Abstract
Do Social Democrats still expand the welfare state? This article argues that a time-constant policy-oriented expectation of Social Democratic behaviour neglects parties’ aspiration for other goals such as votes and offices, and therefore cannot explain why some Social Democratic parties have introduced welfare state retrenchment measures. Social Democrats can win votes and join coalitions by shifting rightwards. In contrast, they can pursue policy objectives by shifting leftwards. To communicate these shifts, in other words, ‘changes of heart’, parties send signals to voters and other parties before elections. This study analyses the effect of these party signals on the welfare state. Party manifesto data are used to compute the positive and negative signals parties send on welfare issues in their electoral manifestos. A pooled time-series analysis of 14 parliamentary democracies between 1972 and 2002 shows that Social Democrats enact retrenchment measures after having sent a negative signal on a welfare issue in election time, especially in the case of unemployment benefits. Most importantly, this study identifies when Social Democrats choose to retrench (part of) the welfare state, namely after having signalled ‘a change of heart’.
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Notes
Or suggest via case studies that more complex mechanisms explain the behaviour of Social Democrats vis-à-vis the welfare state (for example, Levy, 1999; Ross, 2000; Green-Pedersen, 2002).
For example, in a majoritarian electoral system, access to office and policy is only possible when a majority of the vote is obtained; however, in proportional representation systems this is not the case, which decreases the importance of votes (Müller and Strøm, 1999).
In some electoral systems, Social Democrats can also move to the left in order to win votes from smaller left-wing parties. However, by moving to the left, Social Democrats also pursue policy-seeking goals, and hence I subsume leftward movements under policy-seeking behaviour.
The last category mentioned in the description is about sexual and racial discrimination and has less to do with the welfare state. However, the MRG data set also has a separate issue for this category (per706: underprivileged minority groups). It seems likely that when racial and sexual discrimination was mentioned and was not explicitly connected to welfare programmes, it was coded under per706 rather than per503.
The party signals calculated for this article will be made available in a web appendix after publication.
In most cases, Social Democrats form a single-party government or are the senior partner in a coalition. Hence, the cabinet signal of a cabinet with Social Democrats is strongly correlated with the party signal of Social Democrats. In addition, using the Social Democratic party signal as a replacement for the entire cabinet signal does not give substantially different results. Substantively, it seems justified that the ambitions of one coalition party are toned down by the ambitions of its coalition partners. Therefore, the cabinet signal operationalization is preferred.
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Italy is omitted because of the complicated political situation in the larger part of the period under study, which hinders the calculation of meaningful cabinet signals per year.
One can also analyse the sum of these programmes. This is problematic, because each programme has its own political logic. For example, the odds of getting old are much higher than the odds of becoming unemployed or sick. This means that the pension system is relevant for a much larger group of people than the other two programmes.
Other programmes such as disability benefits or family programmes are important too, but they are not historically as important as the other categories. More problematically, there are no yearly replacement rate data available for these programmes.
The results of the analyses with family replacement rates are available on request.
An alternative to a country–year set-up is a country–cabinet set-up. However, to compare my findings with those in the literature, I adopt the literature's practice to use a country–year set-up.
Some of these cabinets had to be excluded, either because they were only short-lived or because there were missing data in one or more of the dependent variables.
Although a reduction in unemployment benefits was not initially part of the New Deal, Labour's employment strategy (Clasen, 2005), Scruggs (2006) reports a reduction in benefits in 2001.
Presenting all six models takes up too much space. However, they will be made available in a web appendix after publication.
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Acknowledgements
This article has been presented at various occasions, including the workshop Comparative Analysis of Welfare Models and Welfare Workshop in Roskilde, October 2008 and the Politicologenetmaal in Nijmegen, May 2009. I thank all participants for their contributions, as well as Kees van Kersbergen, Barbara Vis and Paul Pennings.
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Schumacher, G. Signalling a change of heart? How parties’ short-term ideological shifts explain welfare state reform. Acta Polit 46, 331–352 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2011.17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2011.17