Miriam A. Golden

Unions, Employers' Associations, and Wage-Setting Institutions in Northern and Central Europe, 1950–1992

The eight countries examined in this study—Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—have long been viewed as exemplifying “corporatist” industrial relations systems, in which union coverage is high, unions are influential and commonly have strong ties to political parties, and collective bargaining is institutionalized and relatively centralized. Many observers have recently argued that such corporatist bargaining institutions are everywhere being undermined by changes in the global economy. The authors, using data from a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, test whether changes in patterns of wage-setting in the private sector are consistent with that claim. Although they find some signs that corporatist wage-setting institutions are in decline, they also find offsetting signs of the resiliency of such institutions. Overall, the evidence does not indicate that wage-setting in the private sector is undergoing a general process of decentralization in these eight countries.

Legislative malfeasance and political accountability

Utilizing a unique data set from the Italian Ministry of Justice reporting the transmission to the Chamber of Deputies of more than the thousand requests for the removal of parliamentary immunity from deputies suspected of criminal wrongdoing, the authors analyze the political careers of members of the Chamber during the first eleven postwar legislatures (1948–94). They find that judicial investigation typically did not discourage deputies from standing for reelection in Italys large multimember electoral districts. They also show that voters did not punish allegedly malfeasant legislators with loss of office until the last (Eleventh) legislature in the sample. To account for the dramatic change in voter behavior that occurred in the early 1990s, the investigation focuses on the roles of the judiciary and the press. The results are consistent with a theory that a vigilant and free press is a necessary condition for political accountability in democratic settings. An independent judiciary alone is ineffective in ensuring electoral accountability if the public is not informed of political malfeasance.

Competitive Corruption: Factional Conflict and Political Malfeasance in Postwar Italian Christian Democracy

This article studies the relationship between cartels of politicians and systemic political corruption in a democratic setting. Some electoral systems, including open-list systems of proportional representation, encourage intraparty competition for office. The authors analyze the relationship between intraparty conflict in postwar Italys dominant political party, the Christian Democrats, and charges of malfeasance against Christian Democratic members of the Chamber of Deputies in the years between the first postwar parliamentary elections of 1948 and the end of the XI legislature in 1994, when the electoral system was substantially modified. Suspected malfeasance is operationalized as requests by the judiciary to lift parliamentary immunity in order to proceed with an investigation of a member of the Chamber of Deputies. Results show a significant statistical relationship between intraparty conflict and alleged corruption on the part of dc deputies starting in the early 1970s. These results are interpreted to mean that the dramatic levels of political corruption observed in Italy in recent decades were in part an outgrowth of the search for campaign funds by incumbent dc members of parliament in competition with other candidates from the same party. Electoral competition with other parties did not significantly affect the extent of charges of malfeasance against dc deputies. Using maps, the authors also provide preliminary evidence that Italian corruption did not spread from south to north in a process of cultural contagion, as is commonly believed. Instead, they find, the determinants of corruption appear to be endogenous to institutions of the postwar political system.

Pork Barrel Politics in Postwar Italy, 1953-1994

This paper analyzes the political determinants of the distribution of infrastructure expenditures by the Italian government to the country’s 92 provinces between 1953 and 1994. Extending implications of theories of legislative behavior to the context of open-list proportional representation, we examine whether individually powerful legislators and ruling parties direct spending to core or marginal electoral districts, and whether opposition parties share resources via a norm of universalism. We show that when districts elect politically more powerful deputies from the governing parties, they receive more investments. We interpret this as indicating that legislators with political resources reward their core voters by investing in public works in their districts. The governing parties, by contrast, are not able to discipline their own members of parliament sufficiently to target the parties’ areas of core electoral strength. Finally, we find no evidence that a norm of universalism operates to steer resources to areas when the main opposition party gains more votes.

The Fragmentation of the Bargaining Society Wage Setting in the Nordic Countries, 1950 to 1992

It is commonly believed that corporatist bargaining institutions have been in general decline in the 1980s and 1990s. The leading explanations of the purported universal trend toward greater decentralization of collective bargaining are the impact of technological change, changes in the occupational structure, and growing international economic integration. Decentralization should be particularly visible in the Nordic countries, because collective bargaining was more centralized in these countries in the 1960s and 1970s than in any others in Western Europe. In this article, the authors present data on the changes in the centralization of wage bargaining in the four Nordic countries since 1950. They document that a significant decentralization of collective bargaining has occurred in Sweden, as is well known, but not in the other three. The article concludes with a review of possible explanations of Swedish exceptionalism.

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC SOURCES OF REGIME CHANGE: HOW EUROPEAN INTEGRATION UNDERMINED ITALY'S POSTWAR PARTY SYSTEM

Italy’s 1992 elections marked the end of political dominance by Christian Democracy (DC). The conventional account of the collapse of the DC’s vote to less than 30% focuses on the breakup of the Soviet Union, which is said to have freed Catholic voters to switch to new regionalist protest parties. The author documents that this argument is empirically inadequate. Evidence shows that electoral districts more exposed to international trade were where the DC lost larger vote shares and where the Northern League received more support. These findings corroborate that social groups linked to small firms in the north and center whose products were exported throughout Europe underwent electoral realignment in response to the economic opportunities offered by the 1991 Maastricht Treaty. The author argues that DC was not credible in providing national macroeconomic policies that would have allowed Italy to partake fully of the opportunities offered by European economic integration.

Incumbents and Criminals in the Indian National Legislature

Utilizing data on criminal charges lodged against candidates to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of representatives, we study the conditions that resulted in approximately a quarter of members of parliament elected in 2004 and in 2009 facing or having previously faced criminal charges. Our results document that Indian political parties are more likely to select alleged criminal candidates when confronting greater electoral uncertainty and in parliamentary constituencies whose populations exhibit lower levels of literacy. We interpret the decisions of political parties to enlist known criminals as candidates as a function of the capacity of these candidates to intimidate voters. To substantiate this, we show that criminal candidates depress electoral turnout. In addition, our results suggest that India’s well-known incumbency disadvantage stems from the superior electoral performance of allegedly criminal candidates, who drive parliamentary incumbents from office. Our study raises questions for democratic theory, which claims that electoral competition improves accountability, and for the future of the Indian polity, which is experiencing a growing criminalization of the national political arena.

Replication and Non-Quantitative Research

In “Replication, Replication,” Gary King convincingly argues that publications by political scientists should adhere to what he calls a replication standard. Although Kings article explicitly embraces qualitative as well as quantitative research, the policy statement that he suggests editors and reviewers of books and journals endorse exclusively imposes standards on studies based on quantitative research. Qualitative work is treated in a simple sentence and one that enforces no standards: “Authors of works relying upon qualitative data are encouraged (but not required) to submit a comparable footnote that would facilitate replication where feasible.”

The Politics of Job Loss

This paper undertakes a rational choice analysis of a problem in political economy: namely, why trade unions, confronted with firms equally intransigent in their commitments to work-force reductions, sometimes actively resist job loss and at other times passively acquiesce. Cases investigated are British Leyland and Fiat. Unions at British Leyland acquiesced, whereas those at Fiat resisted mass work-force reductions in 1980. The literatures on corporatism and on contemporary industrial relations both class Italian and British labor relations as antagonistic. They thereby fail to anticipate the different outcomes for these two cases. The outcomes may be understood as products of the rational calculations that union leaders make within the constraints of labor market institutions. Specifically, I show that union responses to the threat of large-scale work-force reductions vary with the presence or absence of seniority-based mechanisms for allocating job loss. Where seniority is used, the union acquiesces in job loss, since seniority effectively protects the unions own shop stewards. Where, conversely, the firm enjoys discretion in selecting workers for job loss, the union may resist if it believes the selection will be discriminatory, hence threatening its own shop floor organization.

Historical Memory and Ideological Orientations in the Italian Workers' Movement

IN an important analysis of the dilemmas of labor movements under advanced capitalism, Adam Przeworski recently argued that workers’ parties necessarily opt for electoralism. &dquo;As long as democratic competition offers to various groups an opportunity to advance some of their interests in the short run, any political party that seeks to mobilize workers must avail itself of this oppommity. &dquo; 1 sometime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so this account goes, socialist movements across Europe realized that the gains to be won through parliamentary participation were simply too tempting to continue eschewing electoral strategies. Entering the parliamentary arena allowed them-mr at least some of them-to become successful reformist