Recalibrating social protection: Electoral competition and the new partisan politics of the welfare state

Abstract

This article investigates the new party politics of welfare states with a particular focus on electoral competition. The argument is that welfare state politics are no longer just about more or less, but involve trade‐offs among ‘new’ versus ‘old’ social rights, and hence social investment versus social consumption. However, party priorities on these issues are highly dependent upon their electoral situation. As electoral competition becomes more intense, parties focus more on vote maximisation than on their traditional policy goals. For left parties, this means focusing more on social investment, which appeals to their growing constituency of progressive sociocultural professionals, and less on defending the traditional income maintenance programmes favoured by their core blue‐collar voters. Centre‐right parties, on the other hand, should hesitate to retrench old social rights when electoral competition intensifies because they need to prioritise their appeal to culturally conservative working‐class voters over their traditional fiscally conservative policy profiles. Using a new dataset and a recently published measure of electoral competitiveness, the article shows that as electoral competition intensifies, left governments are willing to prioritise social investment by reducing pension rights generosity in order to expand programmes for new social risks, while centre‐right governments by contrast avoid retrenchment of pension rights and pension expenditures. The findings demonstrate that this relationship is moderated by the presence of a credible radical right challenger, which increases the electoral risk of welfare state recalibration.

Radical right parties and their welfare state stances – not so blurry after all?

“…We stand in the tradition of this research which has first begun to investigate support for specific policies rather than support for general welfarism and has increasingly added constraints and trade-offs to measure voters’ priorities rather than positions. While the bulk of this research is concerned with the demand side of political competition, both multidimensionality and the increasing importance of priorities are progressively acknowledged in studies of welfare party politics (Abou-Chadi and Immergut 2019 ; Green-Pedersen and Jensen 2019 ).…”

Class and social policy in the knowledge economy

“…By contrast, when it comes to SI, costs occur in the immediate, but returns are both temporally distant and more uncertain in distributive terms. Hence, since investment and consumption reflect different logics of how social policy sustains security and inclusion, conflict over SI is structured – both at the level of voters and at the level of political parties – in ways that differ from conflict over social consumption (Abou‐Chadi & Immergut, 2019; Bremer & Bürgisser 2020; Garritzmann, et al. 2018a; Häusermann & Kriesi 2015).…”

Fifty years of welfare state generosity

“…A recent review of the partisan hypothesis literature finds that the operationalization of welfare matters a great deal, with expenditure analyses finding no partisan effects and generosity analyses finding significant partisan effects (Bandau & Ahrens, 2020). In addition, scholars are likely to be interested in the challenges resulting from the recent electoral success of far‐right parties (Abou‐Chadi & Immergut, 2019; Krause & Giebler, 2020), and the nationalist turn in the advanced countries.…”