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Most political systems consist of multiple layers. While this fact is widely acknowledged, we know surprisingly little about its implications for policy-making. Most comparative studies still focus exclusively on the national level. We posit that both “methodological nationalism” and “methodological subnationalism” should be avoided. We argue instead that in multilevel systems national and subnational governments jointly affect policy-making. Their respective influence is, however, conditional on the distribution of policy authority. Moreover, we identify power asymmetries, as subnational governments hardly affect policy-making in centralized systems whereas national governments shape subnational policy-making even in decentralized polities. Empirically, we study the case of education policy. Novel data on regional education spending, regional and national governments’ ideology, and regional authority over education in 282 regions in 15 countries over 21 years reveals strong support for the interplay between ideology and the distribution of authority across levels. We conclude by sketching a resulting research agenda.
Public opinion towards welfare state reform: The role of political trust and government satisfaction
(2021)
The traditional welfare state, which emerged as a response to industrialization, is not well equipped to address the challenges of today's post-industrial knowledge economies. Experts and policymakers have therefore called for welfare state readjustment towards a ‘social investment’ model (focusing on human skills and capabilities). Under what conditions are citizens willing to accept such future-oriented reforms? We point at the crucial but hitherto neglected role of citizens’ trust in and satisfaction with government. Trust and satisfaction matter because future-oriented reforms generate uncertainties, risks and costs, which trust and government satisfaction can attenuate. We offer micro-level causal evidence using experiments in a representative survey covering eight European countries and confirm these findings with European Social Survey data for 22 countries. We find that trust and government satisfaction increase reform support and moderate the effects of self-interest and ideological standpoints. These findings have crucial implications not least because they help explain why some countries manage – but others fail – to enact important reforms.
We cannot imagine a political system without opposition. Despite this crucial position in politics, political science has largely neglected to study oppositions. Attempting to fill this gap, this article analyses the institutional opportunities of parliamentary oppositions. It offers a parsimonious framework by distinguishing two dimensions of opposition influence: Some institutions enable oppositions to control governments, while others offer opportunities to present alternatives. A comparison of oppositions’ opportunities in 21 democracies shows that countries fall into four groups along these dimensions: In majoritarian democracies, weak control mechanisms are countered by excellent opportunities to publicize alternatives. Consociational democracies are characterized by strong control mechanisms, but provide only weak opportunities to present alternatives. Moreover, in Southern Europe, control mechanisms and opportunities to present alternatives are weak, while both are pronounced in Nordic Europe. The results are summarized in three indices that can easily be applied in future research examining oppositions and their power.
Gender and attitudes toward welfare state reform: Are women really social investment promoters?
(2021)
This article contributes to the study of the demand side of welfare politics by investigating gender differences in social investment preferences systematically. Building on the different functions of social investment policies in creating, preserving, or mobilizing skills, we argue that women do not support social investment policies generally more strongly than men. Rather, women demand, in particular, policies to preserve their skills during career interruptions and help to mobilize their skills on the labour market. In a second analytical step, we examine women’s policy priorities if skill preservation and mobilization come at the expense of social compensation. We test our arguments for eight Western European countries with data from the INVEDUC survey. The confirmation of our arguments challenges a core assumption of the literatures on the social investment turn and women’s political realignment. We discuss the implication of our findings in the conclusion.
Welfare is the largest expenditure category in all advanced democracies. Consequently, much literature has studied partisan effects on total and policy-specific welfare expenditure. Yet, these results cannot be trusted: The methodological standard is to apply time-series cross-section-regressions to annual observation data. But governments hardly change annually. Thus, the number of observations is artificially inflated, leading to incorrect estimates. While this problem has recently been acknowledged, it has not been convincingly resolved. We propose Mixed-Effects Models as a solution, which allow decomposing variance into different levels and permit complex cross-classification data structures. We argue that Mixed-Effects models combine the strengths of existing methodological approaches while alleviating their weaknesses. Empirically, we study partisan effects on total and on disaggregated expenditure in 23 OECD-countries, 1960-2012, using several measures of party preferences.
Gender and attitudes toward welfare state reform: Are women really social investment promoters?
(2021)
This article contributes to the study of the demand side of welfare politics by investigating gender differences in social investment preferences systematically. Building on the different functions of social investment policies in creating, preserving, or mobilizing skills, we argue that women do not support social investment policies generally more strongly than men. Rather, women demand, in particular, policies to preserve their skills during career interruptions and help to mobilize their skills on the labour market. In a second analytical step, we examine women’s policy priorities if skill preservation and mobilization come at the expense of social compensation. We test our arguments for eight Western European countries with data from the INVEDUC survey. The confirmation of our arguments challenges a core assumption of the literatures on the social investment turn and women’s political realignment. We discuss the implication of our findings in the conclusions.
The debate on effects of globalization on welfare states is extensive. Often couched in terms of a battle between the compensation and the efficiency thesis, the scholarly literature has provided contradictory arguments and findings. This article contributes to the scholarly debate by exploring in greater detail the micro-level foundations of compensation theory. More specifically, we distinguish between individual policy preferences for compensatory social policies (unemployment insurance) and human capital-focused social investment policies (education) and expect globalization to mainly affect demand for educational investment. A multi-level analysis of ISSP survey data provides empirical support for this hypothesis. This finding provides an important revision and extension of the classical analytical perspective of compensation theory, because it shows that citizens value the social investment function of the welfare state above and beyond simple compensation via social transfers. This might be particularly relevant in today's skill-centered knowledge economies.