scholarly journals Choosing whom to betray: populist right-wing parties, welfare state reforms and the trade-off between office and votes

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandre Afonso
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Blue Collar ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Trade Off ◽  
Pension Reforms ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact

This article analyses the impact of populist right-wing parties (PRWPs) on welfare state reforms in Western Europe in the light of the trade-off that they face between office and votes. On the one hand, PRWPs appeal to traditionally left-leaning blue-collar ‘insiders’ supportive of social insurance schemes. On the other hand, they have only been able to take part in government as junior coalition partners with liberal or conservative parties who are more likely to retrench these very same welfare programmes. In this context, the article argues that these parties have to choose between betraying their electorate (and losing votes), and betraying their coalition partners (and losing office). When they choose office, it enables welfare state retrenchment by allowing their coalition partners to curtail left-wing opposition, but entails high electoral costs for PRWPs. When they choose votes, it generates deadlock and potentially jeopardizes their participation in government. The paper draws on a comparative analysis of pension reforms during three periods of government participation of PRWPs: the Schüssel I and II cabinets in Austria (2000–06), the Rutte I cabinet in the Netherlands (2010–12) and three pension reforms in Switzerland between 1995 and 2010. The analysis draws on original primary material and interviews.

Housing Prices and Government Approval: The Impact of Housing Booms on Left- and Right-Wing Governments in 16 Advanced Industrialized Countries

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-185
Author(s):  
Sung Min Han ◽  
Mi Jeong Shin
Keyword(s):  
Housing Prices ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Approval Ratings ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Left And Right ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Impact

AbstractIn this article, we argue that rising housing prices increase voter approval of incumbent governments because such a rise increases personal wealth, which leads to greater voter satisfaction. This effect is strongest under right-wing governments because those who benefit from rising prices—homeowners—are more likely to be right-leaning. Non-homeowners, who are more likely to vote for left-leaning parties, will view rising housing prices as a disadvantage and therefore feel the government does not serve them well, which will mitigate the advantage to left-wing governments. We find support for our arguments using both macro-level data (housing prices and government approval ratings in 16 industrialized countries between 1960 and 2017) and micro-level data (housing prices and individuals’ vote choices in the United Kingdom using the British Household Panel Survey). The findings imply that housing booms benefit incumbent governments generally and right-wing ones in particular.

scholarly journals The Centre Does Not Hold: Coalition Politics and Party System Change in the Netherlands, 2002–12

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huib Pellikaan ◽  
Sarah L. de Lange ◽  
Tom W.G. van der Meer
Keyword(s):  
Coalition Formation ◽  
Party System ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Coalition Politics ◽  
Coalition Formation Process ◽  
The Impact

Like many party systems across Western Europe, the Dutch party system has been in flux since 2002 as a result of a series of related developments, including the decline of mainstream parties which coincided with the emergence of radical right-wing populist parties and the concurrent dimensional transformation of the political space. This article analyses how these challenges to mainstream parties fundamentally affected the structure of party competition. On the basis of content analysis of party programmes, we examine the changing configuration of the Dutch party space since 2002 and investigate the impact of these changes on coalition-formation patterns. We conclude that the Dutch party system has become increasingly unstable. It has gradually lost its core through electoral fragmentation and mainstream parties’ positional shifts. The disappearance of a core party that dominates the coalition-formation process initially transformed the direction of party competition from centripetal to centrifugal. However, since 2012 a theoretically novel configuration has emerged in which no party or coherent group of parties dominates competition.

scholarly journals Intelektualiści zachodnioeuropejscy od wybuchu II wojny światowej do współczesności

2015 ◽  
pp. 145-164
Author(s):  
Maria Tomczak
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
World War 2 ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
New Formula

This study aims to show the forms of political involvement of Western European intellectuals. In doing so, the paper attempts to answer the question about the role they played in Western and Central Europe in the discussed period. The paper also demonstrates the cultural and political causes of their decline.streszczenieFor the intellectuals of Western and Central Europe, World War 2 was an extremely difficult period. The genocidal policies of the totalitarian states induced them to take a position, while at the same time depriving them of the ability to express their views publicly. This engendered a sense of helplessness; also, apart for a few exceptions, only emigrants could actually perform the function of intellectuals. Among those, an important role to play fell to two groups: German emigrants who distanced themselves from their nation, and Jewish emigrants, who addressed the subject of the Holocaust. After the war, the Iron Curtain also restricted the actions of intellectuals. It soon turned out that the tenor of spiritual life was set by left-wing authors, fascinated with the USSR. The fascination petered out after the disclosure of Stalin’s crimes in 1956. It was terminated definitively by the ruthless suppression of the Prague Spring. It was at that time that conservatism and right-wing intellectuals returned to Europe. Their aim was to reverse the trend and prevent Western Europe from drifting leftward. The change of the paradigm served to settle the scores with the leftist intellectuals. They were accused of subversive activities against the state and nation or treason. Also, in the intellectual circles there emerged a conviction that the previous formula had been exhausted. A new formula of activities of intellectuals was considered particularly in France, by authors of such eminence as R. Aron, M. Foucault, or P. Bourdieu. The deconstruction of the figure of the intellectual was completed by J.-F. Lyotard, who pronounced the death of intellectuals. Involvement of intellectuals remained a valid notion only in the countries of the Eastern bloc. In post-Cold War Europe, the decline of intellectuals became even more discernible. This was occasioned by a number of political and cultural factors. In this respect, particular role should be attributed to postmodernism which, by disproving the Enlightenment understanding of culture, undermined the role played by intellectuals.

scholarly journals The development of the Welfare State in Portugal: trends in social expenditure between 1938 and 2003

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Fernando Carolo ◽  
José António Pereirinha
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Data Series ◽  
Social Risk ◽  
Social Expenditure ◽  
Social Risks ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Risk Protection ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThis paper presents a data series on social expenditure in Portugal for the period 1938-2003. The series was built with the aim of identifying and characterizing the most significant phases in the process leading up to the current welfare state system in this country. The establishment of a social insurance (Previdência) in 1935 was one of the founding pillars of the Estado Novo (New State). Reforms to Social Welfare (Previdência Social) in 1962, while in the full throes of the New State, policy measures taken after the revolution of 1974 and a new orientation for social policy following the accession of Portugal to the European Economic Community (EEC) in the mid-1980s brought about significant transformations in the institutional organizational structure that provided welfare and conferred social rights in Portugal. To understand this process, knowledge is needed of the transformations to the institutional structures governing the organizations that provided welfare, welfare coverage in terms of the type of benefit and the population entitled to social risk protection, the magnitude of spending on benefits associated with these risks, as well as how benefits were allocated between the institutions. We built a data series for the period 1938-1980, which can then be matched to data already published in the OECD Social Expenditure Database from 1980 onwards. As a result, a consistent series for social expenditure from 1938 to 2003 was obtained. The methodology used to create the series enabled us to measure the impact of the variation in population coverage for social risks and the average generosity of benefits on the relative share of social expenditure in GDP. We present an interpretive reading for the full period, covering the New State and the Democracy from 1974, of the process of building the welfare state in Portugal.

Russian philosophy of law

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrzej Walicki
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
World View ◽  
Russian Philosophy ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Philosophy Of Law ◽  
American Constitution ◽  
Imperial Russia ◽  
The One

Russian thought is rarely associated with philosophy of law. The intellectuals of pre-revolutionary Russia are known rather for their uncompromising critique of legalism, passing sometimes into a genuine ‘legal nihilism’. Indeed, both right-wing and left-wing Russian thinkers – the Slavophiles and Dostoevskii on the one hand, the populists and anarchists (from Bakunin to Tolstoi) on the other – saw modern rational law as an instrument of egoistic bourgeois individualism, destroying the values of communal collectivism still preserved among the Russian peasantry. This attitude found expression not only in different forms of programmatic anti-capitalism but also in a tendency to discredit civil rights and political liberty as a mere mask for capitalist exploitation. Capitalist development and the juridicization of social bonds it involved were perceived as something peculiar to the West, coming to Russia from without and as such not worthy of acceptance. Law and legal rights were criticized in Russia from many quarters and for various reasons: in defence of an idealized autocracy or in defence of true freedom, on behalf of the Russian soul or on behalf of universal progress towards socialism, in the name of Christ or in the name of Marx. In this manner right-wing and left-wing Russian intellectuals supported one another in creating a peculiar tradition of the censure of law. However, it would be wrong to draw from these facts a conclusion of an inherent hostility between the ‘Russian mind’ and the ‘spirit of law’. The ‘juridical world-view’ of the Enlightenment was well represented in imperial Russia. The modernizing Russian autocrats – Peter the Great and Catherine the Great – believed firmly in the power of rational legislation and won admiration from among leading European thinkers (Leibniz, Voltaire, Diderot) fir setting a good example for Western monarchs. The first radical critic of Russian autocracy, Aleksandr Radishchev (1749–1802), was in turn a theorist of natural law, a firm believer in inalienable human rights, and an enthusiastic worshipper of the American constitution. Under the reign of Alexander I (1801–25), who himself thought seriously about the introduction of constitutional rule in Russia, admiration for law was very strong among Russia’s intellectual elite. Radischchev’s disciples, Ivan Pnin and Vasilii Popugaev, inspired also by the Scottish Enlightenment, advocated the idea of a ‘civil society’ with a developed system of private law and legally safeguarded human rights. Nikita Murav’ev and Pavel Pestel, ideological leaders of the two trends within the Decembrist movement (named so after the abortive uprising of December l825), expressed their ideas in the form of detailed constitutional projects. A common feature of these projects, otherwise very different, was a pronounced juridical rationalism, sharply contrasting with all variants of a sceptical attitude towards law.

The Trilateral Era

Worldview ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 21-23
Author(s):  
Jeremiah Novak
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Jimmy Carter ◽  
Henry Kissinger ◽  
George Bush ◽  
The Past ◽  
Corporate Executives ◽  
The U.S

For the past four years right-wing and left-wing organizations in the United States have been aware of a new foreign policy establishment known as the Trilateral Commission. This group, founded by David Rockefeller, is comprised largely of corporate executives from Western Europe, Japan, and the U.S. Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Cyrus Vance, as well as seventeen other members and former members of the Carter administration, belonged to this group before they took office. Key political figures in the governments of Japan and Western Europe also belong, as do John Anderson, George Bush, and Henry Kissinger.

Flank attacks

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthijs Rooduijn ◽  
Tjitske Akkerman
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
The Political ◽  
General Category ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Good People ◽  
Economic Elites ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The Right ◽  
Radical Left

How is populism distributed over the political spectrum? Are right-wing parties more populist than left-wing parties? Based on the analysis of 32 parties in five Western European countries between 1989 and 2008, we show that radical parties on both the left and the right are inclined to employ a populist discourse. This is a striking finding, because populism in Western Europe has typically been associated with the radical right; only some particular radical left parties have been labeled populist as well. This article suggests that the contemporary radical left in Western Europe is generally populist. Our explanation is that many contemporary radical left parties are not traditionally communist or socialist (anymore). They do not focus on the ‘proletariat’, but glorify a more general category: the ‘good people’. Moreover, they do not reject the system of liberal democracy as such, but only criticize the political and/or economic elites within that system.

Paul V. Dutton,Origins of the French Welfare State: The Struggle for Social Reform in France, 1914–1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 251 pp. $65.00 cloth; $27.00 paper.

2004 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 194-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herrick Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Publicly Funded ◽  
World War ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Funded Pensions ◽  
Private Government ◽  
Second World

Comparative studies of social policy usually portray the French welfare state as lagging behind most of its counterparts in Western Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century. The sheer complexity of the French system, moreover, with its baroque mixture of separate private, government and quasi-public funds, made it exceptional as well. Yet tardiness and complexity by no means prevented the French from expanding social insurance at an especially rapid clip in the decades following the Second World War. By 1980 France spent more on social security as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product than any country in Europe except Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands. Today the French are among Europe's most stalwart defenders of publicly funded pensions and health insurance. Given its unimpressive beginnings, how did the French welfare state become such a heavyweight?

How right-wing versus cosmopolitan political actors mobilize and translate images of immigrants in transnational contexts

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Doerr
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
People's Party ◽  
The Right ◽  
Syrian Refugee Crisis

This article examines visual posters and symbols constructed and circulated transnationally by various political actors to mobilize contentious politics on the issues of immigration and citizenship. Following right-wing mobilizations focusing on the Syrian refugee crisis, immigration has become one of the most contentious political issues in Western Europe. Right-wing populist political parties have used provocative visual posters depicting immigrants or refugees as ‘criminal foreigners’ or a ‘threat to the nation’, in some countries and contexts conflating the image of the immigrant with that of the Islamist terrorist. This article explores the transnational dynamics of visual mobilization by comparing the translation of right-wing nationalist with left-wing, cosmopolitan visual campaigns on the issue of immigration in Western Europe. The author first traces the crosscultural translation and sharing of an anti-immigrant poster created by the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), a right-wing political party, inspiring different extremist as well as populist right-wing parties and grassroots activists in several other European countries. She then explores how left-libertarian social movements try to break racist stereotypes of immigrants. While right-wing political activists create a shared stereotypical image of immigrants as foes of an imaginary ethnonationalist citizenship, left-wing counter-images construct a more complex and nuanced imagery of citizenship and cultural diversity in Europe. The findings show the challenges of progressive activists’ attempts to translate cosmopolitan images of citizenship across different national and linguistic contexts in contrast to the right wing’s rapid and effective instrumentalizing and translating of denigrating images of minorities in different contexts.

How do welfare states change? Institutions and their impact on the politics of welfare state reform in Western Europe

2000 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliano Bonoli ◽  
Bruno Palier
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Unemployment Compensation ◽  
European Social Policy ◽  
Overall Resistance ◽  
The Uk

In the 1980s and 1990s West European welfare states were exposed to strong pressures to ‘renovate’, to retrench. However, the European social policy landscape today looks as varied as it did at any time during the 20th century. ‘New institutionalism’ seems particularly helpful to account for the divergent outcomes observed, and it explains the resistance of different structures to change through past commitments, the political weight of welfare constituencies and the inertia of institutional arrangements – in short, through ‘path dependency’. Welfare state institutions play a special role in framing the politics of social reform and can explain trajectories and forms of policy change. The institutional shape of the existing social policy landscape poses a significant constraint on the degree and the direction of change. This approach is applied to welfare state developments in the UK and France, comparing reforms of unemployment compensation, old-age pensions and health care. Both countries have developed welfare states, although with extremely different institutional features. Two institutional effects in particular emerge: schemes that mainly redistribute horizontally and protect the middle classes well are likely to be more resistant against cuts. Their support base is larger and more influential compared with schemes that are targeted on the poor or are so parsimonious as to be insignificant for most of the electorate. The contrast between the overall resistance of French social insurance against cuts and the withering away of its British counterpart is telling. In addition, the involvement of the social partners, and particularly of the labour movement in managing the schemes, seems to provide an obstacle for government sponsored retrenchment exercises.

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