Key events in international politics, such as terrorist attacks, can be characterised as sublime: our minds clash with phenomena that supersede our cognitive abilities, triggering a range of powerful emotions, such as pain, fear and awe. Encounters with the sublime allow us an important glimpse into the contingent and often manipulative nature of representation. For centuries, philosophers have sought to learn from these experiences, but in political practice the ensuing insights are all too quickly suppressed and forgotten. The prevailing tendency is to react to the elements of fear and awe by reimposing control and order. We emphasise an alternative reaction to the sublime, one that explores new moral and political opportunities in the face of disorientation. But we also stress that we do not need to be dislocated by dramatic events to begin to wonder about the world. Moving from the sublime to the subliminal, we explore how it is possible to acquire the same type of insight into questions of representation and contingency by engaging more everyday practices of politics.

While it is commonly accepted that the organisation and mobilisation of labour movements has been critical to the development and nature of welfare states across the OECD, considerable uncertainty remains as to the specific mechanisms and means by which labour movements secure social wage benefits. Emphasis in the evaluation of labour politics can be placed on the role of left and labour party control over government, on the effect of union movement strength as measured by union density rates or on the influence of union confederal involvement in policy-making. These party mobilisation, union density and political unionism theses are tested using pooled time-series crosssectional data drawn from 15 OECD countries. The results indicate that while union involvement in economic policy-making and union movement strength are conducive to higher levels of welfare expenditure, the presence of left parties per se has no apparent effect on welfare effort. Labour movements and welfare states: a -reconsideration of how trade unions influence social change' 1 Labour movements are often seen as key supporters of social wage benefits. The research reported in this paper attempts to illuminate the way in which labour movements influence welfare expenditure by examining the relative effects of different forms of union and left party organisation and mobilisation. We are, however, less concerned with developing a comprehensive explanation of welfare state development than with identifying the most effective labour movement strategies for the pursuit of social change. To achieve this, though, we use two different measures of social policy outcomes as dependent variables in two multivariate models. Our central hypothesis is drawn from recent theoretical accounts suggesting that a key at CARLETON UNIV on June 21, 2015 jos.sagepub.com Downloaded from

This paper is concerned with the political determinants of the significantly different rates of welfare expenditure which characterise advanced capitalist countries. The research concentrates on the connections between the organization and mobilization of a key political actor pursing social wage benefits – the labour movement – and different levels across nations of welfare provision, including expenditure on health, social security consumption expenditure and social security transfers. The paper uses disaggregated, pooled time series data on welfare provision in 15 OECD countries, 1974–1988, to test the association between more comprehensive welfare state regimes and state structures that facilitate the intervention of organized labour movements in the policy process.