This article develops a theoretical distinction between direct and indirect welfare chauvinism in order to analyze how electorally successful populist right‐wing parties transmit social policy preferences with significant redistributive implications for the shape of the welfare state. Direct welfare chauvinism occurs as a result of legislative changes that explicitly exclude recipients from social protection or reduce the level thereof on the basis of ethnicity. Indirect welfare chauvinism is the result of policy measures that apply to both natives and immigrants, but which deliberately negatively affect immigrants the most. Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis of labour market reforms in Denmark, where one of the most successful populist right‐wing parties in Europe – the Danish People's Party – held a pivotal position in the period 2001–11, the article traces the intentions and deliberate policy‐making strategies of the party. It shows that the distinction between direct and indirect chauvinism is a useful theoretical tool for understanding how the Danish People's Party can fulfill the expectations of both its electorate and its coalition partners, even if they point in different directions.

Abstract.  This article deals with the institutional change of 27 political systems in postcommunist countries, 1990–2002. The authors show that institutional change after the institutionalization of the postcommunist regime is limited and lock‐in effects are strong. This applies to the more democratic and affluent countries as well as to the more authoritarian regimes. The authors do not find evidence for theories of institutional change that see institutional development as a linear function of socio‐economic factors such as affluence or of domestic political power distribution. The European Union and NATO have an effect that is limited to the overall democratic character of the system.

The term ‘welfare chauvinism’ has achieved a certain currency in social science research and is used widely. Yet, the concept is not without its critics, who claim that welfare chauvinism is ‘loaded’ or ‘ambiguous’. This article reviews empirical studies of welfare chauvinism, from the 1990s to the present day, drawing primarily from party politics and attitudes research. We identify differences in how the concept is used, defined, operationalized and measured. We emphasize the importance of a unified language, operationalization and measurement, and identify promising directions for future research.

A growing body of literature documents that under the economic and social pressures accompanying the post-communist transformations, governments in Central and Eastern European countries have been forced to change their spending habits. However, because most of these findings are based only on case studies or comparisons of a very small number of countries, it is difficult to observe to what extent the post-communist countries' development patterns share commonalities or develop in unique ways. This article explores in a quantitative comparative framework the effects of government composition, globalization, political institutions, and socioeconomic factors on total public, public social, and public education expenditures in twelve nation states. The authors find that the party composition of government has the most robust effect, in that left incumbency is positively correlated with total public and social expenditures. This result indicates that in this sense, post-communist countries are similar to Western democratic ones. The authors find only mixed results regarding the effects of globalization on public spending. This might suggest that globalization does not have a direct effect on the spending policies of these countries, but rather is mediated by domestic contexts.