New Perspectives on the Study of Partisan Politics and Public Policies

Abstract

Political parties are essential to public policy-making in advanced democracies. Recent literature discusses whether partisan effects change over time or disappear in general due to national and international constraints as well as electoral dealignment and realignment. Moreover, there is a growing scholarly debate about the conditional effect of party competition on public policy-making. The five papers in this panel focusing on OECD countries contribute to these strands of literature from new perspectives. While a first paper adds to the conceptual discussion on the derivation and explanation of partisan differences, two papers examine the revenue side of public policy-making (taxation). The last two papers look at welfare state spending, generosity and regulation. The panel’s conceptual contribution examines the relevance of partisan theory in times of social changes and electoral realignment. It suggests focusing less on a voter-party-linkage but on a party’s ideology and the preferences of its political actors in order to deduce partisan differences. With regard to the revenue side of policy-making, the panel’s papers research partisan effects theoretically and verify them empirically for different governmental levels (national and local) and compare them between different policy dimensions (tax levels vs. tax structure). Finally, with regard to various dimensions of the welfare state, the papers in this panel test whether partisan politics is conditioned by a combination of globalization and organized labour or by opposition parties’ issue emphasis. Overall, the panel contributes to answer the question whether parties still matter under changing circumstances.