Documents Comparative Political Studies 16 results

"Do narratives about the causes of inequality influence support for redistribution? Scholarship suggests that information about levels of inequality does not easily shift redistributive attitudes. We embed information about inequality within a commentary article depicting the economy as being rigged to advantage elites, a common populist narrative of both the left and right. Drawing on the media effects and political economy literature, we expect articles employing narratives that portray inequality as the consequence of systemic unfairness to increase demands for redistribution. We test this proposition via an online survey experiment with 7426 respondents in Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our narrative treatment significantly increases attitudes favoring redistribution in five of the countries. In the US the treatment has no effect. We consider several reasons for the non-result in the US – highlighting beliefs about government inefficiency – and conclude by discussing general implications of our findings."
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

"Political economy literature documents how financial investors are more partial to right executives than left ones. Right cabinets face lower interest rates, less volatile stock prices and exchange rates, and higher credit ratings than left cabinets, even after accounting for fiscal differences. But does this advantage persist if right governments accommodate far right parties or ideas? I hypothesize that because far right populism can introduce political instability, markets' evaluation of right executives might deteriorate if they enter coalition with far right parties or adopt their positions. Employing a panel analysis of bond spread data, and a comparative case study of the Netherlands and Sweden, I find that right executives enjoy significantly lower spreads than their left-wing counter-parts, but this advantage disappears if they rule in coalition with the far right or produce overly right-wing manifestos. These findings highlight that right parties may encounter tangible borrowing costs and market rebuke if they accommodate far right populism."

"Political parties often mobilise issues that can improve their electoral fortunes by splitting existing coalitions. We argue that by adopting a distinctively adversarial stance, radical right-wing parties have increasingly politicised climate change policies as a wedge issue. This strategy challenges the mainstream party consensus and seeks to mobilise voter concerns over green initiatives. Relying on state-of-the-art multilingual large language models, we empirically examine nearly half a million press releases from 76 political parties across nine European democracies to support this argument. Our findings demonstrate that the radical right's oppositional climate policy rhetoric diverges significantly from the mainstream consensus. Survey data further reveal climate policy scepticism among voters across the political spectrum, highlighting the mobilising potential of climate policies as a wedge issue. This research advances our understanding of issue competition and the politicisation of climate change."
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

"Paired comparison is a strategy of political analysis that has been widely used but seldom theorized. This is because it is often assimilated to single-case studies or regarded as a degenerate form of multicase analysis. This article argues that paired comparison is a distinct strategy of comparative analysis with advantages that both single-case and multicase comparisons lack. After reviewing how paired comparison has been dealt with in comparative politics, the article details a number of its advantages and pitfalls, illustrates them through the work of four major pairing comparativists, and proposes what is distinct about the strategy. It closes with a number of suggestions for using paired comparison more effectively."

"As a result of the Europeanization of politics and the increasing role of the public sphere, political actors in Western Europe are currently facing a double strategic challenge. Based on data from seven West European countries and the European Union, the authors analyze how state actors, political parties, interest groups, and social movement organizations cope with this double challenge at both the national and the supranational level. Results indicate that the classic repertoire of inside strategies at the national level is still the most typical for all actors, but media-related strategies are also prominent at the national level. The Europeanization of repertoires is mainly determined by institutional factors and by the actors' power, whereas the public arena plays an equally important role for all types of actors, in all countries and at both the national and the EU level. "

"Across Western Europe, unions have increasingly engaged in staging general strikes against governments since 1980. This increase in general strikes is puzzling as it has occurred at the same time as economic strikes have been on the decline. We posit that theories developed to explain economic strikes hold little explanatory power in accounting for variation in general strikes across countries and over time. Instead, we develop a framework based on political variables; in particular, whether governments have included or excluded unions in framing policy reforms; the party position of the government; and the type of government. Our empirical analysis, based on a conditional fixed-effects logit estimation of 84 general strikes between 1980 and 2006, shows that union exclusion from the process of reforming policies, government strength, and the party position of the government can provide an initial explanation for the occurrence of general strikes. "

"This article focuses on the European governments' decision to involve unions and employers in the design and implementation of public policy. Based on new measures of the phenomenon, the authors argue that between 1974 and 2003, no convergence on a pluralist model of policy formation is visible. They then use these measures to identify and analyze the clearest cases of adoption or demise of concertation, namely, the contrasting responses of the British and Irish governments to wage policy and of the Austrian and Italian governments to pension reform. They argue that governments are willing to share their policy-making prerogatives when they are politically weak and when unions, while still representing a credible threat to policy implementation, have been declining in the recent past. A combination of partisanship and policy learning reinforces the push for change."

"Britain and Germany have been experiencing significant changes in the nature of work and welfare since the 1990s. Although important differences have remained, there have been compelling indications of a dual transformation of welfare constituted not only by a far-reaching retrenchment in unemployment insurance but also by a remarkable expansion in family policy. These developments have their functional underpinnings in accelerating deindustrialization with a declining proportion of the male workforce with specific skills as well as in service sector growth and rising female labor market participation characterized by an increase in general skills. As the aggregate effect of economic fluctuations in industrial production has diminished over time, the relative incidence of work disruptions that have arisen from maternity and child-rearing has increased substantially. This dual transformation in welfare and employment patterns suggests that the process of deindustrialization has initiated significant path adjustments unanticipated in the existing comparative political economy literature."

"Western welfare states were built during the postwar years, with one key objective: to protect family (male) breadwinners against the consequences of losing their ability to extract an income from the labor market. Structures of social risk, however, have changed dramatically since then, so that current social risks include precarious employment, long-term unemployment, being a working poor, single parenthood, or inability to reconcile work and family life. Changes in structures of social risk have resulted in the adaptation of welfare states only in the Nordic countries but much less in continental and southern Europe. To account for this divergence in social policy trajectories, this article argues that the reorientation of the Nordic welfare state was possible because new social risks emerged before the maturation of the postwar welfare states. The argument is demonstrated through comparative statistical analysis relating the timing of key socioeconomic developments to current levels of spending in relevant policies."