Partisan Politics in the Long Shadow of the Golden Age

In their state-of-the-art article 'Rethinking Party Politics and the Welfare State', Häusermann et al. (2013) identify different strands of welfare state research that have recently advanced partisan theory. Amongst other things, they rightly highlight studies that emphasize “the role of context, notably electoral institutions, party competition and the configuration of party systems”. However, one important part of the context in which parties operate is missing in this list, namely the institutional context of the welfare state itself. This kind of context is of particular interest, as it can be altered more easily by political actors than most political institutions, thus adding a historical dimension to the analytical perspective. In my paper, I will outline a historical-institutionalist approach that emphasizes the mutual interaction of political parties and welfare institutions over time. On the one hand, partisan conflict patterns are shaped by existing welfare institutions. This means that different institutional designs lead to different partisan conflicts and, ultimately, to contextualized partisan effects, i.e. if and especially how parties matter differs considerably across welfare states. On the other hand, welfare institutions are themselves the product of previous partisan conflicts and the resulting policies. Thus, by shaping the institutional design of welfare programs in their favor, parties can, due to policy feedback, deliberately limit their political opponents’ policy options. Although one has to account for unintended consequences, this mechanism points to the existence of institutionalized partisan effects. Though applicable to all kinds of welfare programs, pensions promise to be a particularly well suited welfare program to illustrate my approach. Pension systems are generally assumed to be highly path dependent, which is why they possess a high potential for institutionalized partisan effects. The empirical analysis will concentrate on Sweden and Britain, two countries that, concerning their pension systems, started from similar starting points in the 1950s, but followed different trajectories thereafter. The contextual comparison of both cases will demonstrate how the diverging results of the ideological battles of the golden age have shaped Swedish and British pension politics in the retrenchment era. By putting partisan politics in context, the case studies will also help to solve some empirical puzzles, e.g. the observation that a comprehensive funded pension scheme was strongly opposed by the Swedish Social Democrats but promoted by the Labour Party in Britain.