Documents Jensen, Carsten 7 results

"Who Governs matters greatly to welfare state policy. An almost complete neglect of the parliamentary opposition in the comparative political economy suggests that only office-holding matters, but we disagree. We argue that opposition parties of the Left constrain Right governments' welfare state policies, while opposition parties of the Right have no similar effect on Left governments. This is the asymmetric opposition-government response mechanism. Through the compilation of an extensive dataset, we test the mechanism across 23 countries from 1980 to 2007 and find strong evidence for the existence of the mechanism. This demonstrates that parties matter to policy formation not only as yielders of office power, but as agenda setters too."

"The discussion on the existence and nature of the welfare regimes of Western democracies has been ongoing for more than 15 years, and many significant contributions have been made. The scholarly work has, however, had a tendency to focus on the transfer component of welfare states, thereby losing sight of the welfare service component. This article argues two aspects. First, the transfer component and welfare service component are two distinct dimensions of welfare regimes. Second, great differences exist between health care and social care services; health care is characterized by very uniform levels of expenditure across countries, while expenditure on social care services conforms to the regime typology of Esping-Andersen. This is taken to indicate that the welfare service component consists of two different types of services distinguished by the importance of the two ideological dimensions of familiarism and statism during the formative years of these welfare service sectors."

"Childcare services have experienced a sudden surge in the level of public provision since the late 1990s. There is a rising awareness of the benefits of childcare services, not least in terms of the human capital they generate. These recent changes — and especially the country variation therein — are vaguely covered by existing literature, which tends to focus on effects rather than the causes of policies. In this article, three competing hypotheses on the institutional conditions of change are derived and tested. The article shows that change is determined by curriculum traditions and not by the size of vested interests or ceiling effects. Countries belonging to the readiness-for-school-curriculum tradition have expanded their provision considerably more than countries belonging to the social-pedagogical-curriculum tradition; the reason is argued to be that the former conceptually matches the political preference for generation of human capital much better than the latter."

"The Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data set quantifies how much parties emphasize certain topics and positions and is very popular in the study of political parties. The data set is also increasingly applied in comparative political economy and welfare state studies that use the welfare-specific items rather than the CMP's left–right scale to test hypotheses on the impact of political parties on social policies, (in)equality and the welfare state. But do these items provide a valid basis for descriptive and causal inferences? What do the items precisely capture? To answer these questions on concept validity, we use the new manifesto corpus data for German parties 2002–2013 and, to provide a further test, for US parties 2004–2012. Corpus data are the digitalized, originally hand-annotated and coded texts of electoral programmes. We assess the validity of the codings directly at the level of quasi-sentences by re-categorizing and subcategorizing the originally coded statements on equality, social justice and welfare state expansion. Although concept validity concerns about the data seem exaggerated, we find that theoretically relevant and meaningful variation is ‘hidden' behind the original categories. Hence, our approach allows researchers to assess the substantive meaning of the CMP data directly, and we offer an efficient new strategy for testing more specific hypotheses on the impact of political parties on policy."

"A core, but so far untested, proposition of the new politics perspective, originally introduced by Paul Pierson, is that welfare state cutbacks will be implemented using so-called ‘invisible' policy instruments, for example, a change in indexation rules. Expansion should, by implication, mainly happen using ‘visible' policy instruments, for example, a change in nominal benefits. We have coded 1030 legislative reforms of old-age pensions and unemployment protection in Britain, Denmark, Finland and Germany from 1974 to 2014. With this unique data at hand, we find substantial support for this crucial new politics proposition. "

" This article explores how preferences for redistribution among voters are affected by the structure of inequality. There are strong theoretical reasons to believe that some voter segments matter more than others, not least the so-called median-income voter, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to directly analysing distinct income groups' redistributive preferences. In addition, while much of the previous literature has focused on broad levels of inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, it is likely that individuals respond to different types of inequality in different ways. To rectify this gap, we use data from the European Social Survey and Eurostat to examine the interactive effect of income deciles and various measures of inequality. Results suggest that inequality especially affects the middle-income groups – that is, the assumed median-income voters. Moreover, not all inequality matters equally: it is inequality vis-à-vis those around the 80th percentile that shapes redistributive preferences."