Abstract
Will voters punish the government for cutting back welfare state entitlements? The comparative literature on the welfare state suggests that the answer is yes. Unless governments are effectively employing strategies of blame avoidance, retrenchment leads to vote loss. Because a large majority of voters supports the welfare state, the usual assumption is that retrenchment backfires equally on all political parties. This study contributes to an emerging body of research that demonstrates that this assumption is incorrect. On the basis of a regression analysis of the electoral fate of the governing parties of 14 OECD countries between 1970 and 2002, we show that most parties with a positive welfare image lose after they implemented cutbacks, whereas most parties with a negative welfare image do not. In addition, we show that positive welfare image parties in opposition gain votes, at the expense of those positive welfare image parties in government that implemented welfare state retrenchment.
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Notes
These two implications suggest that voters base their voting decision on a party's past performance, that is to say, voters vote retrospectively. However, this line of argument does not rule out the possibility that at least some voters, some of the time, vote prospectively, that is to say, based on what they expect that a party will do. Even in the latter situation, however, voters will always draw on a party's past performance too, as they need information from the past to assess to what extent promises made in, for example, a party's manifesto are credible. If, say, a conservative party promises in its manifesto to increase the generosity of unemployment benefits by 20 per cent, voters will know, based on the party's past performance, that the party is unlikely to keep its promise.
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. We exclude the United States because it is a presidential democracy. We exclude Switzerland because – due to the so-called magic formula that divides the seven executive positions between the four main parties – there is no traditional party competition. Consequently, these two countries are not well suited for testing our hypotheses.
The web appendix will be posted on the authors’ web site: www.gijsschumacher.nl.
The attention of parties for welfare issues is a candidate for a time-varying measure. We chose not to do this, because voter images of parties do not directly change when parties change their policy intent. Also, parties hardly discuss retrenchment in their manifestos. For example, the mean of the ‘per505 welfare state retrenchment’ category in the Comparative Manifesto project indicates that on average parties spend only 0.05 per cent of their manifesto on welfare state retrenchment. In comparison, parties spend on average about 8 per cent of their manifesto to the item ‘welfare state expansion’.
Our sample of governments ends in 2002, but because our dependent variable is the electoral result of governing parties at the next elections the observations can be from after 2002.
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This article was presented at the NIG Work Conference 2009, the Research Seminar of the Department of Governance Studies, VU University Amsterdam and at the ECPR Joint Sessions 2010. Thanks to the participants of these workshops, especially to Mark Bovens and Duco Bannink, and to Carsten Jensen for their useful comments and suggestions. Barbara Vis's research is supported by a Veni grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, grant nr. 451-08-012).
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Schumacher, G., Vis, B. & van Kersbergen, K. Political parties’ welfare image, electoral punishment and welfare state retrenchment. Comp Eur Polit 11, 1–21 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2012.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2012.5