Suchergebnisse

This article explains why the power of organised labour in the reform of Swiss and German pension regimes has faded over the last three decades. Postindustrialisation has brought two different sets of reform issues onto the pension policy agendas of Continental European welfare states: retrenchment of existing benefit levels, and the pension coverage of new, postindustrial social risk groups. Recent pension reforms increasingly combine these two types of measures in encompassing policy packages --'modernising compromises'-- in order to compensate for retrenchment with selective expansive reform elements. Continental trade unions attach a lower importance to postindustrial modernisation than do the left-wing parties -- notably the Social Democrats and the Green parties. Consequently, the distance between the labour movement and the left-wing parties, as well as intra-labour heterogeneity, increase and 'modernising compromises' tend to divide the left and to marginalise trade unions. The empirical analysis relies on coded actor positions from eight major pension reforms between 1972 and 2003. Adapted from the source document.

Mark Vail's new book provides an extraordinary tour de force of economic and social policy reform in Germany and France from the post-war period until the present. Vail argues that both countries have left their national models of capitalism far behind, after going through several periods of fundamental reform since the 1980s. The distinctive merit of the book is to link changes in all relevant policy fields, from industrial relations to labor market, social insurance, as well as income support policies. Thereby, Vail's analysis provides relevant new evidence for all major ongoing debates in the comparative political economy of Western Europe. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractTo what extent do social policy preferences explain party choice? This question has received little attention over the past years, because the bulk of the literature has argued that electoral choice is increasingly shaped by identity‐based attitudes, rather than by preferences for economic‐distributive social policies. We argue that in the wake of this debate, the significance of social policy preferences for electoral choice has been underestimated, because most contributions neglect social policy debates that are specific to post‐industrial societies. In particular, they merely focus on income redistribution, while neglecting distributive conflicts around social investment. The Selects 2011 data allows investigating this crucial distinction for Switzerland. Our empirical analyses confirm that it is pivotal to take the pluridimensionality of distributive conflicts seriously: when looking at preferences for social investment rather than income redistribution, we find that social policy preferences are significant explanatory factors for the choice of the five major Swiss political parties.

With the post-industrialization and flexibilization of European labour markets, research on social and economic correlates of labour market vulnerability and weak labour market attachment is growing. Part of this literature conceptualizes these correlates in terms of dualization and insider–outsider divides in an attempt to explore their political implications: this article is written in order to contribute to this strand of research. In this article, we propose a conceptualization and measurement of labour market insiders and outsiders, based on their respective risk of being atypically employed or unemployed. We propose both a dichotomous measure of insiders/outsiders and a continuous measure of the degree of an individual's 'outsiderness'. We argue that such risk-based measures are particularly suited for research on the policy preferences and political implications of insider–outsider divides. On the basis of EU-SILC and national household panel data, we provide a map of dualization across different countries and welfare regimes. We then explore the correlates of labour market vulnerability – that is, outsiderness – by relating it to indicators of income and upward job mobility, as well as labour market policy preferences. The results consistently confirm an impact of labour market vulnerability, indicating a potential for a politicization of the insider/outsider conflict.

The transition to post-industrialism has generated a range of new tensions between welfare arrangements and labour market performance, which confront today's welfare states with new challenges for employment-friendly recalibration, such as flexicurity, activation and work-care conciliation. Hence, the question of whether, how and to what extent current welfare states are able to adapt to the conditions and needs of post-industrial labour markets has become a major issue in recent welfare state research. This article identifies and discusses key debates in this literature on the politics of employment-friendly reforms. It first focuses on the general capacity for reform in mature welfare states and then discusses regime-specific reform politics, since post-industrialism confronts different welfare regimes with very different challenges. For each regime, the article proposes a range of research frontiers and open debates which we consider particularly relevant and fruitful avenues for future theorizing and research. Adapted from the source document.

This article discusses recent research on party politics and the welfare state that differs from traditional 'partisan politics theory'. The traditional approach states that left-wing and right-wing parties hold contrasting positions on welfare issues, depending on the interests of their respective electorates. This view has recently been challenged by three strands of research, which emphasize (1) the effects of electoral change on parties' policy positions, (2) the role of context, notably electoral institutions, party competition and the configuration of party systems, and (3) the impact of different linkages between parties and electorates (particularistic versus programmatic). The implications of these arguments for the applicability of partisan theory are presented, and theoretical and empirical issues are identified for further research. Adapted from the source document.

The literature on neocorporatist agreements in social & labor market policy in the 1990s points to a decline of concertation in European countries with a long-standing tradition of corporatist negotiation. This article identifies a similar trend in Switzerland & argues that three destabilizing factors account for it: (1) Retrenchment pressure & ideological polarization prevent compromises. (2) The emergence of new social demands & interests challenges the homogeneity & legitimacy of peak organizations & thus their bargaining power. (3) Increasing media coverage tends to open up the traditionally confidential & selective sphere of corporatist negotiation & weakens the social partners' ability to reach agreements. The impact of these factors on neocorporatist bargaining is tested in Switzerland, a case where corporatist negotiations used to be particularly decisive in social policy making. Empirical evidence comes from a cross-time comparison of two major social policies: unemployment insurance & pension reforms in the 1970s & in the 1990s. In the last decade, the main locus of decision making shifted from the sphere of interest groups to partisan politics. In parliament, the political parties were able to draft bills enjoying wide acceptance thanks to compensations offered to groups particularly vulnerable to new social risks. 2 Tables, 1 Appendix, 46 References. Adapted from the source document.

Recent studies of welfare state attitudes in the knowledge economy find very high generalized support for generous welfare state policies, both among the working and the middle classes. Has class become irrelevant as a predictor of social policy preferences? Or do we simply mis-conceptualise today's class conflict over social policy? To what extent has it changed from a divide over the level of social policy generosity to a divide over the kind of social policy and - more specifically - over the relative importance that should be given to different social policies? Answering these questions is not only relevant to understand welfare politics in the twenty-first century, but electoral politics as well: only when we understand what working- and middle-class voters care about, can we evaluate the role distributive policies play in electoral processes. We use original survey data from eight West European countries to show that middle- and working-class respondents indeed differ in the relative importance they attribute to social investment and social consumption policies. Middle-class respondents consistently attribute higher absolute and relative importance to social investment. We also show that this emphasis on investive policies relates to the middle class expecting better future economic and social opportunities than the working class. This divide in anticipated opportunities underlies a new kind of working- versus middle-class divide, which contributes to transforming the class divide from a conflict over the level of social policy to a conflict over the priorities of social policy.

The "World Politics of Social Investment" (WoPSI) project aims at explaining variance in social investment agendas and social in-vestment reforms across democratic countries in different regions of the World. Virtually all capitalist economies grapple with challenges of demographic change, slow economic growth, poor employment performance and increasing poverty rates. In dealing with these pro-blems, a social investment strategy appeals to a wide audience, both political and academic. However, social investment reforms and per-formances in democratic countries around the globe are highly une-qual and remain fragmentary: different countries have implemented different types of policy instruments, with different functions, at diffe-rent points in time, and to different degrees. Despite a growing number of scientific contributions on social in-vestment reforms and their effects, a systematic mapping of the de-sign of social investment agendas and policies in different democra-tic countries around the globe is still lacking. Moreover, we lack an explanation for the variance in the development of social investment policy reforms. This is where we locate the research interest of the project presented in this paper. In order to understand why social investment agendas and policies have developed differently across countries, we need to study the politics of social investment reforms. Thus, we ask: How do social investment agendas and social in-vestment policy reforms vary across democratic countries around the globe? Under what political conditions do social investment agendas and/or reforms develop ? In this paper, we situate these questions in the existing state of the literature, and we outline a way to answer these research questions in the context of social policy reforms in Latin America, East Asia, as well as Western and Eastern Europe. We argue that political coali-tions (actors and their interests), as well as the institutional embed-dedness of social investment politics are key factors in explaining the high ...