Minimum Wages and their Alternatives: A Critical Assessment

Do minimum wages reduce in-work poverty and wage inequality? Or can alternative policies do better? Germany suffers from high unemployment among low-skilled workers and rising wage dispersion at the lower end of the wage distribution. We analyse the impact on employment, wage inequality, public expenditure, and incomes of poor households of three different policy options currently being discussed in Germany: a statutory minimum wage, a combination of minimum wages and wage subsidies, and pure wage subsidies to low-paid workers. In doing so, we distinguish between perfectly competitive and monopsonistic labour markets. We find that a minimum wage of EUR 7.50 would cost between 410,000 and 840,000 low-paid jobs, increasing the fiscal burden, while only moderately raising the income of poor households. With pure wage subsidies, the government can always ensure more favourable employment effects. Combining a minimum wage with a wage subsidy turns out to be extremely costly and inferior to wage subsidies in all respects.     

Post-hegemony and Gramsci: a bridge too far?

This article expands upon the theory of post-hegemony so as to maintain the multitude as an operative political category alongside the State. Ironically, it does so by returning to Antonio Gramsci. It argues that the multitude – or, for Gramsci ‘civil society’ – is constitutive of statal politics in two specific ways: (1) the multitude as a constitutive outside or alterity that the State carries; and (2) constitutive in its positivity, as a productive immanence that affects the social field from which the State is drawn. This relationship of constituent participation – not representation – is demonstrated by investigating changes in politics-as-usual in Venezuela.     

Issue salience in regional and national party manifestos in the UK

The study reveals the salience of particular issues in the manifestos of the main British parties for the 1997 and 2003 UK general elections, as well as the 2003 Scottish and Welsh elections, using the method introduced by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) and a modified list of issue categories to reflect the division of government competences between the central and regional governments. Ideological and social base of a party, as well as the delimitation of government competences, are found to be important determinants of issue salience. A more consensual institutional design of the regional government in Scotland and Wales seems to have conditioned larger differences among the issue profiles of parties competing in regional elections, in comparison with general elections. With the institutionalisation of devolution, however, we observe an increase in the similarity of the issue profiles of the same parties in general and in Scottish and Welsh elections, as well as among different parties competing in the same regional elections.     

Europeanisation and territorial representation in Italy

This article aims to examine how, and to what extent, the process of Europeanisation has affected the reshaping of territorial representation in Italy. To explore this research question, it was considered how European Cohesion Policy and structural funds exercise a potential influence over the key dimensions of representation by providing regions with the opportunity to strengthen their roles as both ‘actors’ and ‘arenas’ of representation. Empirical research conducted through interviews and the analysis of documents in all twenty Italian regions revealed how each region has reacted to structural funds in a distinctive way due to different internal factors, such as the legacy of pre-existing policy styles and political structures, and the attitudes of the political/administrative elite. The article discusses this point in detail by focusing on the changes that occurred (or did not occur) at the regional level in light of the aforementioned dimensions of representation.     

The materialist/post‐materialist value dimension as a party cleavage in the Nordic countries

A growing political polarisation on ethnic integration policy is characteristic of current discussions in Dutch politics. The preferences of Dutch citizens, by contrast, remain fairly stable over time. Thus, polarised politics in the Netherlands is assumed to grow apart from the preferences of ordinary citizens, leading to a gap between politics and society. The present article describes and compares trends in societal and political polarisation on ethnic integration policy in the Netherlands between 1994 and 2006. Three mechanisms are explored that explain a discrepancy between trends in political and societal polarisation: (a) parties' responsiveness to political elites, (b) mean partisan representation, and (c) issue salience. Analyses of data from Dutch election studies and party manifestos reveal the existence of a discrepancy in trends. Political polarisation appears to be associated with trends in mean partisan polarisation and in issue salience, and not with trends in political elite polarisation.     

Changing Ideas: Organised Capitalism and the German Left

What determines party positions on issues of economic governance? Most previous research has pointed either to the presumed material interests of the parties' clienteles, or to the political institutions that shape electoral competition. Both approaches do well in explaining cross-national variation, but neither can adequately account for changes over time. This article documents German Social Democrats' policy preferences and the underlying discourse on organised capitalism from 1880 onward to highlight the crucial role of historical context. The interests reflected in party positions cannot simply be read off the material environment. Instead, as suggested by constructivist work on preference formation, they depend on theories regarding the causal effect of alterative policy measures. Following Peter Hall, we treat the evolution of such theories as a ‘process structured in space and time’, by illustrating how ‘context factors’ affect the relative salience of the multiple considerations pertaining to organised capital.     

Migration and modes of exploitation: Social origins of immobility and mobility

Migration has been the subject of considerable research in recent years, much of it conducted by economists. This paper is an attempt to provide the basis of a general, materialist framework for research on population mobility. As such it pays particular attention to changing mechanisms of exploitation, which are typically ignored in conventional studies of migration. This article focuses on pre‐capitalist relations of production restricting population mobility, the factors that make those controls increasingly unstable and the different implications for migration of different forms of the transition to capitalist relations of production. Drawing on historical and contemporary evidence it then considers the various functions of migration in transitions to capitalist production.