Documents Young, Kevin L. 3 results

"Political economists have often drawn a hard line between the interests of owners of capital and the interests of labor. Yet over the past 30 years in Anglo-Saxon countries in particular, workers have become increasingly invested in capital markets activity through the privatization of pension systems and other incentives for market-based savings. In this article, we investigate whether this ‘financialization of everyday life' has generated a convergence of policy preferences whereby individuals support policies traditionally associated with the financial sector. Using three separate datasets on the US population, we find evidence that financial asset ownership is associated with lower support for more stringent financial regulatory policy, and higher support for financial sector bailouts. Such effects on individual preferences are modest on average, but persist even when controlling for indicators of social class and a range of other conditions, circumstances and time periods."

"Existing literature has offered a variety of claims regarding why financial regulatory politics features a relative dominance of the regulated financial industry. In this article, we explore the broader interest group environment in which financial industry advocacy operates. Using new data on interest group participation in financial regulatory consultations, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of the ecology of interest groups that populate financial regulatory policymaking. Through a new measure of ‘mobilized dissent', we find evidence that the level of interest group pluralism in financial regulatory policymaking is constrained by the limited mobilization of voices outside of the business community. We analyse how mobilized dissent towards the regulated financial industry changes in response to different institutional environments. While technical complexity, institutional context and the global financial crisis are found to impact the level of mobilized dissent, the impact of these environmental conditions varies across different groups. This analysis reveals not only that organized opposition to the financial industry is relatively weak, but also that it is relatively disjointed."

"The factors that influence wage moderation policies across European countries have been a focus of industrial relations literature for some time. Given the lack of direct market discipline on public sector wages, most existing accounts suggest that the determinants of public sector wages are due to institutional characteristics of the national wage-setting system in question. In this article the authors suggest an alternative ‘functionalist' explanation of public sector wage determination, with an emphasis on the role of public fiscal constraints and macroeconomic stress. Drawing on new data from 11 EMU countries during the recent economic crisis of 2008–2010 and engaging in a cross-national analysis using Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), the authors demonstrate that the functionalist explanation performs better than the institutionalist one in a crisis period. "