Georg Wenzelburger

Political Strategies and Fiscal Retrenchment: Evidence from Four Countries

Political strategy matters – especially in the case of unpopular reforms. This is the main argument of this article. It shows that the analysis of political strategies gives complementary insights into the causal mechanisms of reform politics. It helps us to understand how political actors successfully implement unpopular reforms. The article provides empirical evidence for this claim by means of an analysis of adjustment efforts in Sweden, Belgium, Canada and France during the 1990s. It is shown that governments acted strategically in two areas: they used strategic manoeuvres in the political sphere in order to circumvent veto players. And they employed strategic organisation and communication in the public sphere in order to dampen the risk of being punished by voters for the implemented policies.

Blame avoidance, electoral punishment and the perceptions of risk

Recent findings about the electoral cost of welfare state retrenchment challenge the view of the ‘New Politics’ literature that cutting welfare state entitlements is electorally risky. In fact, there seems to be no systematic punishment for governments retrenching the welfare state. At the same time, however, studies show that governments use numerous blame avoidance strategies when cutting welfare. Reflecting on this apparent contradiction we put forward two points. First, qualitative evidence from interviews with political leaders suggests that it is not the actual risk of being punished that entices politicians to use blame avoidance but the perception of this risk. This explains why blame avoidance strategies are widely used. Second, the existing studies showing that governments are not systematically punished for cutting the welfare state suffer from the lack of control for blame avoidance effects. We show that an experimental design could be a remedy for this problem.

Religion, Religiosity, and the Attitudes Toward Homosexuality—A Multilevel Analysis of 79 Countries

Although attitudes toward homosexuality have become more liberal, particularly in industrialized Western countries, there is still a great deal of variance in terms of worldwide levels of homonegativity. Using data from the two most recent waves of the World Values Survey (1999–2004, 2005–2009), this article seeks to explain this variance by means of a multilevel analysis of 79 countries. We include characteristics on the individual level, as age or gender, as well as aggregate variables linked to specificities of the nation-states. In particular, we focus on the religious denomination of a person and her religiosity to explain her attitude toward homosexuality. We find clear differences in levels of homonegativity among the followers of the individual religions.

Roads to Success: Budget Consolidations in OECD Countries

During the 1990s, some OECD countries succeeded in reducing their budget deficits. The average public debt ratio fell from more than 70 per cent of GDP in 1996 to about 63 per cent of GDP in 2001. Up to now, researchers have mainly focused on the economic effects of these consolidation efforts. This paper answers another question: How can balanced budgets be achieved? By means of a detailed review of nine budget consolidations, the study identifies different roads to successful fiscal adjustments, starting with a critical review of the definition of budget consolidation. We find a pattern on the expenditure side that follows different worlds of the welfare state. On the revenue side however, the tax structure seems to be more path-dependent and mainly driven by long-term developments. In the last section, we show that institutional reforms constitute very important components of budget consolidations.

Implications of dataset choice in comparative welfare state research

In the debate on welfare politics replacement rates have been hailed as a measure far more appropriate to identify retrenchment than expenditure. However, this contribution demonstrates that there is a considerable dependent variable problem on the entitlement side as well. By means of a comparison between replacement rates for three major programmes from the two most prominent datasets, Scruggss CWED and Korpi and Palmes SCIP, we show that not only diagnoses on the occurrence and intensity of welfare cutbacks vary considerably, but also the results on the determinants of welfare state change. After tracing some causes of the divergences, we conclude that future research needs to be more programme-specific, more data-conscious and more humble in its claims.

Parties, Institutions and the Politics of Law and Order: How Political Institutions and Partisan Ideologies Shape Law-and-Order Spending in Twenty Western Industrialized Countries

Although the politics of law and order are currently a major issue of debate among criminologists, comparative public policy research has largely neglected it. This article fills that gap by bringing together criminological and public policy theories, and by examining law-and-order policies in twenty Western industrialized countries. It adds to the existing literature in two important ways: it provides a straightforward quantitative test of the existing criminological explanations of law-and-order policies using public spending as the dependent variable; and it shows that governments’ partisan ideology matters for law-and-order policies. Government ideology influences how much countries spend on public order and safety, but the effect depends on the budgetary room for manA“uvre and the strength of institutional barriers.

When do Governments Consolidate? A Quantitative Comparative Analysis of 23 OECD Countries (1980–2005)

Abstract Soaring unemployment, various economic stimulus packages, and the financial backlash have left their marks on the public finances of most industrialized countries. Fiscal adjustments are a top priority for the governments of the OECD member states. Against this background, this paper investigates the determinants of fiscal adjustments in the 1990s – a period when many budget consolidations occurred. Through a quantitative analysis, this research shows (1) what variables explain the probability of budget consolidation, (2) what consolidation strategies are most successful, and (3) what factors influence the relative consolidation performance within the group of consolidators.

Political Parties and Pension Generosity in Times of Permanent Austerity

Abstract The quantitative strand of social policy research suffers from a double deficit: on the one hand, analyses of aggregate expenditure dominate, and on the other hand, most studies of replacement rates focus on unemployment or sickness benefits, while pensions are excluded. This paper addresses the said deficit firstly by discussing the pension sectors’ theoretical peculiarities and by proposing two hypotheses: one on the retrenchment of pension replacement rates and one on the role played by political parties in implementing it. Secondly, after a brief literature review and an outline of our methodological approach, we present regression results of replacement rate changes in 18 developed democracies. Our findings show considerably smaller cuts of pensions than of unemployment or sickness benefits, and striking differences regarding partisan effects between the sectors.

Policy instruments and welfare state reform

A core, but so far untested, proposition of the new politics perspective, originally introduced by Paul Pierson, is that welfare state cutbacks will be implemented using so-called ‘invisible’ policy instruments, for example, a change in indexation rules. Expansion should, by implication, mainly happen using ‘visible’ policy instruments, for example, a change in nominal benefits. We have coded 1030 legislative reforms of old-age pensions and unemployment protection in Britain, Denmark, Finland and Germany from 1974 to 2014. With this unique data at hand, we find substantial support for this crucial new politics proposition.

Framing Effects and Comparative Social Policy Reform: Comparing Blame Avoidance Evidence from Two Experiments

Abstract Following Paul Pierson’s work on the New Politics of the welfare state, numerous studies on welfare state reforms have shown that governments enacting welfare cuts regularly employ blame avoidance strategies and use issue frames when they communicate welfare reform policies. However, it remains largely unexplained to what extent these blame avoidance strategies really impact on the attitudes of voters on the micro level. This study sets out to fill that void in the literature. Using data on pension reforms and student grant cutbacks, the article provides experimental evidence showing that blame avoidance and framing strategies affect individual attitudes towards the proposed policies – in particular in the case of pension reforms. Moreover, in the case of pensions, the impact is conditioned by individual risk exposure. These results add significantly to the literature on blame avoidance and welfare state reform policies by indicating that successful blame avoidance may be the reason why governments are not always punished for cutbacks to the welfare state.