'old' politics of welfare expansion has little to offer in explaining the 'new' politics of welfare retrenchment. This article questions these claims. First, contemporary societal developments are considered in the light of three major theories advanced to explain the emergence of welfare states in Western Europe: the logic–of–industrialism, the crisis of capitalism, and nation–building. Secondly, focusing on trade unions, mainstream left parties, and traditions of governance, the current status of the political forces regarded as vital in building welfare states is assessed. The conclusion drawn is that the resilience of the welfare state in Western Europe lies less in the 'new' politics of 'policy lock in' and 'client interest groups' than in the persistence of the 'old' forces that led to the founding and expansion of welfare states.     

West European welfare states: The old politics of retrenchment

Abstract Analysing endeavours to restructure welfare provision, Paul Pierson proposes that the 'politics of retrenchment' is very different from the politics of welfare expansion. In particular, the difficulties of welfare retrenchment are not to be explained by existing theories of welfare expansion; and the 'old' politics of welfare expansion has little to offer in explaining the 'new' politics of welfare retrenchment. This article questions these claims. First, contemporary societal developments are considered in the light of three major theories advanced to explain the emergence of welfare states in Western Europe: the logic–of–industrialism, the crisis of capitalism, and nation–building. Secondly, focusing on trade unions, mainstream left parties, and traditions of governance, the current status of the political forces regarded as vital in building welfare states is assessed. The conclusion drawn is that the resilience of the welfare state in Western Europe lies less in the 'new' politics of 'policy lock in' and 'client interest groups' than in the persistence of the 'old' forces that led to the founding and expansion of welfare states.