Documents Avdagic, Sabina 11 results

"The article offers an explanation for variations in the effectiveness of trade unions to obtain legislative and policy concessions in peak-level tripartite negotiations in post-communist East Central Europe. It shows that standard interpretations for such variations—focused on structural legacies, modes of transition, political cycles and institutional differences—cannot account for the problem at hand. Instead, I argue that the sources of these variations are to be attributed to distinct paths of state–labour relations, which are the product of continuous strategic interactions that crucially depend on power dynamics between the main actors. To present a mechanism through which these paths evolve, the article sketches a model of government–union interactions that combines institutional and behavioural variables. I propose a set of hypotheses regarding the conditions that determine initial choice of strategies and factors that influence continuation or modification of these strategies later on. By analysing the cases of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, the article further illustrates how these interactions shape tripartite institutions in such a way that they start reflecting accentuated power disparities between the contending actors, thereby limiting future choice sets for weaker actors."

"The discussion on ‘New Approaches to Political Economy (PE)' gives us a state-of-the-art overview of the main theoretical and conceptual developments within the concept of political economy. Thereby, it invites us to broaden our knowledge regarding manifold novel approaches, which make use of more complex methods to study the less stable, less predictable, but faster changing realities of smaller or bigger geographical regions. In this discussion forum, Amable takes a closer look on the nature of ‘conflict' as well as the relationship between conflict and institutional change or stability. After stressing the relevance of comparative capitalism in general, Regan also zooms in on the political conflicts in comparative political economy from three different perspectives (electoral politics, organized interest groups and business-state elites), where he finds new avenues, tensions and research agendas are opening up. From a different perspective, Avdagic reviews the broad developments in the field of political economy with respect to the supply and demand side of redistributive policy. Thereafter, Baccaro and Pontusson sketch an alternative ‘growth model perspective', which puts demand and distribution at the center of the analysis. Finally, Van der Zwan analyses the usefulness of financialization studies for the study of (comparative) political economy."

"International organizations and mainstream economists have consistently promoted the view that labour market rigidities are responsible for high unemployment, and that wide-ranging institutional deregulation is an appropriate policy response. Yet, as demonstrated by recent literature, the empirical support for the deregulatory view is ambiguous. This paper re-assesses this debate by bringing in new evidence from a larger group of countries, which includes advanced and new market economies. Using new data and paying special attention to the robustness of estimation results, we find rather thin support for the deregulatory view. The sensitivity analysis demonstrates that in most cases the adverse effects of institutions disappear with small changes in the sample or the use of alternative estimators and specifications. The impact of institutions is particularly weak in new market economies, where unemployment is related primarily to macroeconomic factors. Overall, our findings challenge the policy orthodoxy that comprehensive deregulation is the universal solution to unemployment."

"International organizations and mainstream economists have consistently promoted the view that labour market rigidities are responsible for high unemployment, and that wide-ranging institutional deregulation is an appropriate policy response. Yet, as demonstrated by recent literature, the empirical support for the deregulatory view is ambiguous. This paper re-assesses this debate by bringing in new evidence from a larger group of countries, which includes advanced and new market economies. Using new data and paying special attention to the robustness of estimation results,wefind rather thin support for the deregulatory view. The sensitivity analysis demonstrates that in most cases the adverse effects of institutions disappear with small changes in the sample or the use of alternative estimators and specifications. The impact of institutions is particularly weak in new market economies, where unemployment is related primarily to macroeconomic factors. Overall, our findings challenge the policy orthodoxy that comprehensive deregulation is the universal solution to unemployment."

"Using new data, the paper examines the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on aggregate and youth unemployment in advanced OECD economies and in Central and Eastern Europe during 1980-2009. The analysis assesses both the direct and indirect effects of EPL on levels of unemployment, as well as the short-term and long-term effects of changes in EPL on changes in unemployment. The results offer no clear support for the argument that EPL is a cause of either aggregate or youth unemployment. While EPL reaches statistical significance at conventional levels in some models, the results are sensitive to small changes in the sample or the use of alternative estimators. The only finding that appears robust concerns the interaction between EPL and the tax wedge, which suggests some scope for reform complementarity in tackling youth labour market problems. On the whole, the analysis suggests that government efforts to tackle unemployment by deregulating EPL alone may well be unwarranted."

"The result of a four-year long comparative research study centered at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and financed by the European Commission's Sixth Framework Programme, Social Pacts in Europe presents the first full-length theoretical and comparative empirical study of new social pacts in Europe. Its aim is to bring the level of sophistication achieved in an earlier literature on neo-corporatism to the more contemporary phenomenon of 'social pacting'. The book brings a wide range of complementary theories to bear on the emergence, evolution and institutionalization of pacts, compares systematically a wide range of cases across Europe, and provides in-depth studies of Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and Slovenia. The book contributes to the scholarly debate on economic adjustment and institutional change in European capitalism by focusing on three inter-related questions: (i) what explains national variation in reliance on social pacts; (ii) what determines the outcomes of individual pact negotiations; and (iii) under what conditions are pacts repeated and become regular features of socio-economic governance? The book's theoretical innovations include a novel application of fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) to help explain national differences in social pact adoption; the application of a game theoretic approach to explain social pact emergence; and a reinterpretation of traditional neo-corporatist and new institutionalist theory to help understand social pact consolidation and institutionalization."

"Are newly established institutions capable of shaping actors' strategies and coordinating behavior on a single path? Contrary to punctuated equilibrium analyses, this paper suggests that the constraining capacity of a range of newly established institutions in new European capitalisms is weak and that their very interpretation is subject to contention. Focusing on peak-level tripartism - a formally similar institution whose functioning has varied across national contexts - this paper proposes an actor-centered framework to elucidate the logic and consequences of actors' ongoing strategic maneuvering for the interpretation, enactment, and development of these young institutions. Combining insights of rational choice and historical institutionalism, the paper develops a heuristic model which, by focusing on strategic choices of government offi cials and union leaders, links the varied enactment of tripartism to different power balances that become mutually accepted in the course of their repeated interactions. In offering a set of falsifi able propositions, the paper provides a guideline for building analytical narratives to evaluate empirically this model."