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Election Campaign Agendas, Government Partisanship, and Welfare State Generosity

Niklas Jakobsson

--Norwegian Social Research (NOVA)

niklas.jakobsson@nova.no

Staffan Kumlin

--Dept. of Political Science, Univ. of Gothenburg

--Institute for Social Research, Oslo

staffan.kumlin@pol.gu.se

Abstract

In this paper we test the hypothesis that partisan effects on welfare state generosity grow after election campaigns dominated by welfare state issues. We combine data on welfare state generosity with new contextual data on overall issue saliency in campaigns, from 13 West European countries for the years 1980-1999. We find clear and significant partisan effects in years following elections where the welfare state was a central election theme, but none in years following elections in which the welfare state did not define the campaign in a major way. On the one hand these findings provide continued support for the contention that “politics” affects policy, even in the “silver age” of the welfare state and even in a restricted West European sample (where it has previously been harder to uncover partisan effects). On the other hand, they suggest the benefits of taking a broader and more contingent view of just what “politics” should be taken to mean, building not only policy preferences/positions, but also policy agendas, into our explanations. Likewise, they suggest that “political factors” may appear less stable and predictable once the interactive role of dynamic policy agendas is considered.

January 11, 2013

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Introduction: government partisanship and the welfare state

Questions about whether and how “politics matters” have long been important in comparative

welfare state research. Perhaps the most researched political factor concerns “government

partisanship,” typically measured by the relative distribution of cabinet posts among different

party families. For example, the influential “power resources model” (see Korpi 1983) links the

scope and character of redistributive policies to the organizational and political strength of the

working class, indicated for instance by the scope of government participation by leftist parties.

Likewise, the “worlds of welfare” approach launched by Esping-Andersen (1990) suggests that

the historical composition of governments, and the class coalitions they reflect, help explain how

countries that were initially similar in welfare ambitions gradually came to resemble qualitatively

different “welfare regimes.”

Although intuitively plausible, the view that politics matters has been somewhat controversial.

For example, the functionalist contention that welfare states grow with modernization,

industrialization, and affluence (e.g. Wilensky 1975) has often been taken to mean that politics is

of less importance at any given level of development. Similarly, “race to the bottom” scenarios

imply that economic globalization forces all governments to attract mobile capital with tax and

labour cost cuts, with adverse effects for social protection (Swank 2002). More recently, different

brands of institutionalism have theorized how the policy legacies of developed welfare states

increasingly create “lock-in” processes and why it may sometimes be rational for governments to

extend that legacy rather than push ideologically driven reform. In a related vein, Pierson (2001)

has envisaged a “new politics of the welfare state,” in which all mainstream parties and

governments find their hands tied to centrist policies by the popularity of the welfare state on the

one hand, but also a severe perceived reform need prompted by economic and demographic

change on the other. However, the popularity of the welfare state is assumed to block major

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reform unless “blame avoidance” is possible, i.e. unless policy change is possible to conceal from

the watching eye of the electorate

Still, the government partisanship hypothesis continues to receive empirical support. Studies

relating measures of how large shares of cabinet posts are controlled by different party families

report expected effects on policy levels and change (Castles 2007; Huber and Stephens 2001;

Korpi and Palme 2003b; van Kersbergen 1995). Thus, Schmidt (2010:213) concludes in a recent

overview that “Although conceding the multi-causal determination of all policy outcomes […]

the evidence of a wide variety of studies is that the “parties matter” hypothesis passes the

empirical test reasonably well.”

A number of finer points in this literature are worth noting for our purposes. First, although the

left-right composition of governments is of continued importance its precise links to policy

change seems to have been altered. During the first few postwar decades left-leaning

governments were associated with increased spending and generosity while right-leaning

governments tended to maintain status quo. In contrast, since the start of the “era of permanent

austerity,” beginning around 1980, right-leaning governments (especially those with a strong

presence of secular conservative parties) are associated with some retrenchment whereas leftist

governments are likely to sustain the policy legacies previously achieved (Allan and Scruggs

2004).

Second, the success of partisan theory varies depending on the sample of countries. Samples

mixing Europe with Anglo-Saxon welfare states tend to yield clearer and more significant

differences. By contrast, samples of European countries throw up weaker, more variable, and less

significant results. A main reason is that European samples limit the variation in the independent

variable. As Schmidt (2010:216) explains, “strong pro welfare state parties […] have been the

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major parties in power in Western Europe. In contrast, the United States, Australia, New

Zealand, and Japan are countries in which non-leftist parties and, above all, market-oriented

conservative parties have played a far more important role in shaping the timing and substance of

public policy.” In other words, using only European data—as we do in this paper—is likely to

yield conservative estimates of government partisanship effects. We will return to this point.

At present, research on government partisanship tends to follow two paths. One line of inquiry

tries to refine the dependent variables by moving beyond encompassing measures of the welfare

state and instead develop hypotheses for specific and new policies. Examples include different

dimensions of active labour market policy (Nelson 2012), types of public sector market reforms

(Gingrich 2011), and types of human capital creation (Iversen and Stephens 2008). The other line

of development involves an interactive approach, seeking to illuminate contingencies of partisan

effects. For example, such effects seem partly dependent on long-standing features of the

institutional system related to “veto points” (Starke 2008), the party system (Green-Pedersen

2001) as well as the “quality of government” (i.e. impartiality and corruption in the legal and

bureaucratic system, see Rothstein, Samanni and Teorell (2012)).

We continue down this second path, focusing not so much on institutional contingencies but

rather on more volatile political conditions that may enable or mute a translation of government

ideology to public policy. We develop and test the argument that the impact of government

partisanship is contingent on whether welfare issues are salient in the public sphere at election

time. We certainly agree—and find—that “politics matters” but broaden the view of just exactly

what “politics” should be taken to mean, and how static or dynamic its impact is. A key idea here

is that democracy in general, and democratic elections in particular, entail more than an

aggregation of exogenous and stable actor preferences (e.g. Warren 1992). They also entail a

dynamic and unpredictable pre-decision, pre-election discursive phase in which relevant facts are

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exchanged, preferences weighted and potentially reshaped (e.g. V. Schmidt 2002). This is a broad

remark, of course, one that opens up potential questions concerning a host of discourse-oriented

concepts, including “deliberation” (Elster 1998), “framing” (Chong and Druckman 2007; Iyengar

1991), “narratives” (Boswell 2012), and “blame avoidance” (Weaver 1986). In this paper,

however, we focus on the older, more basic, but potentially powerful discursive concept of

agenda-setting. The next sections develop our argument and the hypothesis in the context of recent

research on agenda-setting. We note that this concept has been given a new life in comparative

politics, with interesting implications for welfare state research. We then explain our research

design, data sources, and measures, after which it is time to look at the empirical results. The

concluding section discusses implications of the findings for our understanding of how political

factors structure welfare state stability and change.

Systemic agenda-setting and comparative welfare state research

The concept of agenda-setting has long been important for academics and pundits in making sense

of democratic politics. Its premise is that power is not only exercised by obvious and tangible

means like military force, voting strength, or economic clout. Influencing subtle aspects of the

informational context is also important, not least in open and stable democracies. Crucially, this

“soft” brand of power entails more than just authoritative persuasion aimed at shifting

preferences. Recycling a famous phrase from Cohen (1963) it is not only important to affect what

others’ think, but also what they think about; that is, which problems and issues are prioritized and

seen as most worthy of attention and ultimately realization.

At the same time, it is fair to say that comparative welfare state research has been more

preoccupied with policy preferences/positions than with policy agendas. Much energy—and rightly

so—has been devoted to studying which types of policies enjoy support in different groups of

citizens, political parties, and organized interests. Less scrutinized are questions about where

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welfare preferences rank in priority on the political agenda, i.e. the extent to which they are

prioritized and paid attention to at various stages of the policy process. Put differently, we know

more about what citizens and parties want to do with welfare than how prioritized such wishes

are in the larger political scheme of things, or what the implications of such agendas are for

policy.

This imbalance may have evolved for good reason but is still not entirely satisfactory at this point.

Agenda-setting typically represents a more dynamic element in democratic politics than

preferences, which are often largely stable over longer periods of time (Klingemann 1995; Budge

and Bara 1998). Thus, a full understanding of how political factors, broadly conceived, affect

policy may remain somewhat incomplete if measures of agenda-setting and issue priorities are not

part of our explanations. Such an omission becomes especially unfortunate given that welfare

state scholars are increasingly concerned with rapid and sometimes unexpected policy change

(Häusermann 2010; Palier 2010).

To be fair, bringing agenda-setting into comparative welfare state research has been hard due to

the non-comparative orientation of much political communication research (Blumler and

Gurevitch 1975; De Vreese 2003; Strömbäck and Aalberg 2008). Communication scholars have

often modeled agenda-setting as a rather fragmented within-system micro game. A political

process is assumed to contain a cast of actors influencing each other in complex ways. This

complexity has often led agenda-setting research to favor research designs in which a single

process, issue, country, election etc. is studied one at the time. For example, it has proven fruitful

to conceive of party conflict in terms of “issue competition” (e.g. Carmines and Stimson 1990;

Robertson 1976) and “issue ownership” (e.g. Petrocik 1996). These models envision a struggle

for the agenda in which actors try to make the public sphere and decision-making settings attend

to areas where they themselves are positively evaluated. More generally, agenda-setting is typically

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modeled as a three-way power struggle between citizens, the mass media, and political actors (e.g.

Asp 1983). In a complex reality, all these actors influence each others’ agendas, but the weight of

the evidence depicts agenda-setting as an elite-driven process. Purposeful political actors and the

mass media battle each others’ agendas, with citizens as rather passive but receptive bystanders

(c.f. Dearing and Rogers 1996; Van Aelst and Walgrave 2011).

While this approach has clearly been very valuable it may obscure broader cross-national and

historical processes and differences. Hence, we know less about whether agendas may also be

fruitfully thought of as an overall contextual/systemic characteristic of an entire political system. Is

there a meaningful and measurable “overall essence” of the agenda that transcends many actors

and groups in a place and point in time? Put differently, which small set of issues manage to rise

above the cacophony of multiple agendas so as to form a contextual overall agenda?

Comparative politics scholars have recently begun to ask such questions (Baumgartner, Green-

Pedersen and Jones 2006; Baumgartner, Green-Pedersen and Jones 2008; Baumgartner, Jones

and Wilkerson 2011). An interesting observation is that overall systemic/contextual agenda shifts

within a country is frequently larger than differences between actors at one point in time

(Baumgartner, Jones and Wilkerson 2011; Sigelman 2004). Such findings have led scholars to use

terms such as “issue convergence” or “issue overlap” (Damore 2005). Green-Pedersen and

Mortensen (2010) even separate conceptually and empirically between agendas of constituent

actors and the overall agenda of the party system. The latter is the agenda that emerges in settings

where actors interact and thus give up some control over the relative attention given to issues. As

the authors (2010:260) explain, “An agenda is thus a structural phenomenon in the sense that it

constrains the relevant actors at any given time. They must address the issues that are prominent

[…] At the same time, they compete to influence the composition of the agenda.”

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In sum, then, scholars have taken steps towards a broader historical and comparative study of

agenda-setting. This paper continues this emerging research program in that we conceptualize

agenda-setting as a broad contextual phenomenon that can vary across countries and years.

Inspired by this approach, we bring information on broad contextual agendas of election

campaigns into standard models of government partisanship. Election campaigns are interesting

here not just because elections affect policy, but also because they are shaped by a multitude of

actors, including politicians, the mass media, experts, interest groups, citizens themselves, as well

as underlying real world events and trends. Exactly because campaigns involve many competing

influences that “mix” during a short, unpredictable, but crucial period it becomes interesting to

ask not only micro questions about the many competing agendas, but also consider which small

set of issues that become more universally salient and debated topics in that particular campaign.

What are the characteristics of the overall public sphere agenda that most actors influence, but

which nobody can entirely control or predict? In the next section, we formulate a hypothesis

about how an important aspect of such a systemic contextual agenda might interact with post-

election government partisanship so as to jointly impact on welfare policy.

Hypothesis

In principle, election agenda priorities may affect public policy in at least two broad ways. One

occurs when overall attention to a problem has a direct main effect that operates independently

of who the policymakers are. Often such effects have been theorized as inherently expansive

(though this is by no means a logical necessity). For example, broad systemic attention to the area

of public transportation may much of the time lead a government, regardless of denomination, to

spend more on roads and bridges. Empirically, there is evidence of such direct and inherently

expansive consequences of agenda priorities on policy (e.g. Baumgartner, Green-Pedersen and

Jones 2008; Klingemann, Hofferbert and Budge 1994; Mortensen 2010). We will pay attention to

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this possibility. Still, as we have noted redistributive welfare policy is marked by deeply

entrenched ideological and partisan conflict. Therefore, it is potentially necessary to consider also

the interaction between government partisanship and agenda-setting.

As discussed below, a key assumption is that governments are more likely to act, and act

ideologically, in policy areas that topped the overall campaign agenda. From this vantage point,

the combination of dynamic salience and stable preferences could explain policy change (rather

than just any of these components taken separately). For example, fast-moving agendas can

explain policy change even when preferences are rather stable.

The overall hypothesis to be tested is that government partisanship effects on overall welfare state generosity

grow after election campaigns dominated by welfare state issues. Three causal mechanisms could account

for this pattern. The simplest one is a straightforward agenda mechanism through which hotly

debated campaign issues, and with them program consistent reform, are subsequently fast-

forwarded in the policy priorities of the post-election government. A key concept underlying this

agenda mechanism is “attention scarcity,” i.e. the assumption that policymakers must pick their

battles. For cognitive, administrative, and economic reasons they can only attend to some of the

many legitimate and pressing problems facing a nation at any one time. Policy changes, especially

larger and more coordinated ones, tend to occur earlier and to a greater extent in a rather small

number of prioritized areas (see Kingdon 1984; Baumgartner, Jones and Wilkinson 2011). What

is more, the impact of government ideology on policy may grow as policymaking activities

increase. This is especially true in any broader policy domain affected by multiple decisions (i.e

“welfare generosity”). In such broad domains partisan effects on output will accumulate and be

easier to detect as policy activities increase.

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Second, one might conceive of a mandate-confidence mechanism. Governments may feel more

confident and justified to pursue ideologically based policy in areas that topped the overall agenda

in the election. It may seem safer and more justified than usual to pursue contentious reform if

the policy area was unusually scrutinized in the public sphere. Winning, or at least surviving, an

election combined with big-time attention to the area in question ensure that “policy-seeking”

and “office seeking” will seem in less conflict than usual in that area. This would be important as

it has been shown that public policies are also generally affected by majority public preferences

(e.g. Brooks and Manza 2007; Soroka and Wlezien 2010), especially when a policy area is high on

the agenda (e.g. Mortensen 2010). This mandate confidence mechanism, if present in the minds

of policy makers, certainly has well-documented micro foundations. Political behavior research

has long demonstrated the importance of elite-level politicization for individual-level issue

salience (Dearing and Rogers 1996; McCombs and Shaw 1972), issue voting (Stokes 1963),

interest-preference coherence (Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee 1954; Kumlin and Svallfors

2007), and internal value coherence (Granberg and Holmberg 1988). Overall, then, it seems

generally warranted to speak about a more coherent and strongly expressed policy mandate in

areas more salient at election time.

Third, one may discern a mandate-accountability mechanism. Parties give election pledges and

ideological policy cues in a large number of areas (e.g. Naurin 2011). And while citizens do not

always monitor closely whether representatives implement their programs (e.g. S. Stokes 2001),

electoral sanctions, and politicians’ fear thereof, should be more widespread in issue areas high on

the agenda (Hutchings 2003), because in these areas one may expect a greater willingness and

ability to monitor incumbents. Conversely, areas that did not color the systemic campaign agenda

may not be subject to such perceived pressure because any signs of poor program realization will

be less noticeable, prioritized, and understood among citizens, media, and the opposition. In

sum, then, governments who want to avoid accusations of betraying core beliefs and promises

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may be well advised to pay particular attention to the major issues that dominated the public

sphere at the time of (re)election.

Data and measurement

In order to test our hypothesis we need (1) a relevant measure of the character of the welfare

state, (2) a measure of government partisanship, (3) a measure of whether welfare issues have

been salient in election campaigns, and (4) relevant control variables. Let us discuss each in turn.

First, to measure the welfare state we use the overall benefit generosity index presented by

Scruggs (2006). The index is based on net income replacement rates, workforce coverage, length

of qualifying periods, and duration of benefits in sickness benefits, unemployment benefits, and

pensions. High scores indicate more generous policies with the index ranging theoretically from 0

to 64. Using an index based on citizen rights to social insurance is generally viewed as a better

way of measuring welfare state generosity than using expenditure-based measures, since the latter

are for example directly related to changes in GDP. Thus, an economic downturn can appear as

an increase in welfare-state generosity when using expenditure based measures. Changes in the

dependent population may also mask cuts or expansions at the individual level: if unemployment

increases while the individual benefits increase spending measures may not capture the change on

the individual level. More importantly, what we would like to measure is to what extent the

welfare state actually insures the individual from income loss, not governmental spending. These

arguments have been developed in greater length by and Korpi and Palme (2003a), and Allan and

Scruggs (2004).

Second, as a measure of government partisanship we use the right party cabinet portfolios as a

percentage of total cabinet posts, weighted by the days the government was in office in a given

year from the Comparative Political Data Set (Armingeon et al. 2008). We use this variable as

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past research indicates that it is right parties (in particular secular-liberal parties) that have the

strongest effects on policy change during the period studied (roughly speaking, the “permanent

austerity” phase of Western welfare states beginning at some point around 1980). By contrast, a

presence of leftist parties in government has been largely associated with a defence of status qou.

Still, in the appendix we report results using the left share of total cabinet posts, which point in

the same direction as our main results but are, as suggested, somewhat weaker.

Third, we need information about the salience of welfare state issues in election campaigns. This

poses a challenge as research on agenda-setting has not left many large-N comparative data sets

behind. The comparative data sets that do contain information on salience and agenda-setting

tend to tap phases in the policy process that come either well before or well after elections. A

prominent example of the former type is the “Comparative Manifesto Project” (see Klingemann,

Budge et al 2001), focusing on the menu of issues that individual parties bring to elections. An

example of the latter is the “Comparative Policy Agendas” project (Baumgartner, Jones and

Wilkerson 2011), which concentrates on elite actors in later and less public stages of

policymaking (i.e. bills, committees, parliamentary debates etc.). While very useful and impressive

in their own right, these sources contain little information about which issues actually dominate

the public sphere during election campaigns.

To get at such information we coded the contents of “election reports” published in the two

political science journals West European Politics (WEP) and Electoral Studies (EL). Over the

years, these reports have been written by country experts observing specific elections closely, and

later summarizing and interpreting events, issues, and results for an academic audience in a few

pages. At heart, they provide a “thick” qualitative documentation of historical events.

Interestingly however, studies indicate that key aspects of the contents can be fruitfully quantified

across space. Kumlin and Esaiasson (2012) measure the incidence of election scandals and find

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that these have become more common, but less consequential for democratic dissatisfaction.

Armingeon and Giger (2008b) use the source to measure campaign saliency of large cuts in

welfare state generosity. They find that such saliency boosts the negative impact of actual cuts on

electoral support for the government. Their coding, however, was restricted to the rather unusual

elections preceded by large cuts.1 Encouraged by these efforts we have taken a broader approach

and coded whether welfare state issues were salient for 18 West European countries (EU15,

Iceland, Norway and Switzerland), beginning in 1977 (WEP) and 1981 (EL) respectively.

Conceptually, we build on Green-Pedersen and Mortensen’s (2010) discussion, which separates

between on the one hand actor-specific priorities and, on the other, the systemic or contextual

distribution of attention that emerges in a setting where actors interact. All involved actors are

assumed to partly contribute to this systemic agenda at the same time as no one can entirely

control it. Green-Pedersen and Mortensen apply this notion to the interaction between

government and opposition in parliamentary documents and debates. We apply it on a broader

scale, measuring systemic agendas in election campaigns. Which issues and concerns have

temporarily risen to such prominence on the overall agenda that they become key characteristics

of entire campaigns?

Specifically, the concept of an election campaign theme guided the coding of the material. The coding

instructions defined an overall theme as a topic that, according to the expert, was particularly

significant and salient in the public sphere during the election campaign. Such themes, moreover,

can in principle concern past, present or future policies and performance. But it can also concern

political institutions and processes, political actors such as parties and politicians, coalition

formation, their general governing ability, as well as political features of the public (such as

growing mistrust and non-participation).2

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When coding such themes we used and adapted a scheme previously used to categorize

European MPs answers to an open-ended “most important problem” question (1996 European

Representation Study; see Schmitt and Thomassen 1999). The resulting scheme identifies 12

broad domains, one of which is “the welfare state”. This category registers references to public

services, transfer systems, welfare state related policy outcomes (i.e. “poverty,” “inequality” etc),

and concepts (i.e. “social safety net,” “social justice”etc). In the following analysis the variable

Welfare agenda takes the value 1 if at least one of the country reports indicated that an aspect of

the welfare state was highly salient in the last election, 0 otherwise. This dummy, then, registers

the salience of a very broad domain rather than a precise policy area. This relative imprecision is

necessary as country experts vary greatly in the terminology and level of abstraction in discussing

campaigns. Some speak in terms of detailed policy areas and others in terms of more

encompassing and vague concepts. However, we argue that the broader welfare state domain is

still of sufficient interest here because the other central concepts in government partisanship

research are also very broad. After all, the dependent variable here is a measure of overall welfare

generosity. Likewise, the government partisanship hypothesis that we extend explains welfare

policy using measures of the overall left-right ideological character of the government.

Finally, our control variables are meant to represent a “standard” model of welfare state policy.

Here, we have been inspired by prolific large-N studies of government partisanship, including

Korpi and Palme (2003), Allan and Scruggs (2004), as well as other more recent studies

(Rothstein, Samanni and Teorell 2012). Included are trade openness (exports and imports as a

share of GDP) from Heston, Summers and Aten (2011), and financial openness (a measure of

liberalization of current transactions ranging from 0 to 8) from Huber et al. (2004) (originally

from Quinn (1997)), as measures of economic globalization. To control for business cycles we

include growth in GDP per capita in constant prices from Heston, Summers and Aten (2011),

the percentage unemployed (Armingeon et al. 2008), and the government budget deficit as a

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share of GDP (IMF 2007). We also control for corporatist wage bargaining ((Huber et al. 2004);

originally from (Quinn 1997)), and executive veto power, which takes the value 1 if there is an

executive with constitutional veto power over laws passed by the legislature, 0 otherwise (Regan

and Clark 2010). These two variables are included since it may be the case that they decrease the

probabilities of retrenchment or expansion. All variables used in the paper were taken from the

secondary source provided by the QoG Social Policy Dataset (Svensson et al. 2012).

Overall, we have valid information for 13 West European countries on the welfare state

generosity level, the welfare agenda, the cabinet composition, and the control variables from 1980

up to 1999 (20 years). In total we have 239 year/country observations. The countries included

are: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands,

Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. As mentioned in the introduction

partisan effects on welfare generosity have generally seemed weaker and less stable in European

data sets. We should therefore expect conservative or perhaps not even significant overall

estimates of government partisanship. On the other hand, this makes for a tough and interesting

test of the hypothesis that election campaign saliency increases policy differences between types

of government. The empirical question here becomes whether election campaigns can strengthen

and stabilize the relationship between partisanship and welfare state generosity that we know are

usually hard to detect among the particular countries included.

Descriptive statistics of all variables are presented in table 1. Our dependent variable, the

generosity index varies theoretically from 0 to 64 (and empirically between 18 and 45 in our

sample), the mean value over all country/year observations is 31.181, and we can see that the

variation between countries is clearly larger than the variation within countries. We also see that

the average cabinet right share has been 31.5 percent, and the variation in this variable has

actually been higher within countries than between countries. The welfare state generosity has

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been on the agenda in 33.5 per cent of all country/year observations, and also here we see that

there is considerable variation both between and within countries.

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Table 1. Descriptive statistics

Variable Mean Minimum Maximum Overall std.dev

Between std.dev

Within std.dev

Generosity 31.181 17.992 45.378 6.879 6.785 1.780

Right share 31.498 0 100 33.744 23.211 24.816

Welfare agenda 0.335 0 1 0.473 0.178 0.441

Trade openness 61.006 27.442 139.648 23.519 20.847 11.450

Financial openness

7.155 5 8 1.067 0.612 0.899

Veto points 0.762 0 1 0.427 0.441 0.144

GDP growth 2.071 -7.451 9.815 2.247 0.709 2.141

Budget deficit -3.006 -15.731 9.733 4.349 3.146 3.133

Unemployment 7.823 0.457 17.147 3.947 3.326 2.293

Corporatism 3.460 1 5 1.232 1.014 0.717

Specification, estimation and results

To study our hypothesis we use the above described time-series cross-section data that covers 13

West European countries from 1980 to 1999. As a point of departure we use the following

empirical specification:

,agenda WelfareshareRight

agenda WelfareβshareRight βαGenerosity

,131-ti,1-ti,2

1-ti,11-ti,00ti,

tiii,tec

Xβ

where Generosityi,,t is the welfare benefit generosity in country i, year t, our main independent

variables are Right sharei,t-1, Welfare agendai,t-1, and an interaction between these variables. Xi,t-1 is

a vector of control variables (described above), ci is an unobserved time invariant disturbance

term (e.g., unobserved factors that may be important for welfare benefit generosity), and ei,t is an

unobserved time variant random disturbance term. In this empirical model we implicitly restrict

our independent variables to only have an effect on benefit generosity with one lag. This is a

rather restrictive assumption but warranted as we follow the work by Allan and Scruggs (2004) in

doing this. We have also estimated general error correction models including first differenced

variables and more lags, these results point in the same direction as the results presented here.

The results are available upon request.

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Table 2 displays the results of our pooled time-series cross-section analysis. According to a Wald

test we reject the null hypothesis that all year coefficients are jointly equal to zero, therefore year

effects are included in all models. A Hausman test suggests that fixed effects should be included

in our models. We conducted two tests of cross sectional dependence. Frees’ test reject the null

of no cross sectional dependence, while the Pesaran and Friedman tests do not reject the null of

no cross sectional dependence. Even though the tests point in different directions we take the

conservative stance and correct the standard errors for possible cross sectional dependence using

panel corrected standard errors (PCSE). A modified Wald test for groupwise heteroskedasticity

rejects the null of no heteroskedasticity, indicating that robust standard errors should be used.

Following these tests we estimate model 1 using year- and country fixed effects and panel

corrected standard errors, and in model 2 we also include control variables.

A Wooldridge test of no first order autocorrelation is rejected. Following Beck and Katz (1995)

we therefore include a lagged dependent variable to control for first order autocorrelation (see

model 3, table 2). The results are very similar to the results of models 1 and 2 but an LM-test

suggests that we still have problems with autocorrelation. In model 4 we use a first differenced

dependent variable but an LM-test again suggests that we have not solved the problem with

autocorrelation. Models 3 and 4 are actually different representations of the same model, that is

why the coefficients and standard errors on the control variables are the same, see Boef and

Keele (2008) for a throughout explanation of these models. As suggested by Achen (2000), a

lagged dependent variable may be problematic, thus model 5 is estimated using panel corrected

standard errors and a Prais-Winsten correction for panel specific AR(1) serial correlation to

account for the autocorrelation. Estimating a model with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors we

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control for heteroskedasticity, autocorrelation, and correlation between panels, and should thus

have controlled for all the problems suggested by the empirical tests (see model 6).

We conduct several tests of stationarity (to find out if the generosity index is trending during the

investigated time period), and while most of these tests reject the hypothesis of non-stationarity

of the generosity measure, it fails some of these tests. Previous studies in this field have tried to

solve the problem of potential non-stationarity in different ways. Huber and Stephens (2001)

include a time trend and in some estimations a lagged dependent variable, and we have already

used these remedies in model 1-6. However, some previous studies (e.g. Allan and Scruggs 2004)

estimate first differences of the dependent variable, as we do in models 3 and 4, table 2.

Comparing the results from our models they seem robust to all these manipulations.

So, what are the main findings?3 Consistent with past research on European samples, the

coefficient for Right share is small and not statistically significant in any specification, implying

that normally in Western Europe there is not necessarily any clear relationship between

government partisanship and welfare generosity. Importantly however, this applies in years

subsequent to campaigns in which welfare did not feature high on the agenda. Things appear to

change when the welfare state was on the agenda. To begin with, we see a positive and

statistically significant main coefficient for welfare agenda; this implies that welfare state

campaign saliency is associated with policy changes towards a more generous welfare state.

Importantly, this estimate concerns situations when no rightist parties are subsequently

represented in the government. Finally, we see significant interactions between welfare agenda

and cabinet share in all specifications. Specifically, when the welfare state has been clearly present

on the systemic agenda during the last campaign the right share government variable makes a

20

significantly negative difference for welfare policy. Apparently, this is the case also in a West

European sample of countries in which government partisanship effects are usually modest or

absent altogether.

21

Table 2. Determinants of welfare generosity in 13 Western European countries, 1980-1999

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Generosityt Generosityt Generosityt ∆Generosity Generosityt Generosityt

Generosityt-1 0.723*** -0.277*** (0.079) (0.079) Right sharet-1 0.000 -0.002 -0.003 -0.003 -0.004 -0.002 (0.005) (0.004) (0.004) (0.004) (0.006) (0.005) Welfare agendat-1 1.178*** 0.991*** 0.554** 0.554** 0.651*** 0.991*** (0.280) (0.286) (0.237) (0.237) (0.247) (0.297) Right sharet-1*Welfare agendat-1

-0.031*** (0.006)

-0.024*** (0.006)

-0.010* (0.005)

-0.010* (0.005)

-0.014** (0.006)

-0.024** (0.009)

Trade opennesst-1 0.046 0.023 0.023 0.039 0.0457 (0.030) (0.026) (0.026) (0.039) (0.028) Financial opennesst-1 0.356**

(0.181) 0.127

(0.155) 0.127

(0.155) 0.094

(0.191) 0.356* (0.174)

Veto pointst-1 0.192 -0.169 -0.169 0.017 0.192 (0.615) (0.627) (0.627) (0.727) (0.693) GDP growtht-1 -0.001 0.030 0.030 -0.012 -0.001 (0.071) (0.055) (0.055) (0.061) (0.087) Budget deficitt-1 -0.138*** -0.037 -0.037 -0.088* -0.138*** (0.044) (0.035) (0.035) (0.051) (0.042) Unemploymentt-1 -0.285*** -0.122*** -0.122*** -0.246*** -0.285*** (0.065) (0.044) (0.044) (0.081) (0.064) Corporatismt-1 0.493*** 0.188 0.188 0.239 0.493** (0.177) (0.137) (0.137) (0.160) (0.226) Constant 27.66*** 15.26*** 4.871*** 4.871*** 27.26*** 23.70*** (0.330) (1.654) (1.761) (1.761) (4.604) (1.934) Year FE Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Country FE Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Observations 227 227 227 227 227 227 R-squared 0.948 0.957 0.979 0.297 0.988 0.341 Number of countries 13 13 13 13 13 13 Note: Models 1 and 2 are estimated using panel corrected standard errors. Model 3 is estimated using panel corrected standard errors and a lag of the dependent variable. Model 4 is estimated using panel corrected standard errors, a differenced dependent variable, and a lag of the dependent variable. Model 5 is estimated using panel corrected standard errors and a Prais-Winsten

correction for panel specific AR(1) serial correlation. Model 6 is estimated using Driscoll-Kraay standard errors. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1.

Figures 1 and 2 provide two alternative illustrations of the findings. In figure 1 we visualize the

interactive relationship (following model 6, table 2) with the y-axis referring to the marginal effect

of welfare agenda on welfare generosity, while the x-axis refers to the share of right-wing party

seats in the cabinet. The dotted lines indicate 90 percent confidence intervals. While we could see

already in table 2 that there is a positive marginal effect of Welfare agenda when Right share is

zero (the coefficient on Welfare agenda), the figure also shows a negative and statistically

significant marginal effect for high values of right share. The magnitudes imply that in a year

22

where the welfare state has been on the agenda and there are no right-wing parties in the cabinet,

the welfare generosity index increases by one point (on the scale empirically ranging from 18-45).

Conversely, if the cabinet instead consists of only right-wing parties the welfare state is predicted

to shrink by almost 1.5 points along this index. For less extreme values of right share there is no

relationship between welfare agenda and welfare generosity. That is, the overall attention to a

problem has no direct main effect that operates independently of who the policymakers are.

These results correspond well with the hypothesis that government partisan effects on overall

welfare state generosity grow after election campaigns dominated by welfare state issues.

Figure 1. Marginal effect of Welfare election on Generosity at different levels of right-wing seats as a share of cabinet seats

-3-2

-10

12

Marg

inal e

ffect o

f W

elfa

re e

lectio

n o

n G

en

ero

sity

0 20 40 60 80 100Right-wing seats as a share of cabinet seats

Note: The dotted lines refer to the 90 percent confidence interval. The figure is based on model 6, table 2.

Figure 2, finally, provides an alternative graphic illustration, one that corresponds most

immediately to the tested hypothesis. The y-axis refers to predicted generosity, while the x-axis

refers to the right share in the cabinet. The dotted line corresponds to the observations when

23

there were no welfare agenda, i.e. when the welfare state was not a salient issue, while the thick

line refers to the cases when the welfare state was on the agenda. Here we clearly see that the

government partisanship effects on overall welfare state generosity are larger after election

campaigns dominated by welfare state issues, since the slope of the thick line is clearly steeper

than the slope of the dotted line. That is, right share is more decisive when the agenda is

dominated by welfare state issues.

Figure 2. The relationship between generosity and right share when the welfare state is (not) on the agenda

Note: The figure is based on model 6, table 2.

It is worth to note that the share of rightist parties in the cabinet the years following a welfare

election was zero in almost 40 percent of the cases, and 100 in almost 10 percent of the cases.

Thus, our findings do not concern very rare situations, but actually occurring events. It should

also be noted that shares of rightist parties in the cabinet are more or less the same also after

elections not dominated by the welfare state so it does not seem to be the case that rightist

parties tend to win or lose more welfare elections than non-welfare elections.

24

Conclusions

One the one hand, a basic take-away from this paper is the continued support for the contention

that political variables affect welfare state policy. Partisan politics and the composition of the

government appear to matter even in the silver age of the welfare state, and even in Western

Europe where government partisanship variation is more restricted and where it has been harder

to uncover such effects.

An equally important message, however, is that partisan effects appear to depend on broad

contextual aspects of agenda-setting. In fact, in our subset of countries and years there were only

significant effects of the presence of rightist parties in government when the welfare state had

featured very high on the agenda in the last election (i.e. when it had been present as an overall

“election theme ”). The theoretical section suggested three possible mechanisms responsible for

this pattern. First, an agenda mechanism may ensure that hotly debated campaign issues, and with

them program consistent policy reforms, are fast-forwarded in the activities of the post-election

government. Second, the mandate-confidence mechanism denotes the idea that election-winning

governments feel safer, more confident, and justified in pursuing ideologically based policy in

areas that were unusually scrutinized by the media and thought about by voters. Third, the

mandate-accountability mechanism is at work when politicians’ fear of popular dissatisfaction and

media criticism for breaking promises is greater in areas high on the election campaign agenda in

the last election.

These mechanisms, it should be noted, differ from the “blame avoidance” assumption found in

Pierson’s (2001) theory of “new politics of the welfare state.” The assumption there has been that

most if not all mainstream parties now view cost containment reforms as necessary. However, all

of them are nevertheless assumed to be very hesitant and cautious. The assumed reason is that

25

they all fear electoral sanctions by a welfare state-supporting public. Therefore, governments of

all denominations will be much more likely to restructure the welfare state if the changes can

somehow be flown in under the public’s radar (Balla et al. 2002; Pierson 1996), i.e. if

“retrenchment” itself as well as the locus of responsibility go unnoticed. From this vantage point

we should expect more retrenchment (by rightist parties) when welfare issues are off the agenda.

Of course, consistent with the three mechanisms discussed above, we find a different pattern.

Broad election campaign attention appears to be a catalyst for the translation of ideological party

and government differences into policy, rather than an inherent suppressor of retrenchment.

Interestingly, while these assumptions and findings seem to be partly at odds with the “new

politics” theory they fit with recent findings presented by Giger and Nelson (2011). These

scholars argue that the electoral punishment “fear factor” is exaggerated and find that some non-

left parties may even actually win votes from claiming credit for welfare state retrenchment

(Giger 2011).

Our findings may also have broader implications for how we think about welfare state

development more broadly conceived. For example, even though many agree that “politics”

continues to matter in Western welfare states, the findings suggest we should take a somewhat

broader and more contingent view of just what politics should be taken to mean. As we have

noted, comparative welfare state research has paid much attention to voter and elite policy

preferences, and somewhat less attention to policy agendas. Of course, our results suggest that policy

is driven by the two in combination. This also suggests that we should take a broad view of the

role of elections in shaping welfare policy. Democratic elections, we have emphasized, do not

simply provide a translation of exogenous voter and party preferences into policy. They also

involve a discursive phase that potentially reshapes the precise nature of the preference input that

ultimately results in policy.

26

A stronger emphasis on these aspects of electoral politics may lead to a more dynamic view on

political factors like government partisanship and public opinion, which are usually seen as rather

stable forces in welfare state politics. Part of such dynamics are likely to be short term and rather

unpredictable, with simple “real-world” indicators of the severity of societal problems having at

best tenuous relationships with the political attention they receive (for an overview, see Dearing

and Rogers 1996). Rather, as Downs (1972:38-9) argued, “a systematic ‘ issue-attention cycle’

seems strongly to influence public attitudes and behavior concerning most key domestic

problems. Each of these problems suddenly leaps into prominence, remains there for a short

time, and then—though still largely unresolved—gradually fades from the center of public

attention.” Recent research informed by theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” show that while

agendas usually display little change from one year to another agenda change certainly does occur.

And when it does it is characterized by big outbursts of attention (Baumgartner et al. 2009). Yet,

other agenda shifts are likely to be more long-term. Several studies indicate that the political

systems in Western welfare states have given more collective attention to welfare state issues

during the last few decades (Green-Pedersen and Wilkerson 2008) (Green-Pedersen and

Wilderson; (Kumlin, Oskarson and Kihlström 2012). Such findings, taken together with those

presented here, offer a possible explanation for the continued relevance of government

partisanship. While it may or may not be true that “globalization” and “the new politics of the

welfare state” have depressed partisan effects, the increased collective salience and attention

given to welfare state issues may have offset any attenuating consequences of those other

changes.

Finally, we have of course merely scratched the surface of possibilities in conceptualizing and

measuring interactions between policy preferences and policy agendas. There are certainly other

potential measures and phases in the policy process that may be just as important as elections.

Likewise, it will be useful for future research to dig deeper into the broad category of contexts

27

that we registered as “welfare state elections.” Quite obviously, not all welfare state agendas are

the same. This broad category could conceal important variation in finer discursive aspects such

as “framing,” “dominant narratives,” and “blame avoidance.” Still, we think it is also useful to

reemphasize the basic point of this paper: When explaining welfare state politics and government

partisanship there is considerable analytical leverage also in the more encompassing, more

parsimonious and potentially powerful concept of agenda-setting.

ACKNOWLEDGEMNTS

This research was supported by Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research and the

Research Council of Norway.

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Appendix

Table A1. Replication of table 2 using Left share instead of Right share Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6 Generosityt Generosityt Generosityt ∆Generosityt Generosityt Generosityt

Generosityt-1 0.745*** (0.080)

-0.255*** (0.080)

Left sharet-1 -0.006 -0.008* -0.004 -0.00406 -0.006 -0.008 (0.005) (0.004) (0.003) (0.00296) (0.004) (0.006) Welfare agendat-1 -0.689** -0.550 -0.108 -0.108 -0.124 -0.550 (0.309) (0.359) (0.291) (0.291) (0.312) (0.414) Left sharet-

1*Welfare agendat-1 0.019*** (0.006)

0.017*** (0.006)

0.008* (0.004)

0.00774* (0.00414)

0.008* (0.005)

0.017* (0.009)

Trade opennesst-1 0.051 0.023 0.023 0.035 0.051* (0.034) (0.028) (0.028) (0.043) (0.028) Financial opennesst-1

0.416** (0.199)

0.144 (0.163)

0.144 (0.163)

0.092 (0.202)

0.416* (0.193)

Veto pointst-1 0.572 0.038 0.038 0.343 0.572 (0.595) (0.620) (0.620) (0.744) (0.620) GDP growtht-1 -0.005 0.033 0.033 -0.003 -0.005 (0.076) (0.057) (0.057) (0.064) (0.091) Budget deficitt-1 -0.164*** -0.044 -0.044 -0.094* -0.164*** (0.044) (0.035) (0.035) (0.051) (0.044) Unemploymentt-1 -0.333*** -0.142*** -0.142*** -0.263*** -0.333*** (0.067) (0.045) (0.045) (0.082) (0.061) Corporatismt-1 0.425** 0.141 0.141 0.166 0.425* (0.190) (0.146) (0.146) (0.170) (0.221) Year FE Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Country FE Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Observations 242 227 227 227 227 227 R-squared 0.940 0.955 0.979 0.979 0.984 0.297 Number of countries

13 13 13 13 13 13

Note: Model 1 is estimated using panel corrected standard errors. Model 2 is estimated using panel corrected standard errors. Model 3 is estimated using panel corrected standard errors and a lag of the dependent variable. Model 4 is estimated using panel corrected standard errors, a differenced dependent variable, and a lag of the dependent variable. Model 5 is estimated using a first differenced dependent variable, panel corrected standard errors and a lag of the dependent variable. Model 5 is estimated using panel corrected standard errors and a Prais-Winsten correction for panel specific AR(1) serial correlation. Model 6 is estimated using Driscoll-Kraay standard errors. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1.

31

ENDNOTES

1 An appendix reports that campaigns are coded for the overall importance of “social security”

(coded low salience, medium salience or high salience). Specifically, the measure covered 29

elections, with “social security” salient in about half of these Armingeon, Klaus, and Nathalie

Giger. 2008a. "Conditional Punishment: A Comparative Analysis of the Electoral Consequences

of Welfare State Retrenchment in OECD Nations, 1980-2003." West European Politics 31:558-580.

Finally, Giger, Nathalie. 2010. "Do voters punish the government for welfare state

retrenchment[quest] A comparative study of electoral costs associated with social policy."

Comparative European Politics 8:415-443. concludes that campaign salience does not play a similar

role when the model also include individuals-level measures of salience and performance

evaluations and analyzed for all OECD-countries 2001-2006.

2 The coding involved several steps. Reports were first checked for passages where substantive

issues and conflicts were discussed. Second, it was determined which issues qualified as overall

campaign themes. Two specific rules of thumb were then used to identify such themes. First, we

looked for instances where the expert author explicitly states that a topic has been important for

the election or public campaign in some overall sense, has created visible conflict or agreement

across parties or aroused significant overall attention in the media or among the entire electorate.

Thus, simply the fact that an issue appears in the manifesto or on the agenda of a single party,

special interest or voter group is not, on its own, enough to qualify a topic as an election theme

under the definition. Second, we also looked for instances where an expert does not simply

mention or list a topic, but devote considerable space to explaining its contents and political role.

(i.e. by devoting a paragraph/several sentences to it, or by repeatedly returning to it in several

places.). An intra-coder reliability test of the coding of themes was conducted six to twelve

months after the first coding. This involved recoding a randomly sampled 15 percent subset of

elections. The results indicated a satisfactory reliability. Overall, 91 percent of the total number of

32

coded themes were coded to the same policy domain in a consistent way across occasions and

journals (WEP=88 percent; EL=94 percent).

3 A note should be made on the reported R-squared statistics in table 2. The relatively low

reported R-squared statistics for model 4 is due to that we have a first differenced dependent

variable, and changes are generally harder to predict. The relatively low R-squared in model 6 is

due to that the STATA-command only reports the within-R-squared for the xtscc-command that

we use here, while the xtpcse-command used in the other estimations only report the overall-R-

squared.