Party and Issue Competition and Welfare State Reforms

Abstract

For a long time after Paul Pierson (1994) famously argued that retrenchment is a politically risky strategy, theorizing on the welfare state revolved around the question how to explain policy resilience. The answer was mainly found in positive feedback effects for core electoral groups. From early on it was acknowledged that retrenchment does occur, but it was mainly treated as an exception requiring external shocks as ‘windows of opportunity’. This claim has been nuanced by theories of incremental institutional change, but the fundamental assumptions of welfare state theory remained intact: welfare states persist, because they are popular. At the same time, we have seen many examples of radical welfare state reforms in recent years. This panel will support the development of new theories that can explain such reforms by focusing on two dimensions of political competition: party and issue competition. We invite papers that use theories of political competition to explain when and why it is attractive for political parties to retrench, or conversely when and why it is attractive to increase investment in specific policy areas or for specific population groups.

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