The Partisan Politics of the Regulatory Welfare State

In the last decade, the concept of the regulatory welfare state (RWS) is gaining ground in academic research. As political parties and party competition have been important factors in explaining the expansion and retrenchment of the traditional concept of welfare states, this article argues, that it should also be relevant for the rise of the regulatory welfare state. More specifically, we test whether the partisan composition of the government makes a difference and whether left parties in parliamentary opposition have a specific impact on the RWS policies of right parties as suggested by the asymmetric opposition-government response mechanism (Jensen and Seeberg 2015). To test these hypotheses, we analyse labour market regulation and either statutory minimum wages or replacement rates in twenty-one established OECD countries between 2000 and 2013.