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Biting the Hand that Feeds: Reconsidering the Partisan Determinants of Welfare Spending in Times of Austerity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2017

Abel Bojar
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Abstract

The New Politics of the welfare state suggests that periods of welfare retrenchment present policymakers with a qualitatively different set of challenges and electoral incentives compared to periods of welfare expansion. An unresolved puzzle for this literature is the relative electoral success of retrenching governments in recent decades, as evidenced by various studies on fiscal consolidations. This article points to the importance of partisan biases as the main explanatory factor. I argue that partisan biases in the electorate create incentives for incumbent governments to depart from their representative function and push the burden of retrenchment on the very constituencies to which they owe their electoral mandate (‘Nixon-goes-to-China’). After offering a simple model on the logic of partisan biases, the article proceeds by testing the unexpected partisan hypotheses that the model generates. My findings from a cross-section time-series analysis in a set of 23 OECD countries provide corroborative evidence on this Nixon-goes-to-China logic of welfare retrenchment: governments systematically inflict pain on their core constituencies. These effects are especially pronounced in periods of severe budgetary pressure.

Keywords

welfareretrenchmentpartisanshipspendingfiscal adjustment
Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 621 - 652
Copyright
© The Author(s). Published by Government and Opposition Limited and Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

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Abel Bojar is a fellow of Political Economy in Europe at the European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science. Contact email: a.t.bojar@lse.ac.uk.

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