Partisan Impacts on Social Policy and Distributive Outcomes in the Eras of Welfare State Expansion and Retrenchment
Year: 2014
Type: preprint
Abstract: This paper examines the changing role of partisan government in shaping social policy and distributive outcomes in post-industrial democracies. The paper attempts to evaluate the thesis that partisan effects disappeared (Pierson 1996) or dramatically declined (Huber and Stephens 2001a) when countries moved from the period of welfare state expansion to the period of welfare state retrenchment. The dependent variables are 6 measures of social spending, 6 measures of social rights, welfare state employment, and 4 measures of distributive outcomes. The analysis compares the effect of social democratic and Christian democratic government before 1986 and after 1985, with 1985 as our operationalization of the divide between the era welfare state expansion and welfare state retrenchment. We find pervasive effects of social democratic government on almost all measures of social rights, expenditure, employment, and distributive outcomes in the expansion era. In the expansion era, Christian democratic government has positive effects on most spending measures of social protection but not on measures of social investment and work and family reconciliation. Christian democratic government has negative effects on three measures of poverty but no effect on redistribution. Social democratic government has no effect on most measures of social protection and distributive outcomes in the retrenchment era but continues to have positive effects on measures of social investment and work and family reconciliation. In this period, Christian democratic government has a negative effect on one of the pension rights measures and on welfare state employment and positive (poverty increasing) effects on two of the poverty measures, indicating that Christian democratic governments retrenched previously very generous pension systems and did not put into place appropriate social policies to confront new social risks.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Authors: Évelyne Huber, John Stephens
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2292423879