Diversity in Employment Patterns in North-West Europe : A Regional and Sectoral Approach
The decline in Germany's capacity to provide employment for its population has become one of the most discussed economic questions of the turn of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. It is a change that has occurred despite the economy's continuing strong performance on the most obvious criterion of national competitiveness: capacity to sell goods abroad. Particularly puzzling from some perspectives is that the two parts of Europe that out-perform Germany on employment – the United Kingdom and the Nordic Countries – are often considered in the literature on capitalist diversity to differ from Germany in opposite ways. For example, in the dichotomized world of Hall and Soskice (2001) the UK is a paradigm case of a liberal market economy, while the Nordic countries are, like Germany, coordinated market economies. Other observers claim that the Nordics and the UK both have low levels of labor-market regulation, but this only works if certain forms of government regulation are considered: the Nordic countries have more powerful trade unions and legislation governing the work environment than either Germany or the UK. That in post-industrial economies both so-called 'liberal' and 'social demo-cratic' welfare states might have a superior capacity to generate employment than so-called 'corporatist' ones was anticipated some years ago by Esping-An-dersen (1999). In his scheme the UK, the Nordics, and Germany were clear representatives of these respective types. In free-market economies, he argued, there was a large gap between wealthy and poor populations, enabling the former to employ the latter at low wages and with low or nonexistent non-wage costs in low-productivity service jobs. Also, generous welfare states produced a large number of jobs in public services, many of which also existed at low-skilled levels. These two contrasting kinds of economy both developed a capacity to provide low-productivity jobs in services to replace those that had existed in Fordist manufacturing. Ebbinghaus (2000) reached a similar conclusion about these three country types following an examination of a different policy area: early retirement.
Social Change in Western Europe
Introduction Prologue: The End of the European Millennium 1. The Making of Contemporary Europe PART I: THE FATE OF INDUSTRIALISM: INDUSTRIALIZING, INDUSTRIAL OR POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES? 2. Work, Households and Occupations 3. The Organization of Working Life: Between Stability and Flexibility 4. The Sectors of Employment PART II: CHANGES AND DIVERSITY IN THE CHARACTER OF CAPITALISM 5. Capitalism and Inequality in Work 6. The Institutions of Modern Capitalism PART III: SOCIOLOGICAL LIBERALISM AND THE INSTITUTIONS OF TRADITIONAL COMMUNITY 7. The Family 8. Families, Education, and Social Mobility 9. The Paradox of Religion 10. Nations, Cultures and Ethnicities PART IV: CITIZENSHIP 11. Democracy and Mass Participation 12. The Organization of Social Interests 13. Mass Citizenship and Welfare States CONCLUSIONS 14. Is There a Western European Society? 15. What Type of Society are We Now Inhabiting?
Electoral systems and the politics of coalitions : why some democracies redistribute more than others
We develop a general model of redistribution and use it to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. We show that the electoral system plays a key role because it shapes the composition of governing coalitions, whether these are conceived as electoral alliances between classes or alliances between class parties. Our argument implies a) that center-left governments dominate under PR systems, while center-right governments dominate under majoritarian systems, and b) that PR systems redistribute more than majoritarian systems. We test our argument on panel data for redistribution, government partisanship, and electoral system in advanced democracies. Prepared for presentation at the Juan March Institute, November 2004. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2002 Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, Sheraton and Marriott Hotels, Boston, August 29 September 2, 2002. We thank Jim Alt, Klaus Armingeon, Neal Beck, David Brady, Geoffrey Brennan, Thomas Cusack, Jeff Frieden, Robert Goodin, Peter Hall, Peter Lange, Peter Katzenstein, Ron Rogowski, Frances Rosenbluth, Fritz Scharpf, Ken Shepsle and Michael Wallerstein for their many helpful comments. 1