Brian Burgoon

On Welfare and Terror Social Welfare Policies and Political-Economic Roots of Terrorism

This article argues that social welfare policies may reduce international and domestic terrorism. Social policies likely affect terrorism in offsetting ways but, on balance, should diminish preferences for terrorism by reducing economic insecurity, inequality, poverty, and religious-political extremism. Thus, countries with more generous welfare provisions should suffer fewer terrorist attacks on their soil and have fewer of their citizens perpetrate terrorism. Supporting this argument, cross-sectional estimation reveals that a countrys welfare efforts negatively correlate with transnational or total terrorist incidents on its soil, as well as transnational terrorism perpetrated by its citizens. Pooled cross-section time-series estimation reveals that several measures of welfare effort reduce the incidence of transnational terrorism in countries, robust to a range of estimators and controls. Such findings suggest that strengthening social policies at home and abroad may not only serve redistributive or development goals but also help combat terrorist violence.

Flexible employment, economic insecurity and social policy preferences in Europe

This paper examines how flexible employment, particularly temporary and part-time employment, affect political support for social policy protection. Although their implications are a priori uncertain, the paper lays out how flexible employment conditions can be expected to generate various kinds of economic insecurity for workers that ought in turn to spur support for social-welfare policies. The paper finds broad support for such expectations in individual-level survey data from 15 EU member states. In particular, part-time employment, temporary employment and their combination tend to increase several measures of an individual’s subjective economic insecurity. Further, partly due to such increases, the same measures of flexible employment tend to spur support for social policy assistance targeted at the unemployed.

Support for redistribution and the paradox of immigration

This paper argues that immigration has varying implications for attitudes about government redistribution depending on the level at which immigration is experienced. Working in occupations with higher shares of foreign-born employees can raise individual economic insecurities in ways that might overwhelm the way high foreign-born shares of the population can reduce solidarity or increase fiscal burdens. Hence, experiencing more immigration in one’s occupation might more positively affect support for government redistribution than does experiencing more national-level immigration. We test this and other expectations on survey data in 17 European polities, focused on occupational and national measures of immigration. While national-level exposure to foreign-born populations tends to have little effect on support for government redistribution, occupational-level exposure to immigration tends to spur such support. These results suggest that immigration directly influences the politics of inequality, but in ways more complicated than recent scholarship suggests.

Comparing Immigration Policies: An Overview from the IMPALA Database

This paper introduces a method and preliminary findings from a database that systematically measures the character and stringency of immigration policies. Based on the selection of that data for nine countries between 1999 and 2008, we challenge the idea that any one country is systematically the most or least restrictive toward admissions. The data also reveal trends toward more complex and, often, more restrictive regulation since the 1990s, as well as differential treatment of groups, such as lower requirements for highly skilled than low-skilled labor migrants. These patterns illustrate the IMPALA data and methods but are also of intrinsic importance to understanding immigration regulation.

The Dogs that Sometimes Bark: Globalization and Works Council Bargaining in Germany

This article investigates how international economic openness affects works council bargaining. The focus is on how bargaining over working time, payment systems and non-standard employment in eight German factories is affected by not only various measures of ‘bite’ (exit via trade and FDI flows) but also measures of ‘bark’ (employer threats of foreign production relocation). The main conclusion is that greater foreign investment and trade tend to trigger deeper concessions in works council bargaining. The study also suggests how biting and barking interact. The research suggests that the less studied manifestations of globalization may constrain labour organization more than previous studies focused on flows have suggested.

Three Worlds of Working Time: The Partisan and Welfare Politics of Work Hours in Industrialized Countries

This article argues that annual hours per employed person and per working-age person capture important dimensions of political-economic success that should be weighed against aggregate employment and wealth patterns. It also argues that partisan-driven work-time policies and welfare-regime institutions give rise to diverging Social Democratic, Liberal, and Christian Democratic “worlds” of work time in terms of these two measures. Descriptive statistics for eighteen Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries reveal broad clustering and trends suggestive of the Three Worlds, while panel estimation suggests the influence of partisan and welfare-institutional conditions underlying them. Case study of Finland, the United States, and the Netherlands further illustrates the political process and sequence of the Three Worlds.

A market for worker rights: explaining business support for international private labour regulation

ABSTRACT Why do companies choose the private labour regulations that they do? Scholars know plenty about why companies might accept private regulators to oversee and protect labour standards. But they know very little about why companies choose one rather than another private regulatory approach when several are available, differing in terms of stringency. This paper explores the conditions under which companies in the clothing industry choose private labour-standards regulation with more rather than less stringent regulation. It does so based on qualitative and quantitative analysis of clothing companies in Europe. It argues that business preference for more stringent private labour regulation is positively affected by societal pressure, and that this societal pressure is predominantly orchestrated by activist groups. This not only entails campaigns, but also can be a combination of public and informal efforts to influence companies, together with pressures from consumers and media. This research also shows that national and industrial factors play a role. In particular, the position of the firm in the value chain and its distance to consumers and manufacturers affect preference for more or less stringent private regulation. Societal pressure is therefore important but not the only source of business preferences for private regulation.

Immigration, Integration, and Support for Redistribution in Europe

Immigration poses individual or collective economic risks that might increase citizen support for government redistribution, but it can also generate fiscal pressure or undermine social solidarity to diminish such support. These offsetting conditions obscure the net effects of immigration for welfare states. This article explores whether immigration’s effects are mediated by the economic and social integration of immigrants. Integration can be conceptualized and measured as involving the degree to which immigrants suffer unemployment rates, depend on welfare-state benefits, and harbor social attitudes similarly to the native population. Such integration may alter how immigration reduces solidarity and imposes fiscal and macroeconomic pressures, but does not much alter how immigration spurs economic risks for natives. Where migrants are more integrated by such measures, immigration should have less negative or more positive implications for native support for government redistribution and welfare states than where migrants are less integrated. The article explores these arguments using survey data for twenty-two european countries between 2002 and 2010. The principal finding is that economic integration, more than sociocultural integration, softens the tendency of immigration to undermine support for redistributive policies.

Partisan Embedding of Liberalism How Trade, Investment, and Immigration Affect Party Support for the Welfare State

Political scientists have long debated how economic globalization influences national social policies, but they have so far not explored the political demands of political parties implicitly underlying such influence. This article explores such demands to see how globalization affects partisan-political demands for the welfare state in industrialized countries. It argues that political parties link globalization to welfare policy, but in ways that differ across parties and faces of globalization. First, globalization can be expected to spark support for welfare policies as compensation for globalization’s risks, but given the constituencies and traditions of parties, this applies more for left than for right or other parties. Second, this dynamic is different for immigration than for trade or investment because migration poses fiscal pressures and threats to solidarity that can dampen enthusiasm for welfare compensation and spark calls for welfare retrenchment. Analysis of party manifestos in 23 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 1960 to 2004 supports this view that some but not all parties embed some but not all liberalism.

Inequality and anti-globalization backlash by political parties

Does income inequality increase political backlash against European and global integration? This paper reports research suggesting that it can. The article analyses party opposition to and support for trade openness, European Union integration and general internationalism of political party platforms in advanced industrial democracies between 1960 and 2008. It finds that inequality tends to increase anti-globalization positions of parties, net of pro-globalization positions, an effect that does not significantly differ across party families or levels of actual globalization. This effect, however, does depend on, and is diminished by, generous redistributive policies. These findings clarify socio-economic conditions underlying the backlash against political and economic globalization.