The paper investigates the effect of different ideological constellations on cutbacks in unemployment insurance entitlements. Many studies have addressed the question whether external and internal pressures or distinct political decisions drive the re-privatization of labor market related risks. Unfortunately, comparative welfare state scholars have employed an insufficient conceptualization of ideology. In most cases ideology is simply defined in terms of left and right - often measured via expert judgments which do not take positional shifts of parties into account. Those expert judgements do not consider ideological change of parties over time and they make it impossible to discriminate empirically between a lack of political commitment and a lack of opportunity to implement certain preferences. Two solutions to this "Independent Variable Problem" are discussed and applied. The first strategy is to employ time variant left-right scales based on party manifestos. The second strategy is to decompose ideology, i.e. use aspects items which are theoretically meaningful for the question of retrenchment and political decisions vis à vis external and internal pressures. More precisely, the focus is on a government’s "market affinity" and "welfare affinity", as expressed in party manifestos. The analysis is based on 174 cabinets in 18 countries within the last four decades. Using OLS and Logit regression analysis, it can be shown that the way governments respond to external and internal pressures depends on cabinet ideology, particularly on the adherence to ideas of non-intervention in the market. By contrast, more abstract frames such as left and right do not affect the extent and probability of retrenchment policies. The results suggest that economic worldviews serve as a cognitive anchor or filter of perception – causing different reactions of governments faced with similar challenges.
