This chapter examines the forces that produced Indonesiaâs highly mobilized but politically independent labor movement. It describes the authoritarian legacies that shaped the first phase of its evolution when the labor movement had no choice but to use street politics as its primary weapon in the struggle for more worker-friendly labor policy. In a second phase, new opportunities opened by the decentralization process led unions to experiment with electoral engagement. The focus of these efforts was at the local level where union activists backed executive candidates from many different parties, pragmatically trading their political support for pro-labor measures. In a third phase, unions drew on their past organizational learning and experimentation to extend their electoral engagement to the legislative arena. Reluctant to tie themselves directly to a single party, union strategists chose to place union cadres on legislative tickets of many different political parties. Autonomous electoral participation now complemented street politics as central features of laborâs political strategy.
Important developments are transforming socialization patterns long associated with Mexico&s;s political system. These developments are altering some of the bases of that system and the challenges it faces. This chapter considers political consequences of changes involving two major foci of socialization: education and mass media. Educational progress has been critical to political legitimacy since the revolution. The education ministry alone employs nearly one million people, almost 75% of the national government&s;s total, and the major teachers&s; union itself has roughly 600,000 employees. Some observers fear that education is becoming even less attuned to mass/national needs than it has been. Educational decentralization is historically associated with terrible regional disparities in finance and quality; the revolution pushed educational centralization as necessary to political centralization. Amid all the problems and transformations in education, an elite has generally been able to protect itself in privileged sanctuaries. The positive impacts of educational changes on political stability are more direct and predictable than the negative consequences.
This chapter analyzes the âthirdâ hand of a local government in China: the caring hand, which is largely ignored in the literature on the behavior of local governments in a decentralized fiscal system. The incentive for a local government to lend its caring hand is quite different from the motivation to help township and village enterprises and provide other public goods. While technically a unitary state, China is a highly decentralized country with a high degree of autonomy enjoyed by local governments. The collusive relationship between local governments and local enterprises works as a mechanism to keep the information of local businesses hidden from higher-level governments. Chinaâs rural health care system, established under a centrally planned economy, was widely regarded as a success. Responsibility for the financing and management of township and village health facilities was devolved to township governments.
After a general campaign that aimed at changing the political and socioeconomic system, the 15M/Indignados abandoned the visible occupation of central squares decentralized through neighborhood assemblies, and specialized around different issues, such as housing, and the health and public education systems. Although often cohabitating amid tension, feminist activists of different generations forged internal and autonomous spaces that prioritized feminist aspirations and permeated dissent in the shadow of the Great Recession, sharing arenas with people who would not have been reached otherwise. Despite the feminist movement(s)â heterogeneity, intersectional character, and organization through polycephalous networks, it has in recent times grown to stand out as the movement with the highest mobilization capacity in the country. Based on original qualitative data from 12 semi-structured interviews with key informants and activists, the piece of research sheds light on the tensions between different generations of feminists. It will explain the continuities and discontinuities between veteran and younger activistsâ world views when it comes to their forms of politicization, theoretical underpinnings, strategic priorities, organizational configuration and resource mobilization, repertoires of action and cultural foundations. In addition, it contends that the ability of veteran and new activists to forge arenas of encounter, fostering debate and synergies during the antiausterity cycle of protest, were key to account for the cross-generational alliance-building processes, which have hitherto seldom been explored in the feminist movement(s) and beyond.
This chapter discusses public sector growth to illuminate the puzzle in political economy regarding effective government constraints and to provide an analysis of the institutional structures that can "tame Leviathan." It argues that altering the institutional structures to be more polycentric would contain important self-generating mechanisms to tame Leviathan. A polycentric organization of government describes a system with many centers of decision-making units that are formally independent of each other and it involves multiple, overlapping systems of autonomous governments. An important feature of what makes an institutional structure "more" or "less" polycentric is the degree of autonomy of the states, localities, or subunits in the society. The features of a polycentric institution complemented by the decentralization of money would move us closer to the reality of a constrained government. Borrowing money and inflating are the remaining choices, and this is what politicians tend to do.
Social policy scholars often take the view that welfare states can be classified into different types based on distinct political philosophies and stable institutional features. However, it is a challenge to fit China squarely into any existing taxonomy. Using the volatile growth of educational expenditure in recent years as an example, this paper contends that Chinaâs social policy in general, educational policy, in particular, has not evolved into a stable model. Much of the irregularity stems from the tension between centralized mandates and decentralized financing, often leading to underfunded social programs. In response, the central government relies on top-down mobilization to achieve unfunded or underfunded policy mandates. Mobilization, however, cannot last long as it stresses and strains local governments. The alternation between mobilization and post-mobilization accounts for the great irregularity in educational financing and poses a serious challenge for Chinaâs welfare state building. There is a need to replace mobilization with a more regularized, sustainable and equitable financing mechanism for education and other social programs.
There are two distinct but related elements that have been put forward as arguments in favour of greater role for local governments in delivering public services. The first is the extensive literature on âfiscal decentralizationâ following the works of Tiebout (1956), Oats (1972) and others. This line of argument has been reviewed intensively by various studies. However, the other element that has received relatively little attention from economists working in the area of public finance is the recent literature on public service delivery lays great emphasis on fixing the governance and accountability of service provision â especially in health and education. Pritchett and Pande (2006) put forward the proposition that âeffective decentralizationâ (in the context of elementary education in India) will not be possible until the principles of public finance are harmonized with the principles of accountability in the design of the decentralization strategy itself. It is currently the accepted wisdom that decentralization provides an answer to increasing participation of the users (âvoiceâ) and enhancing monitoring by the community or the user group at the service provider level (âclient powerâ). In that sense, there is a direct line of accountability between the decentralized institutions. Following the analytical framework discussed in Chapter 1, laid down by the World Development Report (2004), we can visualize the accountability framework below: There are four basic external elements of accountability corresponding to citizens (or clients), the state (politicians/policymakers) and service providers (education/health) â voice, compact, management and client power. In the general case, citizens elect their representatives to national/state legislatures, who are in a compact with service providers made up of national or state government employees. The latter are supposed to provide service to the citizens in terms of delivery of education and health care. However, in this model, the route to accountability is âlongâ, implying that if the citizens are not satisfied with the service providers, they would need to wait until the next electoral cycle to vote on their preferences. Citizens can exercise little control over the compact and, therefore, suffer from weak client power.
In this article, I advance a theory of gendered money and demonstrate how couples give special symbolic meaning to menâs money in domestic exchanges. Unlike previous perspectives on gender and money such as resource theories and gender performance, this framework acknowledges money as a prop and tool that couples use to construct gender boundaries and signal normalcy in the marital relationship. Integrating concepts from economic sociology with Hochschildâs insights on the symbolism of domestic labor, I find that Ukrainians use money as a token and symbol of value, not as a commodity with which to obtain desired outcomes. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 56 married and cohabiting individuals, I discover that couples subvert market meanings of money to enact a Soviet-style gender ideology. By spending menâs money on ânecessaryâ items and avoiding accessing womenâs money in the household, couples construct menâs money as both visible and valuable while rendering womenâs money non-fungible. These practices highlight the primacy of culture and ideology over relative income, and can help explain the reproduction of male privilege in the household, despite gains in womenâs employment and earnings.
Ciara Brennan, James Rice, Rannveig TraustadĂłttir, Peter Anderberg
Article 19 of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities requires states to ensure that persons with disabilities have access to a range of support services, including personal assistance. The Convention is an agreement between state parties and the UN. However, in practice, disability services are often implemented at the local level. Drawing on the findings of qualitative research in Iceland, Norway and Sweden, this paper examines a paradox whereby states commit to ensure access to support services, but decentralize responsibility to autonomous and independent local governments. A multi-level governance framework is applied to analyse the findings of qualitative inquiry with policy-makers, local government officials and leaders of independent living organizations in all three Nordic countries. A multi-level analysis highlights the tensions and contradictions between decentralization and human rights commitments.
The collaborative relationship between Shiga Prefecture and the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) to create the International Lake Environment Committee (ILEC) was Japanâs earliest experience of sub-national participation in international cooperation with counterparts from the developing world and international organizations. The ILEC is an international nongovernmental standing committee, which has been hosted by Shigaâs prefectural government since 1986. One of its key missions is to support environmentally sound lake management activities, which UNEP promotes in developing countries. The objective of this chapter is to examine the local governmentâs autonomous capacity to mobilize resources across institutional boundaries of polity and independently participate in transnational environmental governance. From a state-centric view, a sub-national level of participation at the international level can only be feasible if it is an active part of national policy. In the case of the Shiga prefectural governmentâs initiative for international lake-environmental cooperation, however, as Table 5.1 indicates, sub-national actors came to see themselves as direct players in the absence of national policy. The chapter examines under what conditions and in what ways such a sub-national level of participation takes place by conducting a case study of Shigaâs collaboration with UNEP over lake-environment risk reduction. It reveals the formation process of transnational governance networks involving a sub-national government that is not operating on behalf of the national government. Shigaâs cooperation with UNEP was primarily driven by the ad hoc, bottom-up political mobilization of sub-national actors. In general, without institutionalized channels for subnational governments to participate in the international level, sub-national governments need to mobilize resources on such an ad hoc basis and pioneering sub-national actors need to be capable of effectively engaging in the formation process of transnational governance in unfamiliar territory. This chapter is about the management story of Lake Biwa in Shiga prefecture. The lake is completely located within Shiga prefecture, situated across most municipalities in the prefecture, with its surface area of 674.4 square kilometers occupying one-sixth of the prefectureâs total area. In the environmental policy area of Japanese history, as environmental impacts were manifested locally and adaptive capacity determined by local conditions, municipal governments became the ïŹrst movers. Given the geographical setting of the lake, however, the initiatives for environmental policy were taking place at the prefectural level. The Shiga prefectural government reached out for international environmental cooperation on behalf of voters who found it impossible to ignore the severity of lake pollution and whose concern with it prevailed over pro-development policies in electoral processes. While the worsening eutrophication of the rivers and lakes became known as a worldwide problem, local knowledge and experience in Japan was not sufïŹcient to cope with the Lake Biwaâs environmental stresses. This led the prefectural Environmental Bureau to develop a lake environment policy network with overseas counterparts, which provided them with the process of learning about lake environments.1 These actors transnationally engaged in policy innovation and coordination by diffusing ideas and inïŹuencing the policy measures adopted in other countries.2 In the process of policy networking, the under-funded and overloaded UNEP3 began to work with Shiga prefecture to meet the need to decentralize environmental governance functions, in order to pave the way for future environmental problem-solving.4
This chapter argues that China&s;s central leaders have begun to reverse the decentralization of the social welfare regime that occurred early in the reform period. It focuses on the recent recentralization processes as manifested in several social policy areas, including basic education, public health, pension insurance, and public housing. Based on these policy changes related to social welfare recentralization, the chapter also argues that a series of problems has emerged from the disconnect between the continued decentralization of the local fiscal system and the recentralization of the administration of social welfare. In most cases, reform of the social welfare system in China followed the logic of efficiency in economic reform, in which decentralization became dominant. The policy proposed to more reasonably divide the responsibilities of central and local governments for social welfare provision and financing, and to promote the gradual reform of the transfer payment system.
Purpose â The purpose of this paper is to address the ideological narratives which came to comprise a new welfare consensus in the USA and subsequently a welfare state which was more fiscally austere, demeaning, and coercive. It also explores the role of the political and financial restructuring which facilitated the implementation of retrogressive reforms. Design/methodology/approach â Macro-level historical forces are investigated through various texts such as policy statements, journal articles, press releases, political addresses, congressional transcripts and testimony, archived papers, newspaper articles, and occasional sound bites and popular culture references pertaining to welfare and which have come to construct the common understanding of it. Findings â The formation of this consensus was due in part to three factors: first, the growth of and increased influence of an elite policy planning network; second, welfare program administration and financing had been decentralized which allowed greater autonomy of state and local governments to implement their own retrogressive reforms; and third, there emerged an overarching discourse and paradigm for structuring policy and explaining the causes of poverty which emphasized individual behavior. Originality/value â This paper focusses on the materialization of the contemporary welfare consensus during the 1980s and 1990s in terms of its ideological and political history and on its persistence which has affected the ensuing policy culture and which continues to constrain anti-poverty policy discourse as well as what can be accomplished legislatively. The paper is of value for for readers, fields, courses with work that encompasses an examination of political and social theory, ideology, social policy, power/hegemony, poverty, inequality, families, gender, race, and meaning making institutions.
This dissertation comprises three empirical essays in political economy. The first essay analyzes the implementation of a French social program by subnational governments following a decentralization reform. Using program implementation data, it shows that local political environments strongly influence implementation decisions after decentralization, and that decentralization results in an overall tightening of benefits. The second essay reports the results of a conjoint field experiment involving German welfare offices. Using random assignment of cues about ethnicity and other characteristics in requests to welfare offices, it is shown that putative non-German applicants receive replies at the same rate as putative Germans, but are disadvantaged in terms of the substantive quality of responses. This suggests that minority populations do experience discrimination when attempting to access social benefits. Finally, the third essay uses micro-level voter file data from Illinois to measure whether property tax limitations reduce participation in local elections. In contrast with prior research, results from panel regressions with matching adjustments suggest that tax limitations do not affect political participation negatively. Together, these essays contribute to our understanding of public finance and social policy in contexts characterized by multi-level governance.
Over the past decade, a large number of studies have shown that in advanced democracies policymakers are more likely to represent the preferences of high-income citizens than the preferences of low-income citizens (e.g., Gilens 2005, 2012; Bartels 2008; Ellis 2012; Giger, Rosset and Bernauer 2012; Hayes 2012; Rigby and Wright 2013). In a quest to understand this income bias in substantive representation, several authors have recently suggested that the persistent descriptive underrepresentation of low-income groups in policymaking institutions may explain why political decisions are so frequently skewed toward the preferences of the affluent (e.g., Carnes 2012; Carnes and Lupu 2015).2 However, although this is a plausible explanation, many previous studies dealing with the consequences of descriptive representation have failed to find an effect of policymakers' incomes or social class backgrounds on their behavior in office (e.g., Matthews 1984; Norris and Lovenduski 1995). In this essay, we argue that descriptive representation may indeed have an effect on policymaking, yet for it to be consequential three necessary conditions must be satisfied. We explain in the next section what these conditions are. We then present research that we have recently conducted on representation in the Swiss parliament. Our analyses show that although Swiss legislators coming from lower-income backgrounds appear to have distinct preferences over policy, these differences in preferences do not translate into distinct behavior in the policymaking arena. Finally, drawing upon the three necessary conditions described below, the last section provides some suggestions as to why we fail to find an effect of descriptive representation on legislative behavior in the current Swiss context. The descriptive representation of different income groups may be important simply on symbolic grounds, since the legitimacy and authority of a ârepresentativeâ body such as parliament can be undermined if it fails to reflect the composition of the population that it is intended to represent (e.g., Norris and Lovenduski 1995). If we assume, however, that constituents care primarily about policy outcomes (e.g., Downs 1957), rather than the composition of parliament, descriptive representation is important only to the extent that it affects legislative behavior.3 Based on this assumption, and following in part Carnes and Lupu (2015), we argue that there are three necessary conditions that must be satisfied for descriptive representation to have an effect on legislators' policymaking actions. First, legislators must share policy preferences with the group they represent descriptively, at least for a subset of the policies on the political agenda. Such preference congruence can be the result of two mechanisms. On the one hand, people with similar background characteristics may have âshared experiences,â which in turn promote similar interests and preferences over policy (Mansbridge 1999). By merely following their personal preferences, descriptive representatives then further not only their own interests but also those of the social groups they represent. On the other hand, congruence between the preferences of representatives and citizens belonging to the same socioeconomic group may be the product of responsiveness (Achen 1978). If the former have incentives to respond to the policy preferences of the latter (for instance because of reelection concerns; see, e.g., Mayhew 1974), the represented can âinduceâ preferences in their legislators (e.g., Snyder and Ting 2005). Second, much of the literature on legislative politics assumes that multiple principals can influence the voting behavior of legislators. Most important in this regard are party discipline and constituent pressure (e.g., Levitt 1996; Burden 2007; Carey 2009). Consequently, although legislators' behavior may be constrained by party leaders and constituents who do not belong to their descriptively represented groups, for descriptive representation to be relevant these principals must not determine legislators' actions completely. In order to be able to act according to the preferences of the groups they represent descriptively, representatives must therefore have some discretion in the policy decision-making process (see also Carnes and Lupu 2015). Third, legislators who descriptively represent a particular group must be presented with choices in the policymaking process that separate them from other legislators who do not represent the same group descriptively but are otherwise similar (e.g., in terms of party affiliation). If this is not the case, it is difficult to disentangle the effect of descriptive representation from the effects of other characteristics shared by the descriptive representatives and other (similar) representatives. Provided that these three conditions are satisfied, we expect descriptive representation to matter for legislative behavior. We turn next to a discussion of our research assessing whether and to what extent socioeconomic characteristics affect legislators' attitudes and behavior in the Swiss parliament. The Swiss parliament is a militia parliament. Hence, although the compensations legislators receive for their parliamentary activity may suffice to cover the cost of living, many retain a professional activity during their parliamentary mandates. Members of the Swiss parliament are therefore likely to have relatively diverse economic conditions, not only as a result of the different professions they exercised before entering parliament and the different levels of accumulated wealth, but also because their incomes can vary substantially depending on the professional activities conducted during their mandates. An important argument put forward by proponents of the militia system is that it allows for a more diverse composition of parliament and a closer connection between legislators and their constituents. However, in practice, the militia system does not seem to enhance the descriptive representation of different social classes, as the Swiss parliament is predominantly composed of liberal professionals, entrepreneurs, and high-rank civil servants (Pilotti et al. 2010, Pilotti this debate). These two features of the Swiss parliament â diversity in legislators' income levels, combined with a significant overrepresentation of representatives coming from high-income backgrounds â make it an interesting case for analyzing the link between the descriptive and the substantive representation of economically defined groups of citizens. In this essay, we thus report on two recent studies dealing with descriptive representation and its consequences in Switzerland. The first study focuses on policy preferences among candidates in the Swiss Federal elections of 2007 (Rosset 2013a, pp. 109-133). It is based on data from the candidate survey conducted as part of âSelects,â the Swiss electoral study. For this survey, all candidates to the two chambers of the Swiss parliament have been contacted and asked to answer a paper or online questionnaire regarding their political engagement, campaign activities, policy preferences as well as their socioeconomic background. Based on these data, the study analyzes candidates' preferences with regard to redistribution, using a question asking to what extent respondents agree with the statement that the state should do more to reduce income differences between the rich and the poor. The main independent variable of interest is the candidates' monthly household income. The analysis reveals that controlling for party affiliation, gender and education, income â even though measured only crudely by seven categories â has a significant negative effect on support for redistribution. In other words, candidates from the same party are on average less favorable to redistribution of income by the state if they themselves have higher incomes. Consequently, since citizens on average have both lower incomes and policy preferences that are much more favorable towards redistribution than their representatives (Rosset 2013b), this result suggests that the unequal descriptive representation of income groups in parliament could explain the unequal representation of their preferences on redistribution. The second study focuses on legislator responsiveness. It takes advantage of Switzerland's direct democratic system, in which parliament votes on each policy proposal that is put to a popular vote (WĂŒest and Lloren 2014). This institutional setting thus provides a unique opportunity to compare legislators' and citizens' policy preferences on identical scales.4 The empirical analysis consists of two steps. First, based on data from surveys carried out after popular votes (âVoxâ surveys), the study examines whether citizens' policy preferences vary according to income. In line with previous research findings (Gilens 2009; Rigby and Wright 2011), this analysis shows that with regard to economic issues the poor tend to have more left-leaning preferences than more affluent citizens. After having shown that the preferences of poor and rich citizens differ, the study then assesses in a second step whether legislators with different socioeconomic backgrounds respond unequally to the policy preferences of different income groups. To do so, WĂŒest and Lloren (2014) regress legislators' voting decisions in parliament on three sets of independent variables: (i) indicator variables showing whether a legislator has a lower-income, middle-income or higher-income occupation (see Pilotti, Mach and Mazzoleni 2010), (ii) variables measuring the preferences of poor, middle-income and rich citizens, respectively, in a legislator's reelection constituency and (iii) a set of indicator variables to control for legislators' party affiliations.5 The analysis reveals, first, that representatives are more responsive to higher-income groups and that the preferences of the less affluent are therefore underrepresented in the legislative arena. Second, and most importantly for this essay, representatives occupying low-wage jobs are not more likely to cast a left vote than their colleagues who have middle- and higher-income occupations. Thus, conditional on party affiliation, legislators' socioeconomic backgrounds do not affect their voting decisions. Finally, the results show that legislator responsiveness to income group preferences does not depend on party affiliation. Consequently, this second study suggests that occupational income has no effect on legislators' behavior in final passage votes and that the overrepresentation of well-off representatives in parliament does not contribute to explaining the lack of congruence between legislators and lower-income citizens. At first sight, this finding contradicts a growing body of research that politicians' personal such as gender or ethnic influence their political behavior at various stages of the legislative process, thus enabling marginalized groups to voice their political concerns more accurately (Lefkofridi, Giger, and Kissau, 2012; Lloren 2015b; Preuhs 2006; Swers 2002). Some might argue that grouping legislators' according to income could be an improper measure to grasp the effect of one's position in the social structure on political decision-making (Carnes 2012; this debate; Mansbridge this debate). Accordingly, the politics of presence (Philipps 1995) postulates that personal features matter only to the extent that they generate shared social experiences, such as discrimination. Indeed, although a law student and a manual worker can be found in the same income brackets, no one would expect them to have similar social experiences or life chances, and, in turn, share a distinct set of policy preferences. However, the study carried out by Rosset (2013a) and discussed in the previous section shows that personal income determines candidates' preferences with regard to redistribution. Our findings presented above have shown that Swiss legislators' socioeconomic backgrounds are related to their attitudes towards income redistribution, yet do not seem to translate into specific patterns of voting behavior. Hence, although more research is needed to better understand the relationship between representatives' preferences and policymaking actions, we conclude this essay by offering some suggestions as to why legislators' socioeconomic characteristics do not appear to affect their behavior in parliament. As set forth in the introduction, three conditions must be satisfied for descriptive representation to have consequences for legislative behavior. Whereas the first of these conditions â that preferences of legislators are close to the preferences of the socioeconomic group they descriptively represent â is obviously satisfied, the other two are potentially violated. The second condition is violated if legislators' behavior is completely determined by party leaders and/or constituents not belonging to the groups they represent descriptively. In Switzerland, parties are decentralized organizations and legislators do not attach much importance to party loyalty as a guiding principle for their actions (Loewenberg and Mans 1988). However, this does not mean that they do not act in a cohesive manner and recent research suggests that party unity is higher on final passage votes and votes on salient issues (Traber et al. 2014). Therefore, the small influence of socioeconomic characteristics on legislators' voting behavior might be explained by the fact that their behavior is largely determined by party positions in votes on economic issues which are arguably salient. With regard to constituent pressure, we first note that given the large size of the underrepresented group of low-income citizens, legislators have a priori little electoral incentives to respond exclusively to the preferences of the more affluent. However, there is a clear class bias in political participation, which might explain why representing richer citizens could be of particular importance for reelection-seeking legislators (Rennwald 2014). Further, given the lack of party finance regulations and the low level of party subsidies in Switzerland, it may also be that politicians attach more importance to the preferences of constituents with greater financial resources they can contribute to political campaigns. Finally, the third condition for descriptive representation to matter is violated if there are no alternatives on the political agenda separating descriptive representatives from other legislators who do not represent the same group descriptively but who are otherwise similar. While coalition patterns among Swiss parties tend to differ across policy domains, recent research shows that with regard to economic issues there is a clear left-right cleavage, with center and right-wing parties favoring less welfare state than left-wing parties (Afonso and Papadopoulos 2014). Economic policies, therefore, divide legislators strongly along party lines, blurring more subtle differences in preferences that may exist among legislators with different income levels within parties (see also Mansbridge this debate). Consequently, proposals on economic issues might simply be not heterogeneous enough to allow us to disentangle the effects that socioeconomic characteristics may have on legislative behavior. This discussion also intends to serve as a cautionary note. Although in our analysis we failed to find an effect of descriptive representation on legislators' behavior, this does not imply that descriptive representation is irrelevant for policymaking. Rather, we believe that its effect is context-dependent. When the context changes (e.g., when party pressure decreases or more heterogeneous proposals are voted on in parliament), descriptive representation may become more important in structuring legislative behavior. For example, women's descriptive representation in the Swiss National Council has increased substantive representation for women (Lloren 2015a). In that case, the three conditions discussed earlier were satisfied. Women legislators are more likely to favor women friendly policy than their male colleagues and to vote together â sometimes even against their party â to support women's interests, especially on policies that yield weak left-right polarization such as moral issues. Exploring such context dependencies for other politically marginalized groups thus constitutes a fruitful avenue for future research. Finally, we should note that legislators' socioeconomic backgrounds might affect behavior other than roll call voting. For instance, some scholars have argued that legislators are less constrained by party pressure in earlier stages of the legislative process, such as when sponsoring bills or in floor debates, and therefore have more discretion to act according to the preferences of groups they represent descriptively (see, e.g., Carnes and Lupu 2015; Lupu this debate). Anouk Lloren is a postdoctoral visiting fellow at Columbia University funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Within the field of political behavior, her work relates to political participation, representation, gender, and socio-economic inequalities. Jan Rosset is a postdoctoral researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim, with a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. His research focuses on the relationship between economic and political inequality and on democratic political representation. Reto WĂŒest is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Geneva. His research interests include legislative institutions and behavior, economic inequality and political representation, and formal theory.
If millionaires in the United States formed their own political party, that party would make up just three percent of the country, but it would have a majority in the House of Representatives, a filibuster-proof super-majority in the Senate, a 5:4 majority on the Supreme Court, and a man in the White House. If working-class Americansâpeople employed in manual-labor and service-industry jobsâwere a political party, that party would have made up more than half of the country since the start of the twentieth century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before getting into politics) would never have held more than two percent of the seats in Congress. In the last few years, scholars of US politics have started taking a renewed interest in what I call white-collar government,1 the disproportionate numerical representation of wealthy people and white-collar professionals in our political institutions. Political scientists are once again asking how government by the upper class affects public policy in the United States. And they're starting to ask why our representative process consistently gives us such economically unrepresentative slates of politicians. By virtually any measure of class or social attainment, the average policy maker in the United States is vastly better off than the average citizen. The size of the social gap between citizens and their representatives varies somewhat across different political institutions and depends in part on how we measure class or economic standing. In general, though, politicians tend to be drawn overwhelmingly from the top strata of American society. For example, members of Congressâthe branch of the federal government often touted as most closely reflecting the nation's diversityâare considerably more privileged than the people who elect them. Lawyers and business owners make up approximately 10 percent of the population but constitute at least half of both chambers. Almost every member today is a college graduate, a distinction held by just one in three Americans (Ruggles et a1. 2009). And the median net worth of members of Congress is approximately $1.5 million (Center for Responsive Politics 2014), roughly eleven times the median net worth of American families. These imbalances are by no means recent developments (e.g., Domhoff 1967; Matthews 1954a; 1954b; 1985; Mills 1956; Pessen 1984; Zeller 1954). They have persisted, moreover, even as other underrepresented groups have begun to break through the glass ceiling. Figure 1 plots the percentage of members of Congress who served between 1901 and 1996 who were women, racial or ethnic minorities, and who were from the working class (that is, who last worked as manual laborers, service industry workers, or union officials before entering politics). Although women and minorities were still underrepresented at the end of the twentieth century, both groups gained considerable ground during the postwar period. In sharp contrast, working-class Americansâwho have made up more than half of the labor force for at least the last hundred years (even after that Information Revolution of the late-20th century)âhave never held more than two percent of the seats in Congress. The Demographic Makeup of the United States Congress, 1901â96 Source: Carnes 2012. This long-standing feature of American political life doesn't seem to be going anywhere any time soon. Data on the makeup of state and local institutionsâwhich tend to foreshadow demographic changes in national officesâsuggest that, if anything, working-class representation may decline even further in the short term. In state legislatures, for instance, women's representation skyrocketed from 8 percent to 24 percent between 1976 and 2007, and the share of lawmakers who were Black or Latino grew from 9 percent to 11 percent. During the same period, the share of state legislators from blue-collar jobs fell from 5 percent to 3 percent (National Conference of State Legislatures 2011). The path to political office has always been difficult for the working class, and it doesn't seem to be getting any easier. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution were skeptical about the importance of a politician's economic or social class background. In Federalist #35, Alexander Hamilton defended government by the privileged (see, for instance, Lewis 1961; Manin 1997), arguing that blue-collar workers âknow that the merchant is their natural patron and friend; and they are aware that however great the confidence they may justly feel in their own good sense, their interests can be more effectually promoted by the merchant than by themselves.â Why should it matter whether the people who represent us come from one background or another? Workers and business owners both want economic prosperity, so what's the harm in letting the upper class call the shots? This rosy take on government by the privileged has been an important part of American political thought ever since. Campaigns and candidates routinely invoke âslogans such as president Calvin Coolidge's âthe business of the nation is businessâ or Charles E. Wilson's (Eisenhower's secretary of defense and a former executive at General Motors) statement that âwhat was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versaââ (Witko and Friedman 2008, 72). Unfortunately, the idea that class doesn't matter in our political institutions appears to be flat wrong. Scholars of public opinion have known for decades that Americans from different classes have different views about economic issues, that working-class Americans tend to be more progressive, and that the wealthy tend to want government to play a smaller role in economic affairs (e.g., Gilens 2009; Hout 2008; Keely and Tan 2008; Manza and Brooks 2008; Rehm 2010). Politicians seem to be no exception. Like ordinary citizens, politicians from different classes tend to have different personal views about economic issues. And because politicians often have some discretionâtheir hands aren't always tied by parties, citizens, and interest groups (Burden 2007)âthey sometimes base their choices in office on their own views about the issues before them. In Congress, for instance, legislators who had working-class jobs before being elected tend to have more progressive personal views about economic issues, tend to introduce more progressive economic proposals and work harder to pass them, and tend to cast more progressive votes on economic bills (Carnes 2012; 2013). Figure 2 plots data from the Chamber of Commerce (America's largest business association) on how frequently members of Congress sided with business interests when voting on major economic proposals. The figure divides legislators according to the main occupations they held before serving in Congress: average voting scores for members who worked in profit-oriented white-collar jobs (like owning a business) are graphed at the top, service-oriented white-collar jobs (like teaching, law, or social work) are plotted next, and working-class jobs appear at the bottom. The pattern in the data is unmistakable. Like ordinary citizens, lawmakers from the working class tend to be more pro-worker, and lawmakers from white-collar jobsâespecially profit-oriented jobs in the private sectorâtend to be more pro-business (even when I control for a wide range of constituency and legislator characteristics). Class and Roll Call Voting in Congress, 1999â2008 Source: Carnes 2013. These social class divisions are remarkably consistent across different datasets. They appear in voting scores computed by other organizations, in data from different periods of American history, in data on other forms of legislative conduct like introducing bills, and in surveys of state and federal legislators' personal beliefs (Carnes 2013). They are also mirrored in other studies that use different measures of class and privilege. Members of Congress from specific white-collar occupations like business (Witko and Friedman 2008) and law (Eulau and Sprauge 1964; Miller 1995) tend to vote differently on legislation that affects their industries. Legislators who have more money invested in stocks are more likely to vote to protect the markets (Grose 2013). Wealthier legislators are more likely to vote against the estate tax (Griffin and Anewalt-Remsburg 2013). Legislators with more wealth and education are more likely to support bills that increase economic inequality (Kraus and Callaghan 2014). However we define class or privilege, it seems to matter in our legislatures. Like ordinary citizens, lawmakers who are well off themselves are more likely to support policies that protect the well off. And these class-based differences in individual legislative conduct can have dramatic consequences in the aggregate. Figure 3 plots data from 1993 and 1995 on the social class makeups of state legislatures against data on the percentages of states' budgets devoted to social welfare programs (top panel), the generosity of unemployment benefits in each state (middle panel), and the tax rate on corporations in each state (bottom panel). State legislatures with more working-class members devote more of their resources to social safety net programs and tax corporations at higher rates. States with more business owners and executives in their legislatures spend less on welfare, provide lower levels of unemployment benefits, and tax companies at lower rates (Carnes 2013, ch. 5). Economic Policy and the Social Class Makeup of State Legislatures, 1994â1996 Source: Carnes 2013, ch. 5. Note: Lines represent quadratic best-fit estimates (with 95 percent confidence intervals shaded gray). Welfare spending and corporate tax rate data are from 1994 and 1996; maximum weekly unemployment benefits data are from 2001. Of course, many other features of US politics mute our government's response to the needs of the working class, like the decline of labor unions and the recent and unprecedented surge in campaign spending (see Gilens in this debate). White-collar government isn't the only barrier to pro-worker policy in the United Statesâbut it certainly belongs on the list.2 The rosy notion that lawmakers from business and professional backgrounds want what's best for everyone is seriously out of line with the realities of legislative decision making in the United States. The economic issues at stake in American politics often involve difficult trade-offs between the material well-being of different classes of citizens. And the scarcity of lawmakers from the working class ultimately tilts decisions about the distribution of economic resources, protections, and burdens in favor of the more conservative policies that affluent Americans tend to prefer. Government by the upper class promotes government for the upper classâand government for the upper class is often bad for everyone else. Why, then, are there so few working-class people in our political institutions in the first place? If the policy stakes are so high, why does our representative process consistently yield such an unrepresentative group of decision makers? Political scientists currently know more about the effects of government by the privileged in the United States than they do about the causes. However, a growing body of research seems to be ruling out several potential culpritsâand implicating others. Probably the most common view among pundits and political observers is that white-collar government is something of a practical necessity in the United States. One popular version of this argument holds that government by the privileged is what Americans want, that white-collar professional rule in the U.S. because American voters prefer white-collar candidates. Another common and related view is that government by the upper class is what Americans need, that working-class people don't have the skills or qualifications required for holding office. The Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist William A. Henry III (1995, 21) summarized both when he wrote that âvoters repeatedly reject insurrectionist candidates who parallel their own ordinariness [âŠ] in favor of candidates of proven character and competence.â Why are we governed by the rich? Many observers believe it's because the rich make better politiciansâand voters know it. These arguments have deep historical roots in the United States. However, they've never found much support in hard data on U.S. politics. There has never been an empirical study that has shown that American voters prefer white-collar candidates. And there has never been a single studyânot oneâthat has concluded that working-class people are underrepresented in public office because they are less qualified for the job. On average, members of Congress from the working class do almost exactly as well in elections as members from white-collar professions (Carnes n.d.). Experiments comparing hypothetical candidates from different classes reach identical conclusions. Sadin (2011) finds, for instance, that voters randomly assigned to evaluate a hypothetical candidate from the working class are just as likely to report that they would vote for him as those randomly assigned to evaluate an otherwise identical hypothetical candidate from an elite professional background. Far from âreject[ing] ⊠candidate[s] who parallel their own ordinariness,â voters seem to like working-class candidates just fine. A shortage of qualified workers doesn't seem to be to blame, either. It's true that on average working-class Americans are less likely to have many of the personal qualities that promote success in politics or that we might want in our leaders: knowledge about public affairs, confidence that the political process can be used to achieve real change, âtoleran[ce] of unpopular voicesâ (Verba 2003, 669), and so on. However, there are many more working-class people than there are white-collar professionalsâso many more, in fact, that there are actually more blue-collar workers with many of these desirable characteristics than there are white-collar professionals (Carnes 2013, ch. 6). If even just half a percent of the blue-collar workers in the United States have the skills required for holding office, there would be enough of them to fill every seat in Congress and in every state legislature more than 40 timesâwith enough left over to run a few thousand city councils. Something other than voters and qualifications seems to be responsible for the shortage of working-class citizens in American political institutions. Scholars haven't yet confirmed exactly what that is, but we're starting to make some headway. Building on research on other historically underrepresented groups like women (e.g., Crowder-Meyer 2010; Lawless and Fox 2005; 2010; Sanbonmatsu 2002; 2006), the nascent scholarship on the shortage of working-class Americans in public office is beginning to find evidence that workers are underrepresented not because of some deficiency on their part, but because of discouraging circumstances, like the practical burdens associated with holding office and the gatekeeping decisions of party leaders and interest groups. In places where holding office is less burdensome and in places where workers are better integrated into parties and interest groups, workers tend to hold office in larger numbers. Figure 4 illustrates this point with data on the share of working-class Americans in state legislatures (from Figure 3). In states with more professionalized legislaturesâthat is, where holding office takes more time and energyâfewer workers hold office. In states where working-class citizens make up larger shares of party and campaign volunteers, workers tend to hold office in larger numbers. And in states where unions are stronger, workers are more likely to lead (Carnes n.d.; see also Carnes forthcoming; Sojourner 2013). The factors that keep workers out of office don't seem to have to do with voters or with the supposed shortcomings of the working class itself. They seem to have far more to do with the structural features of the political landscape that have captivated scholars of U.S. politics for decades: parties, institutions, and interest groups. What Predicts Working-class Representation in State Legislatures? Source: Carnes n.d. These findings are still preliminary, of courseâthere simply hasn't been much research on this topic yet. Scholars still need to develop a complete account of the individual behavioral or psychological factors keeping workers from running and winning (e.g., differences in resources, ambition, recruitment, etc.). We need to link those factors to the structural features of the political environment that give rise to them, like the high cost of running an election, the weakness of labor unions in the US, and so on. We need to think through and identify the causal relationship between these factors and working-class representation. And we need to think about change over time. Many of these structural factors are changing in ways that probably discourage working-class office holdingâelections are getting more expensive and unions are getting weaker. Holding office was always challenging for workers (see Figure 1), but it may be getting even harder. Scholars need to understand how these changes are affecting the already difficult process of transitioning from a working-class job to a career in politics. Reformers do, too. In the last few years, activists have started taking an unprecedented interest in government by the privileged. In the 1990s, the New Jersey AFL-CIO launched a âcandidate schoolâ to identify, recruit, and train working-class citizens to run for public office. Since then, similar working-class candidate training programs have been launched in California, Connecticut, Maine, Nevada, New York, and Oregonâand more are on the way (Carnes 2013, ch. 6). Programs like these are premised on the same basic ideas that are emerging from the scholarly research on the factors keeping working-class Americans out of office, namely, that there are many qualified working-class Americans out there, that workers do well in elections when they run, and that electing more workers will tilt economic policy toward the progressive policies that workers tend to support and away from the conservative policies favored by America's rich. However, scholars and practitioners still have a lot to learn about why the United States has a white-collar governmentâand what we can do about it. Nicholas Carnes is Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. His research focuses on U.S. politics, legislative decision making, representation, social class, economic inequality, and state and local politics. His new book White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making examines how the shortage of people from the working class in American legislatures skews the policymaking process towards outcomes that are more in line with the upper class's economic interests. He is also starting a large-scale study on the factors that discourage working-class Americans from holding public office and the programs that could help to address the shortage of working-class Americans in our political institutions.
This article addresses the market for employment services. It adopts a dynamic perspective on welfare markets and demonstrates how the institutional design of quasiâmarkets in the Danish Public Employment service has been promoted, altered, and reâregulated over a period of 10 years. It was in 2002 when quasiâmarkets have been created by using the instrument of contractingâout employment services to private providers. Seen from the perspective of policymakers at the national level, contractingâout is attractive as it has a buffering function and allows adapting the amount of the public financed employment services comparatively easy to changing needs resulting from changing labor market conditions. However, contractingâout makes accountability to public goods more difficult as the chain of accountability is stretched or may even be broken. Against the background of accountability scandals, which have revealed the poor quality of privately provided services, the market design was reâmodeled again by replacing standardized national tendering with a decentralized, partnershipâbased and dialogueâoriented approach, where services are developed in joint efforts between purchaser and provider. All in all, the development of quasiâmarkets in the Danish Public Employment system can be described as a partial reversal from marketization. Paradoxically, elements of network governance, which were abolished initially, have been introduced again.
Greece's residual type of welfare model is facing the past six years an intense pressure caused by the economic crisis (2008) and the emergence of new social risks. Restrictive policies and internal devaluation process adopted to restructure economy, underestimated the social impact. The State, choosing a different welfare model with emphasis on commodification and selective services, gradually withdraws from the implementation of social policy, seeking, through administrative reforms, to transfer responsibilities to local government, without, however, the necessary funding. At the same time, European Union's social policy, despite its rhetoric and some initially ambitious efforts, particularly with the Treaty of Lisbon, shows inability to create a âcommunity acquisâ, which would contribute decisively to the Europeanization of the southern countries. By applying âsoft lawâ measures and always based on the principle of subsidiarity, European strategy is confined, almost entirely, to an application of employment support measures, primarily seeking to improve competitiveness and meet the financial objectives of Monetary Union. The study of basic economic and social EU-28 indices for the period 2008-2012, confirms that diversification of welfare models has a crucial effect in mitigating income inequality and reducing the risk of poverty, enhancing therefore, the dispute over theoretical approaches that support the adequacy of policies related to economic growth. This paper attempts, given the aforementioned conditions, to present the current situation in local government organizations, both from the structures and the financing means perspective, based on a primary research, conducted for this purpose using a structured questionnaire filled by competent executives of all municipalities in the Prefecture (now regional unit) of Thessaloniki. Research findings, though highlighting the efforts to substitute central government's role in an institutional context, constantly under reform, indicate that municipalities are facing significant efficiency problems. Social policy is exercised by different organizational units without integrated strategic planning, new structures which were created primarily to address poverty are inadequate to meet the actual needs and funding is limited in an effort to replace the reduced own resources through European programs, without seeking future alternative sources. The acute lack of human resources and coordination, adversely affects evaluation of local government's social policy. The findings also intensify the concern about structures sustainability and the capacity of municipalitiesâ overall support, but at the same time detect needed interventions in order to implement an efficient decentralized policy, which will become an essential factor of social cohesion and prevent escalation of social exclusion.
In Turkey, important decentralization measures were taken after the 1980s. The new administrative model gave local governments the role of dealing with social exclusion while financing social welfare expenditures through entrepreneurial investment of their non-material resources. This study is an attempt to discuss how such a challenge for local governments has been resolved through the analysis of gendering impacts of three decentralization reform programs.
Since the mid-1980s, both Shanghai and Hong Kong have implemented health insurance reform to contain healthcare costs. But the reform result in these two places represents polar extremes. While Shanghai witnessed a revolution in healthcare financing in 2000, Hong Kong remains status quo on healthcare financing. Using the theory of historical institutionalism, this study examines how the complex interplay of forces affects health insurance reform implementation in these two places. It finds that Shanghai succeeded in implementing health insurance reform because of contextual influences, ideological shift, policy feedback, the authoritative political institutions, the dominance of key bureaucratic stakeholders in health insurance reform process, the endorsement of new ideas, and the decentralization power given to local governments. On the other hand, it finds that Hong Kong failed to implement any health insurance reforms in 1993 because of a more democratic political system, policy feedback, the persistence of old ideas, and a robust economy. Besides, it finds that the government failed to implement healthcare financing reforms in 1999 and 2000 because of a disjointed political system, difficult economic circumstances, the new idea lacking public acceptance, policy feedback, and the institutionalization of old ideas.
Abstract In the last three decades, China has experienced dual decentralization in transforming its economy, resulting in decentralization and deconcentration in public administration and social service delivery. Under the policy framework of decentralization, particularly when welfare financing has been decentralized to local governments, the emergence of welfare regionalism is evident in China. This paper sets out against this policy context to examine how three local governments in eastern coastal areas in China handle changing labour welfare needs by institutionalizing social and labour protection measures to meet the local needs instead of implementing central policy. With particular reference to examine why regional variations exist in welfare provision even though the socio-economic development status is similar in these areas, this paper shows how different forms of capitals, government's governance style and diversity of industries have affected welfare arrangements for labour in China.