Kimberly J. Morgan

Path Shifting of the Welfare State: Electoral Competition and the Expansion of Work-Family Policies in Western Europe

What explains the surprising growth of work-family policies in several West European countries? Much research on the welfare state emphasizes its institutional stickiness and immunity to major change. Yet, over the past two decades, governments in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have introduced important reforms to their welfare regimes, enacting paid leave schemes, expanded rights to part-time work, and greater investments in child care. A comparison of these countries reveals a similar sequence of political and policy change. Faced with growing electoral instability and the decline of core constituencies, party leaders sought to attract dealigning voter groups, such as women. This led them to introduce feminizing reforms of their party structures and adopt policies to support mothers’ employment. In all three cases, women working within the parties played an important role in hatching or lobbying for these reforms. After comparing three countries that moved in a path-shifting direction, this article engages in a brief traveling exercise, examining whether a similar set of dynamics are lacking in two countries—Austria and Italy—that have moved more slowly in reforming these policies. Against the prevailing scholarly literature that emphasizes path dependence and slow-moving change, this article reveals the continued power of electoral politics in shaping redistributive policies.

Forging the Frontiers Between State, Church, and Family: Religious Cleavages and the Origins of Early Childhood Education and Care Policies in France, Sweden, and Germany

European states differ tremendously in the extent to which their national education systems administer preschool programs, and whether or not these services can serve as day care for working parents. This article traces contemporary policy differences in three countries—France, Sweden, and Germany—to the effects of nineteenth-century conflicts between religious and secular forces over education. Intense, clerical-anticlerical conflict in France led to the incorporation of preschools into the national education system. In Sweden and Germany, the more accommodating relationship between church and state assured that no such incorporation took place. These decisions had lasting consequences for the nature and extensiveness of child care services for preschool-aged children.

The Political Path to a Dual Earner/Dual Carer Society: Pitfalls and Possibilities:

What are the political pathways to the dual earner/dual caregiver model? Are most countries likely to attain only a partial transformation of policies and societies, rather than a full embrace of this model? This article examines the development of work-family policies in Western Europe to probe the politics and consequences of these programs. In many countries, the political context frustrates efforts to enact a unified, comprehensive vision like the dual earner/dual caregiver model. Rather than achieving gender-egalitarian arrangements for work and care, countries may stall halfway there. Advocates should be careful in what they ask for and be aware of the challenge of keeping gender-egalitarian goals at the center of a policy-making process over which they will not have full control.

The origins of tax systems: A french-american comparison

This article examines the origins of tax systems. Through a historical comparison of France and the United States, and analysis of several shadow cases, the article explains why the United States has relied more heavily on progressive income taxation than France, which has favored regressive sales taxes. This study traces the origins of these two tax systems to the early 20th century, arguing that decisions about tax structure were shaped by resistance to the concentration of economic power in the United States and the centralization of state power in France. In the United States, the rapid concentration of economic power in the late 19th century spurred a political movement for a tax with clear redistributive purposes. In France, resistance to the centralization of state power and concomitant fears of “fiscal inquisition” weakened the drive for an effective income tax, leaving the state to rely on consumption taxes to meet its revenue needs. These 19th‐century movements of resistance to modernization shaped the foundations of contemporary political economy.

Federalism and the Politics of Old-Age Care in Germany and the United States:

Until the early 1990s, Germany and the United States had similar systems of long-term care. At that time, Germany created a new social insurance program, whereas American reform efforts stalled. As conventional explanations of social policies—rooted in objective conditions, policy legacies, interest group mobilization, and party politics—fail to explain the diverging trajectories, the authors show how differing federal structures shaped reform efforts. German federalism gives states a strong voice and encourages collective responses to fiscal problems, enabling comprehensive restructuring of long-term care financing. In the United States, states lack a political mechanism to compel federal policy makers to tackle this subject. This analysis suggests reform of social welfare issues with weakly mobilized publics is unlikely without proxy actors that have institutional or political means to forcibly gain the attention of policy makers. In addition, scholars should pay more attention to “varieties of federalism” in analyses of the welfare state.

From “Sick Man” to “Miracle”: Explaining the Robustness of the German Labor Market During and After the Financial Crisis 2008-09

What explains Germany’s exceptional labor market performance during the Great Recession of 2008-09? Contrary to accounts that emphasize employment protection legislation or government policy (i.e., short-time work), this article argues that actions by firms—embedded in ever-changing coordinative institutional structures—were crucial. Firms chose to keep rather than shed labor, a strategy induced by (i) a “toolkit” of flexible labor market instruments that had evolved incrementally over the past thirty years; (ii) wage restraint and successful internal restructuring of firms during the past decade, which fueled an export boom before the crisis. Firms thus had some margin for maneuver, using internal flexibility to protect their investment in skilled workers. These and other institutional changes driven by firms reflect a process of successful adaptation to external economic challenges, but did not fundamentally undermine Germany’s coordinated form of capitalism. The result is not a new German model that was purposefully designed; instead German firms slowly discovered new ways to cope with economic challenges.

Financing the Welfare State: Elite Politics and the Decline of the Social Insurance Model in America

fits and services provided by the welfare state, few scholars have investigated how these programs are financed. The tax side of the budget equation is crucial for the ability of welfare states to exist and expand; without a stable and growing source of revenues, the welfare state can neither meet its existing obligations nor increase its responsibilities. The mode of finance can be particularly important, as some taxes are more visible or contested, and thus more difficult to raise. For example, because there are limits to how much revenue can be raised with progressive income taxes, many industrialized countries finance large social programs through contributory finance, that is, payroll taxes. Levied over a broad swath of the population, these taxes generate a large amount of revenue, yet are politically acceptable because people see them as payments that entitle them to benefits in return. Payroll taxes are central to the American social insurance model, financing two of the most significant government programs in American history: Social Security and Medicare. Since its passage in 1935, Social Security has alleviated much senior poverty, while Medicare provides access to healthcare for a population often lacking insurance. As universal entitlements, both programs are enormously popular with the public, and have enjoyed support even through times of fiscal difficulty and rising antitax sentiment. Despite the economic and political success of these programs, policy-makers have turned away from the social insurance model in recent decades, arguing that a limit has been reached in the public’s willingness to pay these taxes. As a result, the existing programs have not been put on stable long-term footing. Moreover, proposed expansions of the welfare state, including improvements in Medicare, long-term care coverage, and access to health insurance for the uninsured, have foundered, in large measure owing to their lack of financing.1 Why have elites rejected this highly successful mode of financing social policy? Why have they turned their backs on payroll tax funding, especially when the average citizen appears willing to pay higher payroll taxes, when American tax rates are still Studies in American Political Development, 19 (Fall 2005), 173–195.

Gender, right-wing populism, and immigrant integration policies in France, 1989–2012

Abstract Immigrant integration has been on the political agenda in France since at least the late 1980s, yet starting in the early 2000s this issue became bound up with concerns about the oppression of minority women. This article examines the evolution of the issue over two decades, pinpointing when and why debates over integration took on a gendered cast. The article’s explanation centres on two factors – the growing threat of the Front National coupled with the legitimation of gender-based claims in French politics. These claims were embraced by conservative politicians seeking to adopt a harder line toward immigration and led to the refashioning of core Republican concepts such as égalité and laïcité as being about gender equality. The use of similar themes by the Front National as it has sought to move in from the political fringe reveals how gendered claims can be deployed in an effort to keep anti-immigrant policies within the boundaries of liberal values.

Process tracing and the causal identification revolution

The essays in this special issue of New Political Economy are welcome contributions to growing debates about the logic and methods of process tracing in the social sciences. The introductory essay, along with three short pieces by Beach, Falleti and Kreuzer, offers a roadmap to these discussions, helpfully clarifying some of the lines of division about how to use process tracing, how to think about causality and causal mechanisms, and the role of theory vis-à-vis empirical research. The essays also make plain the rapidly expanding use of process tracing in political science and sociology; although some social scientists had been using variants of this method (without calling it that) for some time, the terminology and more self-conscious use of process tracing have taken off since the mid-2000s (Kittel and Kuehn 2013). In their introductory essay to this volume, Trampusch and Palier count no fewer than 18 different types of process tracing. Considering that King et al.’s influential methods treatise in 1994 largely dismissed process tracing as an inferior mode of inquiry (228), the growing literature either using or advocating this method makes plain that we are in a post-King, Keohane and Verba’s (KKV) world of social science research (Mahoney 2010). As my own graduate training in comparative politics took place in the 1990s under the weighty influence of KKV, I would like to comment on some implications of a larger trend that has shaped the turn to process tracing: the intensified emphasis in the social sciences on problems of causal identification. Previously, those of us engaged in comparative analyses followed a logic of inquiry that was implicitly – and after KKV explicitly – modelled on statistical research. The ideal was a statistical analysis of independent and dependent variables for a large number of observations that would generate a series of partial correlations. We would know in general how X related to Y, controlling for A, B and C, and if this was in line with theoretical expectations, we could plausibly argue that there was a causal relationship. The qualitative comparative method was always the ugly stepsister at the ball however, given the too-many-variables-in-too-few-cases problem. Methodologists therefore urged comparativists to multiply their N wherever possible – KKV suggested that more than 5 but fewer than 20 observations should do the trick – but some also encouraged the use of cross-national regression analysis, including the pooling of time series and cross-sectional data so as to increase the number of observations. Qualitative scholars studying fewer cases sought out clever comparisons of countries that varied enough on the outcome, but little enough on everything else, so as to claim that the ceteris paribus assumption held. Another acceptable strategy was to analyse subnational and/or longitudinal variation within one case. Although there were always concerns about what one could conclude from the standard regression analysis, criticisms began crystallising by the start of the new millennium around the problem of causal identification. Statisticians long had cautioned against moving airily from correlation to causation owing to the often non-random distribution of observations, problems of endogeneity and omitted variable bias, and the complex causal relationships that abound in the social, political and economic world. But increasingly quantitative scholars were turning to an array of improved statistical methods, such as instrumental variables, matching techniques or regression discontinuity designs, in order to grapple with problems of causal inference. The more striking change

The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy and Welfare Discipline: Discourse, Governance, and Globalization

The Welfare State Nobody Knows: Debunking Myths about U.S. Social Policy. By Christopher Howard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 260p.