Political parties,globalization and labour strength: Assessing differences across welfare state programs

This article investigates how globalization and organized labour condition partisan effects on different welfare state programs. The main argument is that the conditional effect of globalization on government partisanship depends on how relevant a program is to the needs of vulnerable groups and that organized labour additionally affects this relationship. Analyzing 21 OECD countries between 1980 and 2011/2014, empirical evidence largely corroborates this argument: Firstly, the expectation that partisan differences decrease with globalization in general and especially in weak labour countries in the case of programs that are less relevant for compensation holds true for old-age provision and partly for sick pay insurance. Secondly, and in accordance with theoretical expectations concerning programs that are primarily relevant for compensation, partisan differences increase with globalization, in general regarding education and only in strong labour countries regarding unemployment benefits. Therefore, while globalization constrains national politics’ room for manoeuvre in some areas, parties are still able to follow their ideologically preferred policies and respond to compensation demands in others.     

Migrant Workers or Working Women? Comparing Labour Supply Policies in Post-War Europe

ABSTRACT

Why did some European countries choose migrant labour to expand their labour force in the decades that followed World War II, while others opted for measures to expand female employment via welfare expansion? The paper argues that gender norms and the political strength of the left were important structuring factors in these choices. Female employment required a substantial expansion of state intervention (e.g. childcare; paid maternity leave). Meanwhile, migrant recruitment required minimal public investments, at least in the short term, and preserved traditional gender roles. Using the contrasting cases of Sweden and Switzerland, the article argues that the combination of a weak left (labour unions and social democratic parties) and conservative gender norms fostered the massive expansion of foreign labour and a late development of female labour force participation in Switzerland. In contrast, more progressive gender norms and a strong labour movement put an early end to guest worker programmes in Sweden, and paved the way for policies to promote female labour force participation.     

Nordic labour market policies in transition

This article provides an overview of the Nordic labour market policies targeted to promote employment and reduce open unemployment since the early 1980s. Applying a disentangled approach, the goal is to analyse the policies of stimulating employment, the policies of influencing labour supply and, finally, active and passive labour market policies. It is argued that the employment crises of the early 1990s were mainly caused by domestic factors and, partly as a way to react to the challenge, the Nordic countries learned to use labour force supply as a policy instrument to combat unemployment. Additionally, the Nordic countries choose different ways to adapt to the imperatives of the globalised economy, hence, at the beginning of the new millennium, Nordic labour market policies are in flux.     

Between workfare and enablement – The different paths to transformation of the welfare state: A comparative analysis of activating labour market policies

Abstract.  The concepts that address different paths to transformation of the welfare state as a 'workfare', an 'enabling' or an 'activating' state share the idea that traditional welfare policies, mostly aiming at decommodification, are more and more replaced by social policies emphasising (re-)commodification. Activating labour market policy therefore is supposed to play a central role within the paradigm shift of welfare state policies. It is understood to involve a mix of the enforcement of labour market participation, the conditioning of rights and growing obligations of the individual at one side, and an increase of services in order to promote employability and restore social equity at the other. In this article, the different perceptions of the workfare and the enabling state perspectives on the positive and negative aspects of activating policies are reconstructed as 'pure forms' in order to obtain theoretical standards against which the empirical cases of activating labour market policies in Denmark, the United Kingdom and Germany are characterised and compared. The actual reform path is described by a combination of two indicators: the strength of the workfare and the strength of the enabling elements of the activating labour market policies. The evidence on activating labour market reforms confirms that in both dimensions a move in the same direction is taking place, but without producing growing convergence. Different welfare state types keep on producing different mixes of workfare and enabling policies, leading to very different levels of decommodification and (re-)commodification. Thus, an ongoing divergence of policies also exists within the new paradigm of an activating labour market policy, although single countries seem to change their alignment to a particular welfare state type.     

New town,new capital,new workplace? The employment relations of a Japnese inward investors in West Midlands new town

In this paper we examine the chracter of employment and industrial relatins withing new manufacturing industry in a new-town setting. We show how a combination ofnational and local state initiatives generated a new patterno of manuafacturin, dominated by foreign-owned companies. Drawing from extensive fieldwork in Japanese firms, we demonstrate,contra the ‘japanization’ thesis, that greenfield sites do not proved employers with unconstained opportunities to control labour. Rather, we highlight how capoital-labour relations development through interaction between large firms, state agencies and workers, producing an evoling and contested new employment settlement. Our analysis also undelines the limits confronting local state development strategies under a neo-liberal state regime.     

Class Power and Participatory Equality: Attitudes towards Economic Democracy in Denmark and Sweden*

Proposals for capital sharing (i.e. the spreading of ownership rights to productive assets), also known as 'economic democracy', have been advanced by the trade unions in both Denmark and Sweden. In view of their redistributive intent, these schemes have met surprisingly little enthusiastic response in traditional labor constituencies. The article makes an attempt to explain why . An examination of wage earner attitudes (which goes into greater detail for Denmark) shows that the presently entertained proposals appeal in a cross-cutting manner to conflictual notions of class power and participatory opportunity. The result is a fragmentation of wage earner support.     

城市反贫困:政策比较与中国关怀

随着农村贫困人口的空间转换,城市未来将成为贫困问题凸显的集中地,为完成城市减贫目标,必须回到城市反贫困的政策之中。当前中国在城市反贫困政策上存在定位偏差、目标偏差和执行偏差的情况,救助政策侧重于消极保护,救助对象范围较小,政策之间难以衔接。为解决这些问题,须结合国外发达国家和发展中国家反贫困实践的经验,从定位转型、目标扩展和政策衔接三个方面入手,建设以积极支持为主要内容、以城市居民和新贫困群体为主要对象、"网式"服务的反贫困政策体系。     

The Labour Market Regimes in the Nordic Countries: A Comparative Analysis

The aim of the article is to discuss the differences between the labour market regimes in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland in a historical perspective. The foundations of the regimes were laid more than 100 years ago. Differences in labour market institutions and practices are in fact substantial, particularly as regards the role of the state in collective bargaining and conflict resolution, but also in connection with incomes policy. While the state for a long time has played a significant role in Denmark and Norway, mainly concerning conflict resolution, and in Finland since the 1960s in the form of comprehensive incomes policy agreements, a doctrine of freedom of the labour market from state intervention has dominated in Sweden. These divergences can to a great extent be explained by differences in the democratization process and the organizational structure, particularly in the trade unions, which reflect different timing and structure in the process of industrialization. 'Path dependency' has been strong in the North. The main elements of the four national labour market regimes are still there, such as trade union fragmentation and strong instruments for conflict resolution in Denmark and Norway, relatively advanced social partner responsibility for bargaining outcomes and conflict resolution in Sweden (although sometimes against the background of threats of state intervention), and almost continuous tripartite consultation in Finland as a stabilizing element in a much more turbulent political environment than in the neighbouring countries. There are no clear tendencies towards convergence between the Nordic labour market regimes.     

国际关系中的世界城市:世界体系论的视角

论文在简要回顾了世界体系论的主要观点的基础上,系统地总结了从世界体系角度出发的世界城市理论。该理论认为,世界城市的性质、地位和内部特征都由世界经济体系所决定,随着劳动分工、资本控制的变化而变化;在信息时代和全球化的背景下,世界城市承担着国际生产、金融和资本控制中心的职能,实现着最大化的剩余价值抽取;跨国资本阶层是世界城市的主人和主要受益者,中低收入阶层、移民等群体的处境却在恶化;世界城市由于在金融、生产性服务业和企业总部等方面的集中性程度的差异,构成了一个以中心和半边缘地带的世界城市为核心、世界其他地区为边缘的世界城市体系。论文的最后对从世界体系角度出发的世界城市理论进行了简要的总结、评论和批判。     

Analyzing How Local Governments Establish Service Priorities

Resource limitations and increasing citizen expectations are causing decisionmakers to reexamine existing approaches to establishing priorities in the funding of governmental services. Using local governments as a contextual example, this article investigates the decision making processes used by Texas cities The research seeks to understand the role different budgetary frameworks, i.e., incremental, performance and community values, play in resource allocation. Factors such as the budget sequence, the participants and the reference sources are considered to better understand local budget deliberations. This research indicates that a mixed or hybrid framework (any combination of the incremental, performance and community values approaches) dominates decision making in Texas cities. That is, most cities attempt to incorporate the politicalness of incrementalism, the results orientation of the performance framework, and the utility maximization desired under the community values framework. Results from this research indicate that Texas cities are moving away from a single framework orientation as a rule and are incorporating more rational and participative aspects into their budget process. This refutes common wisdom on this topic and suggests a more complicated approach to decision making that emphasizes the injection of more objective performance-related data, as well as the subjective perceptions of non-traditionally dominant participant groups.     

The marginal pole of the economy and the marginalized labour force

The paper proposes the concept of ‘marginal pole’ of the economy to characterise a new level of Latin American economic activity, which has a precarious relationship with the basic means of production controlled by the dominant levels of the economy as a whole. The ‘marginalised labour force’ employed here is a distinct new sector within the working population. It is argued that the concept of ‘marginalised labour force’ is more appropriate in this case than that of ‘industrial reserve army’ and enables certain consequences of marginalisation to be analysed.     

Multiple roots of the populist radical right: Support for the Dutch PVV in cities and the countryside

Populist radical right parties are considerably more popular in some areas (neighbourhoods, municipalities, regions) than others. They thrive in some cities, in some smaller towns, and in some rural areas, but they are unsuccessful in other cities, small towns, and rural areas. We seek to explain this regional variation by modelling at the individual level how citizens respond to local conditions. We argue that patterns of populist radical right support can be explained by anxiety in the face of social change. However, how social change manifests itself is different in rural and urban areas, so that variations in populist radical right support are rooted in different kinds of conditions. To analyse the effects of these conditions we use unique geo-referenced survey data from the Netherlands collected among a nationwide sample of 8,000 Dutch respondents. Our analyses demonstrate that the presence of immigrants (and particularly increases therein) can explain why populist radical right parties are more popular in some urban areas than in others, but that it cannot explain variation across rural areas. In these areas, local marginalization is an important predictor of support for populist radical right parties. Hence, to understand the support for the populist radical right, the heterogeneity of its electorate should be recognized.     

Beyond (and Within) City Limits: Climate Policy in an Intergovernmental System

This analysis explores the role of city‐level and state‐level variables to explain why some cities make more progress on climate‐related policy implementation than others. Using multilevel modeling, we find little support for the influence of state factors on local government leadership among the 812 cities in the dataset, but local government institutional and community variables are strongly associated with climate policy initiatives. We argue for a rethinking of the notion of the limited and constrained city and suggest that, in the realm of climate protection and environmental policy, cities are leading a bottom‐up federalism. Moreover, where some political analysts and scholars have argued that climate protection and environmental policies may not be economically rational for cities to pursue, we theorize that cities are acting locally to further their self‐interest in an increasingly global economy.     

Structural stress or deliberate decision? Government partisanship and the disempowerment of unions in Denmark

The role of government partisanship in the era of retrenchment is debated. It is argued in this article that partisanship matters for only some aspects of policy. Irrespective of ideological bending, governments accommodate structural pressure as well as short‐term electoral interests to keep the economy on track and implement austerity measures in labour market policy that, in effect, reduce union resources and capacity to mobilise. But only governments of the right exploit structural stress to pursue long‐term interest in curbing the institutional privileges of unions. Aligning short‐ and long‐term interests is easier for social democratic governments during economic expansion, whereas governments of the right have an easier time aligning interests in periods of structural pressure. By analysing a sample of Danish labour market reforms, this article shows that today social democratic governments still defend the institutional privileges of unions and discusses the comparative significance of the Danish case.     

产业政策的制订与战略性产业的选择

产业政策是一种政府行为,是政府为了促进、引导、保护或限制某些产业发展的各种政策措施的总和.在市场经济条件下,产业政策的作用主要是纠正市场失灵,弥补市场缺陷.产业政策的重点是对战略性产业进行扶持和保护.我国现阶段宜将能源、技术密集型的机械装备制造业、以信息技术为先导的高新技术产业和高技术武器装备研发与制造业作为战略性产业.     

Distributive politics,ward representation,and the spread of zoning

This analysis examines two alternative explanations for the adoption of comprehensive zoning ordinances in the years immediately following its initial adoption in New York City. The market failure explanation predicts zoning adoption in cities where externality problems (represented by heavy incidence of manufacturing) exist. The distributive policymaking model treats zoning as a form of regulation that is most likely to be found in cities where local legislators are elected from geographically-concentrated constituencies (e.g., wards) and therefore try to target policy benefits to their own constituencies while spreading the policy costs over all constituencies. Some support is found for each model. Especially striking is the interactive effect of ward representation and of economic interest (i.e., levels of home ownership).     

大城市利益博弈的人口空间响应研究——以上海市为例

20世纪90年代以来,中国大城市人口空间相继发生变动,主要特点体现在以下几个方面:中心城区人口密度下降同时局部人口密度出现反弹;近郊区人口急剧增长且分布不均衡;流动人口在中心城与郊区呈现速度不一的增长态势,表现出与西方国家一般经验模型不同的特征;户籍人口与流动人口的郊区化步伐存在明显差异,人口郊区化出现二元结构.在利益博弈时代,人口空间演变这一社会现象背后的实质是一系列的利益冲突与博弈过程.基于这样的认识,采取了社会学与地理学的交叉协同研究方法,时那些主导大城市人口空间演变的利益冲突与博弈机制进行了剖析,这种跨学科交叉研究对城市宏观决策有一定启示意义.研究结论表明,政府回归公共利益代表的角色,并建立恰当的利益诉求与协调机制,是引导大城市人口布局调整走出困境的出路.     

当前我国区域经济均衡发展的公正视角

随着经济的快速发展,我国东、中、西部地区经济差距日益拉大,主要表现为经济增长的不均衡、产业结构的不合理、科技教育发展的不均衡和资源配置的不均衡。形成这些不均衡的原因主要是政策制度倾斜、区位与自然条件差异、自身发展潜力以及制度创新四个方面。因而,必须从起点公正、过程公正和结果公正三个方面来实现区域经济的公正发展。     

THIRD WORLD URBANIZATION AND AMERICAN FOREIGN AID POLICY: DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE IN THE 1990s

Over the next decade, the demographic and economic characteristics of countries to which the United States government provides technical and financial assistance for economic development will change substantially. Rapid urban population growth, the expanding role of cities and towns in national economies, continued migration of population from rural to urban areas, explosive growth in the size of the labor force, and shifts in the occupations of the labor force from agriculture to manufacturing and ser- vices will require a reorientation of American development assistance. Yet, program objectives and budget allocations of the U.S. foreign aid program fail to reflect these changes in the characteristics of its clientele. The US. Agency for International Development lacks an overt strategy for coping with urbanization in developing nations. Without an urban strategy, the American foreign aid program is likely to incur increasing opportunity costs and fail to address critical problems arising from fundamental shifts in the economic and social structure of developing countries.     

Demographic change,labour force dynamics and employment: new problems and old politics?

Abstract. The paper examines the problems for social protection and economic growth that arise from the development of a dualistic labour force – divided into a privileged core and a disad-vantaged periphery – created by the dynamic interaction of labour supply rigidities and rapid technological growth. It concludes that reforms of labour market institutions have to be introduced in order to solve the existing problems.