Evelyne Huber

Social Democracy, Christian Democracy, Constitutional Structure, and the Welfare State

The literature on the determinants of welfare state effort displays many inconsistencies and contradictins. This article takes imoprtant stepts toward resolving these issues with the use of pooled cross-sectional and time-series analyses. The findings are that various independent variables affect different measures of welfare state effort in different and theoretically meaningful ways. Of special importance are the contrasting effects of Christian democracy and social democracy on transfer payments, social benefits expenditure, and total government revenue. There is also a strong effect of constitutional structure on welfare state effort, a finding that provides the first solid support for the state-centered perspective in a quantitative analysis.

Determinants of relative poverty in advanced capitalist democracies

Using relative poverty measures based on micro-level data from the Luxembourg Income Study, in conjunction with pooled time-series data for 14 advanced capitalist democracies between 1970 and 1997, the authors analyze separately the rate of pretax/transfer poverty and the reduction in poverty achieved by systems of taxes and transfers. Socioeconomic factors, including de-industrialization and unemployment, largely explain pre-tax/transfer poverty rates of the working-age population in these advanced capitalist democracies. The extent of redistribution (measured as poverty reduction via taxes and transfers) is explained directly by welfare state generosity and constitutional structure (number of veto points) and the strength of the political left, both in unions and in government.

Partisan governance, women's employment, and the social democratic service state

The causes of the expansion and cross-national variation in the provision of welfare state goods and services are examined. Social democratic governance is by far the most important determinant of the public delivery of services and is one of the most important determinants of the public funding of the provision of welfare state goods and services. Christian democratic governance is an important determinant of public funding of services, but is not related to public delivery. State structure is also an important determinant. Womens labor force participation is an important determinant of the expansion of public social welfare services net of other social, political, and historical factors. The analysis also shows an interactive effect of womens labor force participation and social democratic governance on public delivery of welfare state services. We conclude that public delivery of a wide range of welfare state services is the most distinctive feature of the social democratic welfare state and that this feature is a product of the direct and interactive effects of social democracy and womens mobilization

Internationalization and the Social Democratic Model Crisis and Future Prospects

This article examines the crisis of the social democratic model in the four countries (Austria, Norway, Finland, and Sweden) in which social democracy was most successful in maintaining and even extending its two central achievements—full employment and the institutional welfare state—through the end of the 1980s. Four major conclusions emerge from the analysis. First, supply side measures, more so than demand management, were central to the employment and growth models pursued by social democracy prior to the early 1970s. Second, the increasing trade openness contributed little to the recent problems of social democracy. By contrast, financial internationalization and deregulation and the multinationalization of capital undermined important features of the supply and demand sides of the models. Third, changes in the international and domestic economies have weakened centralized bargaining. Fourth, governments in the three Nordic countries made serious mistakes in economic policy, which greatly aggravated their difficulties.

Politics and Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean

This article presents the first pooled time series analysis of the impact that politics and policy have on inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. The authors build on models consisting of sociological and economic variables, adding the strength of the democratic tradition, long-term legislative partisan political power distribution, and social spending to explain variation in inequality. They analyze an unbalanced pooled time series data set for income distribution in 18 Latin American and Caribbean countries from 1970 to 2000. They show that the political variables add explanatory power. A strong record of democracy and a left-leaning legislative partisan balance are associated with lower levels of inequality, as are social security and welfare spending under democratic regimes. Thus, they replicate some and modify other well-established findings from studies of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in the very different context of Latin America and the Caribbean. They confirm that the partisan composition of government matters, and show that, in contrast to OECD countries, where social security and welfare spending consistently reduce inequality, such spending reduces inequality only in a democratic context in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Politics and Social Spending in Latin America

We examine the determinants of social expenditure in an unbalanced pooled time-series analysis for 18 Latin American countries for the period 1970 to 2000. This is the first such analysis of spending in Latin American countries with a full complement of regime, partisanship, state structure, economic, and demographic variables, making our analysis comparable to analyses of welfare states in advanced industrial countries. Democracy matters in the long run both for social security and welfare and for health and education spending, and—in stark contrast to OECD countries—partisanship does not matter. Highly repressive authoritarian regimes retrench spending on health and education, but not on social security.

Combating old and new social risks

Part 1: Politics of the New Social Risk 1. New Social Risks and the Politics of Post-Industrial Social Policies 2. Political Parties and New Social Risks: The Double Backlash against Social Democracy and Christian Democracy 3. New Social Risk and Political Preferences 4. Public Attitudes and New Social Risk Reform 5. Reconciling Competing Claims of the Welfare State Clientele 6. The Politics of Old and New Social Risk Coverage in Comparative Perspective 7. Trade Union Movements in Post-Industrial Welfare States. Opening up to New Social Interests? 8. Combatting Old and New Social Risks Part 2: Patterns of Policy Adaption 9. New Social Risks and Pension Reform in Germany and Sweden: The Politics of Pension Rights for Child Care 10. New Labour Market Risks and the Revision of Unemployment Protection Systems in Europe 11. Child Care Policies in Diverse European Welfare States: Switzerland, Sweden, France and Britain 12. Providing Coverage against New Social Risks in Bismarckian Welfare States: The Case of Long Term Care 13. The EU and New Social Risks: The Need for a Differentiated Evaluation

Political Parties and Public Pensions: A Quantitative Analysis

This article analyses pooled time series and cross-sections data for pension expenditure in advanced industnal democracies from 1958 to 1986, and cross-sectional data for pension quality and the distributive effect of pensions for 1980. Contrary to previous studies, it demonstrates significant effects of the party political composition of governments ; both Christian democratic and social democratic incumbency are positively associated with pension expenditure Only social democratic incumbency is associated with pension quality and less inequality and poverty among the elderly Aspects of state structure which facilitate access of relatively small groups to the policy-making process are negatively associated with quality of pensions and their distributive effects. The article explains the discrepancies between this and earlier studies, and it explores the reasons for the differences in the determinants of pension expenditure and those of overall welfare state expenditure.

Globalisation, Competitiveness, and the Social Democratic Model

For a long time, the discussion about the impact of economic globalisation on the full employment/generous welfare state policies pursued by social democratic governments was characterised by doom and gloom. Glib neo-liberal arguments about the impossibility of maintaining social democratic policies, that were presumably hindering competitiveness through excessive wages and taxes in the new international environment were difficult to counter, because social democrats could not resort to an equally elaborate and internally consistent economic doctrine that could substitute for evidence, and the evidence was not yet in to counter these arguments on empirical grounds. Recently, careful and comprehensive comparative studies have provided evidence that, despite undeniable problems posed by economic internationalisation, social democratic welfare states and employment regimes have proven to be highly resilient (Scharpf and Schmidt, 2000; Huber and Stephens, 2001). Indeed, some kinds of traditional social democratic policy, such as an emphasis on labour mobilisation through active labour market policy and social services that make it possible to combine labour force participation with raising children, and an emphasis on human capital formation have facilitated adaptation to the new economic conditions. Moreover, newly available data on skill distribution (OECD/HRDC, 2000) and income distribution (LIS) suggest that the egalitarian thrust characteristic of social democratic policy has made an important contribution to raising literacy skills at the bottom, which in turn facilitates the integration of the entire labour force into productive activities that are competitive in high-quality markets.

The Handbook of Political Sociology: State Economic and Social Policy in Global Capitalism

Across the capitalist world in countries of varying levels of development, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a retreat of the state from intervention in the economy, reversing a trend that dates back to the Great Depression. In the advanced capitalist countries, countries led by parties of varying political colors privatized state enterprises, reduced state regulations, liberalized capital markets, and, to varying degrees, cut welfare state entitlements. In the Latin American and Caribbean economies, as in much of the rest of the less developed world, countries turned from import substitution industrialization (ISI) with high tariffs, capital market regulation, and high levels of state intervention to neoliberal open, export-oriented models. The dominant interpretation among political and journalistic observers has been that trends toward greater reliance on the market were both products and manifestations of “globalization,” the increasing economic openness of the national economies and integration of the world economy. The academic version of this view, the “hyperglobalization thesis,” argues that the emergence of a single global market and global competition has eliminated the political latitude for action of national states and imposes neoliberal policies on all governments. Proponents contend that as markets for goods, capital, and, more recently, labor have become more open, all countries have been exposed to more competition and the liabilities of state economic intervention and deviation from market-oriented “best practices” have become more apparent because these raise the cost of production.