Pieter Vanhuysse

Are Aging OECD Welfare States on the Path to Gerontocracy

Since  the age of the average OECD median voter has increased three times faster than in the preceding  years. We use panel data from – to investigate the effects of population aging on both the program size and the benefit generosity of public pensions in  OECD countries. Population aging is accompanied by cutting smaller slices out of larger cakes: it increases aggregate spending on pensions but freezes or decreases the generosity of individual benefits. Controlling for political, institutional and time-period effects, we find that public pension efforts are significantly mediated by welfare regime type. Moreover, since the late s pension effort has more fully adopted a retrenchment logic. It is the politics of fiscal and electoral straitjackets, not gerontocracy, which shape public pension spending today. While population aging is accelerating, contrary to alarmist political economy predictions democracies are not yet dominated by a new distributive politics of elderly power.

Elderly bias, new social risks and social spending: change and timing in eight programmes across four worlds of welfare, 1980-2003

Over the past decades, all affluent welfare states have been coping with two major new trends: population ageing and new social risks resulting from de-industrialization. How have these demand-side trends, and their timing, affected welfare spending? We investigate up to 21 OECD democracies with respect to eight separate programmes and two composite indicators of aggregate welfare spending bias towards the elderly and new social risks. We find that welfare regime logics still matter crucially in accounting for variation between countries, as does the timing of the large-scale arrival of new social risks. Both Southern European welfare states and countries that entered the post-industrial society comparatively late spend less on programmes such as education and family allowances, and more on survivor pensions. However within countries, contemporaneous levels of new social risks conspicuously fail to affect spending on programmes that deal with these risks. These findings defy simple neo-pluralist expectations of social policy responsiveness: on their own, even dramatic demand-side trends influence welfare spending relatively little in advanced democracies.

Parties, Unions, and Activation Strategies: The Context-Dependent Politics of Active Labor Market Policy Spending

This article explores the diverging roles of left-wing parties and trade unions in determining active labour market programme (ALMP) spending. We argue that unions today increasingly take into account the distinct re-employability worries of their members. Rather than as a labour market outsider programme, unions now consider ALMPs, especially those sub-programmes most directly useful to their members, as their second-best or first-best feasible priority. Specifically, in countries where high job protection levels (the first-best goal) have not been achieved, more powerful unions will promote ALMP spending as an alternative way to offer their members some measure of labour market security. We test these arguments on a sample of twenty OECD countries between 1986 and 2005. Using a new measure of leftness, we find that left-wing party power has no effect on ALMP spending generally and a negative effect on job creation spending. By contrast, larger and more strike-prone unions are associated with higher ALMP spending overall, and specifically on those programmes most benefiting their members: employment assistance and labour market training. Moreover, union strategies are context dependent. More powerful unions push for more activation spending, especially in labour markets where jobs are not yet well protected.

Who Cuts Back and When? The Politics of Delays in Social Expenditure Cutbacks, 1980-2005

This article investigates the politics of delays in social spending cutbacks in OECD democracies. In the context of fiscal austerity, policymakers are assumed to have a strong incentive to manipulate the timing of cutbacks strategically. Applying event history analysis to small and large cutbacks in 21 mature welfare states, the authors test whether partisanship, electioneering and institutional constraints contribute to explain the timing of cutbacks. Macro-economic determinants such as worker productivity, economic growth and unemployment are found to be more important than these political variables. However, left-wing governments and welfare states with more institutional rigidity or a greater degree of contribution financing do tend to delay welfare cutbacks, while cabinets that have recently changed their party composition implement cutbacks earlier.

Cops for Hire? The Political Economy of Police Employment in the German States

In times of an alleged waning of political business cycles and partisan policymaking, vote-seeking policymakers can be expected to shift the use of political manipulation mechanisms towards other policy domains in which the macro-institutional environment allows them greater leverage. Public employment generally, and police employment specifically, are promising domains for such tactics. Timing the hiring of police officers during election periods may increase votes, as these are ‘street-visible’ jobs dealing with politically salient issues. Law-and-order competence signaling makes police hiring especially attractive for conservative parties. Testing these electioneering and partisanship hypotheses in the German states between 1992 and 2010, we find that socio-economic variables such as population density strongly determine police employment. But incumbents also hire more police officers before elections, while conservative party power increases police numbers. Subjectively ‘immediate’ forms of crime (issue salience) and perceived causes of crime such as immigration are also positively associated with police numbers.

Power, Order, and the Politics of Social Policy in Central and Eastern Europe

If there is one topic on which political science ought to be able to stake out a distinct claim to fame against other social sciences, it is power. From Machiavelli in the Renaissance Florence of the Medici to Bismarck and Pope Leo XIII in late nineteenth-century Prussia and Rome, rulers and their counsellors have been studied by political scientists in how they have used their state power to establish and consolidate political order. In the post-war decades, early post-behavioural theories by Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz (1962) and Steven Lukes (1974) represented seminal breakthroughs. They emphasized the hidden faces of power, suggesting how the asymmetric distribution of political and economic rights can structure relations of dominance in society above and beyond any observable decisions taken by ruling elites. Even in the absence of manifest conflict — what Lukes called the first face of power — powerholders often have the ability to stack the deck of cards of social life in ways such as to avoid the making of decisions (the second face of power), for instance through institutional design and agenda setting. Moreover, powerholders can shape the definitions of subordinate actors’ identities and interests, thereby forcing them to pre-emptively adapt to newly stacked decks of cards (the third face).

The pensioner booms in post‐communist Hungary and Poland: political sociology perspectives

Starts out by documenting the massive scale of early, and disability, retirement in Hungary and Poland, during the first seven years of the post‐communist transition. Sums up that the Hungarian and Polish governments had urgent reasons to design social policies to try to halt the danger of large‐scale protests in the 1990s.

Intergenerational Justice Perceptions and the Role of Welfare Regimes

This study analyzes intergenerational justice perceptions among 2,075 undergraduate students in 1996-1998 across eight democracies spanning four welfare regime types. It examined how different regimes structure perceptions of (a) justness in principle of young-to-old public resource transfers and (b) actual contributions to and rewards from society of various age groups. Support in principle of young-to-old transfers is higher in social democratic and conservative than in liberal and radical welfare regimes and correlates positively with a welfare-statist ideological frame and negatively with a market-based frame. Regarding actual contributions to society, the following ordering of age groups was obtained: adults > youth > elderly. Regarding actual rewards, the ranking was adults > elderly ≥ youth. But in the conservative regime, the youngest age group ranked lowest in perceived rewards and highest in perceived contributions. It was concluded that there is a distinct perception of intergenerational injustice among these populations of highly educated young citizens.

Merging dollars with values: Rights and resources in education worldwide

The Costs and Financing of Education: trends and policy implications, MARK BRAY, 2002 Manila/Hong Kong: Asian Development Bank/Comparative Education Research Centre, 77 pp., ISBN 9 71561 405 1 (paperback) Education and Social Change, AMANDA COFFEY, 2001, Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 142 pp., ISBN 0 33520 069 9 (paperback), £18.99 Education in the Twenty‐First Century, EDWARD LAZEAR (Ed.), 2002, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 192 pp., ISBN 0 81792 892 8 (paperback), £8.46 Education Denied: costs and remedies, KATARINA TOMASEVSKI, 2003, London and New York: Zed Books, 205 pp., ISBN 1 84277 250 3 (hardback), £49.95, 1 84277 251 1(paperback), £14.95 The International Handbook on the Sociology of Education: an international assessment of new research and theory CARLOS ALBERTO TORRES & ARI ANTIKAINEN (Eds), 2003, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 415 pp., ISBN 0 74251 769 1 (hardback), £65.00, 0 74251 770 5 (paperback), £27.95

Introduction: Social Policy Pathways, Twenty Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall

The year 2009 marks the fifth anniversary of the accession of eight formerly communist states in Central and Eastern Europe to the European Union,1 and the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This latter event ushered in a new post-Cold War era and a new wave of democratization and free markets in the heart of the European continent. Twenty years on from that eventful autumn day on 9 November 1989, the institutions and procedures of liberal democracy and the predominant role for free markets in economic life are well established as the only game in town in most though not all of the post-communist region, and they are solidly established in every one of the new EU member countries. But many challenges remain even in this latter group of eight (plus two, since 20072), not least in the domain of welfare states. The long-term social consequences of transition still have to be ascertained, and already population ageing looms large as the next big threat in the decades ahead. Economic crises have repeatedly materialized in all countries of the region since 1989, most recently and severely in October 2008 in Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Romania. As Claus Offe notes in this volume, compared to the EU-153 member states, after 1989 even post-communist reform leaders, on average, were nevertheless confronted with generally higher levels of unemployment, poverty, social exclusion and income inequality and with lower levels of economic wellbeing and social justice.4 These social ills are now likely to increase still further, widely across post-communist Europe. In addition, the export-led economic model embraced by Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries based on liberalized trade and capital markets and a high dependence on foreign direct investments has now turned into a possible impediment (Barysch, 2009). Whether the impact and extent of the global financial crisis are still unknown for Western European countries, their potential negative consequences for the less developed CEE countries are more obvious precisely because of their larger social ills and their particular economic models.