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.     

Three Decades of Policy Layering and Politically Sustainable Reform in the European Union's Agricultural Policy

The study of policy reform has tended to focus on single‐stage reforms taking place over a relatively short period. Recent research has drawn attention to gradual policy changes unfolding over extended periods. One strategy of gradual change is layering, in which new policy dimensions are introduced by adding new policy instruments or by redesigning existing ones to address new concerns. The limited research on single‐stage policy reforms highlights that these may not endure in the postenactment phase when circumstances change. We argue that gradual policy layering may create sustainability dynamics that can result in lasting reform trajectories. The European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has changed substantially over the last three decades in response to emerging policy concerns by adding new layers. This succession of reforms proved durable and resilient to reversal in the lead‐up to the 2013 CAP reform when institutional and political circumstances changed.     

The Reception of Magna Carta in Early Modern Germany,c. 1650–1800

The article examines how far the reinvigoration of Magna Carta in seventeenth-century British legal thought was received into German discourses between c. 1650 and 1800. An analysis of early modern German works on feudal law and ius publicum, of historical writings as well as of political literature reveals a formal, but no substantive reception: early modern German scholarship betrays no signs of an effort to discuss or describe the actual contents, provisions and meaning of Magna Carta. Rather, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the Great Charter enters political debate as a trope for a constitutional guarantee of unnamed personal liberties.     

Less is Sometimes More: Consequences of Overpayment on Job Satisfaction and Absenteeism

This article investigates the responsive and purposive consequences of overpayment by studying changes in job satisfaction and absenteeism over time. Overpayment is defined as the positive deviation from the net earnings subjectively considered being fair. Two theoretical approaches are tested providing differing predictions: The self-interest model predicts that any increase in earnings always increases individual job satisfaction and that no changes arise in the number of days absent. The justice model predicts that overpayment reduces individual job satisfaction, and that absenteeism decreases in the period that follows. These predictions are tested with longitudinal data from a large-scale survey by means of fixed-effects regression analysis. The results show that increases in pay that are perceived as overpayment decrease job satisfaction and reduce absenteeism in the subsequent period.     

Decayed, filled and missing teeth as a forensic-odontologic aid for determining the age above 18 years: A radiographic study of orthopantomograms from a group of teenagers and young adults

The human teeth are a valuable source of information concerning identification and age calculation in forensic sciences. Dental treatment often causes permanent alteration of the teeth, which is visible on radiographs. The correlation of decayed, missing or filled teeth and chronological age has not yet been used for determining the accomplished 18th year of life in teenagers and young adults, e. g. for legal and anthropological purposes. The aim of this study was to determine whether the evaluation of these findings on radiographs correlates with the chronological age in teenagers and young adults. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The dental X-rays (orthopantomograms, OPG) of 1053 outpatients (age: 14 to 24 years) were evaluated. The values "decayed", "missing", or "filled" were recorded for each tooth present. The data were then calculated using statistical tools. RESULTS: The correlation between the number of missing teeth and the chronological age is low. However, the positive predictive value of determining the age of 18 years for certain types of teeth proved to be very high, even up to 100 %. Further, high numbers of filled teeth gave reasonable positive predictive values for an age of 18 years. The number of decayed teeth did not correlate with age. DISCUSSION: This study provides for the first time predictive values for the estimation whether a person is 18 years of age, based on the evaluation of decayed, missing or filled teeth on OPGs only. Whereas the number of patients with such findings is generally low in this age group, some of the positive findings can be used for age estimation as an adjunct to other sources of age calculation. The sole application of these items is not recommended, as sanitary conditions of the teeth depend on both social and individual circumstances. Therefore, the calculated values also reflect the culture of the sample studied. Finally, they are time-dependent and have to be compared to data from other populations. These results have some bearing on the field of forensic odontology.     

Can process conditionality enhance aid effectiveness?

Can process conditionality enhance poverty reduction in developing countries? We address this question in a political-economic framework with political distortions on the recipient and the donor side. Process conditionality is a useful tool only if the international financial institutions hold all necessary information to assess the political situation in recipient countries and to select the true representatives of the poor into a participatory process. If they do not hold this information or if bureaucratic interests reduce their incentive to acquire this information, process conditionality loses its effectiveness.