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A growing body of literature documents that under the economic and social pressures accompanying the post-communist transformations, governments in Central and Eastern European countries have been forced to change their spending habits. However, because most of these findings are based only on case studies or comparisons of a very small number of countries, it is difficult to observe to what extent the post-communist countries' development patterns share commonalities or develop in unique ways. This article explores in a quantitative comparative framework the effects of government composition, globalization, political institutions, and socioeconomic factors on total public, public social, and public education expenditures in twelve nation states. The authors find that the party composition of government has the most robust effect, in that left incumbency is positively correlated with total public and social expenditures. This result indicates that in this sense, post-communist countries are similar to Western democratic ones. The authors find only mixed results regarding the effects of globalization on public spending. This might suggest that globalization does not have a direct effect on the spending policies of these countries, but rather is mediated by domestic contexts.

AbstractEducation has long played an important role in social policy as a means for strengthening labour market integration and increasing social mobility. The shift towards a knowledge economy has placed education policy even more centrally in efforts to provide the institutional preconditions for making economic efficiency compatible with social inclusion. To provide conceptual and theoretical context to the special issue, this paper first explores the key tension in the role of education in modern economies between serving concerns for efficiency and inclusion. Second, it argues that it remains possible for education policy to balance between efficiency and inclusion, but that the capacity of advanced economies to do so is politically mediated. Finally, the paper reviews the four main arenas in which such mediation processes take place—the parliamentary arena, the corporatist arena, the state, and public opinion—and how the contributions to the special issue study these.

European labour markets are often described as rigid with comparatively high levels of job protection that do not allow for the flexible adjustment of employment to economic fluctuations. This interpretation overlooks important sources of flexibility, however. Research has shown that recent labour market policy reforms have allowed for the creation of two-tier labour markets consisting of insiders in standard employment relationships and outsiders in non-standard employment. This outcome has typically been explained by pointing to the representational interests of unions or social-democratic parties. It has been argued that rather than protecting all labour market participants, unions and social-democratic parties focus on the interests of their members and their core constituency, respectively, most of whom are in standard employment relationships. In contrast, it is argued here that unions' institutional power resources are the crucial variable explaining this outcome. In difficult economic times, when unions are asked to make concessions, they will assent to labour market reforms, but only to those that do not fundamentally threaten to undermine their organisational interests. In the context of job security legislation, this means that unions defend the protection of permanent contracts while they compromise on the regulation of temporary employment. This 'second best solution' allows them to protect their organisational interests, both by retaining their institutional role in the administration of dismissals and by living up to their institutional role as one of the organisations responsible for the direction of labour market policy reform. Using fsQCA this article shows that unions' institutional power resources are more apt to explain the observed two-tier reform pattern than the unions' or the social-democratic parties' representational interests. Adapted from the source document.

Most political science accounts assume that governments in Western democracies avoid unpopular reforms to protect their re‐election chances. Nevertheless, governments sometimes embark on electorally risky reforms – even in times when they have no slack in the polls. In this article, it is argued that pursuing unpopular reforms can be a perfectly rational strategy for vote‐seeking governments. Based on a simple game theoretical model that compares strategic framing with the classic blame avoidance strategy, it is demonstrated that unpopular policy reforms allow governments to pursue gains of both policy and votes by opting for a highly visible strategy of reframing the substantive reform issue in question. This general argument is illustrated with the substantial 2011 retrenchment of Danish early retirement benefits. This particular welfare state programme was highly popular. Nevertheless, the incumbent Liberal prime minister proposed to abolish it only a few months prior to a national election while his government was trailing significantly in the polls.

AbstractEuropean labour markets are often described as rigid with comparatively high levels of job protection that do not allow for the flexible adjustment of employment to economic fluctuations. This interpretation overlooks important sources of flexibility, however. Research has shown that recent labour market policy reforms have allowed for the creation of two‐tier labour markets consisting of insiders in standard employment relationships and outsiders in non‐standard employment. This outcome has typically been explained by pointing to the representational interests of unions or social‐democratic parties. It has been argued that rather than protecting all labour market participants, unions and social‐democratic parties focus on the interests of their members and their core constituency, respectively, most of whom are in standard employment relationships. In contrast, it is argued here that unions' institutional power resources are the crucial variable explaining this outcome. In difficult economic times, when unions are asked to make concessions, they will assent to labour market reforms, but only to those that do not fundamentally threaten to undermine their organisational interests. In the context of job security legislation, this means that unions defend the protection of permanent contracts while they compromise on the regulation of temporary employment. This 'second best solution' allows them to protect their organisational interests, both by retaining their institutional role in the administration of dismissals and by living up to their institutional role as one of the organisations responsible for the direction of labour market policy reform. UsingfsQCAthis article shows that unions' institutional power resources are more apt to explain the observed two‐tier reform pattern than the unions' or the social‐democratic parties' representational interests.

AbstractDoes landholding inequality undermine democratization? Recent contributions have challenged the argument that landholding elites oppose suffrage extension if geographically fixed assets are unequally distributed. We advance research on this long-standing question by exploiting exogenous variance to reinvestigate the relationship. Using multiple instruments, we find that landholding inequality decreases support for suffrage extension. By focusing on traditional patterns of social control, we explore an empirically neglected mechanism linking landholding inequality and democratization. Taking advantage of four direct democratic votes between 1866 and 1877 in Switzerland, we demonstrate that landholding inequality also influences the political preferences of ordinary citizens who do not control these resources. This paper shows that high levels of landholding inequality provide local elites with the incentive and the means to align the local population's voting behaviour with their political goals. Supplementary analyses using qualitative and quantitative data further substantiate this social control mechanism.

AbstractThis paper explores the extension of collective governance to sectors without collective governance tradition. We introduce the concept of state‐led bricolage to analyze the expansion of the Swiss apprenticeship training system – in which employer associations fulfill core collective governance tasks – to economic sectors in which training had previously followed a school‐based and state‐oriented logic. In deindustrializing societies, these sectors are key for the survival of collectively governed training systems. Through a mixed‐methods analysis, we examine the reform process that led to the creation of new intermediary organizations that enable collective governance in these sectors. In addition, we compare the organizational features of these organizations with the respective organizations in the traditional crafts and industry sectors. We find that the new organizations result from state‐led bricolage. They are hybrid organizations that reflect some of the bricoleur's core policy goals and critically build on the combination of associational and state‐oriented institutional logics.

This paper explores the extension of collective governance to sectors without collective governance tradition. We introducethe concept of state-led bricolage to analyze the expansion of the Swiss apprenticeship training system – in which employerassociations fulll core collective governance tasks – to economic sectors in which training had previously followed a school-based and state-oriented logic. In deindustrializing societies, these sectors are key for the survival of collectively governedtraining systems. Through a mixed-methods analysis, we examine the reform process that led to the creation of new interme-diary organizations that enable collective governance in these sectors. In addition, we compare the organizational features ofthese organizations with the respective organizations in the traditional crafts and industry sectors. We nd that the new orga-nizations result from state-led bricolage. They are hybrid organizations that reect some of the bricoleur's core policy goalsand critically build on the combination of associational and state-oriented institutional logics

AbstractThis article contributes to the literature on direct democracy and public spending in two ways. First, we explore how direct democratic institutions interact with a specific aspect of the representative system, the size of the governing coalition, to influence public spending. Second, based on newly collected data, we examine the relationship between three different direct democratic institutions, coalition size and public spending over the period from 1860 to 2015. Empirically, we find that initiatives increase the size of the public sector under single-party governments, but this positive relationship disappears as coalition size increases. In contrast, we find that financial referendums slow down the growth of public spending, while law referendums are not systematically associated with public spending. Finally, we find that the relationship between direct democratic institutions, coalition size and public spending does not change over time despite the long period under investigation.