Partisan Politics in the Long Shadow of the Golden Age

Abstract

The question if political parties matter in social policy making is traditionally answered by an analysis of social spending or replacement rates. Following this approach, parties obviously mattered in the ‘golden age’, whereas their influence dwindled or even disappeared afterwards. Starting from the insights and blind spots of the conventional approach, I will outline an innovative, more historical 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 constrain their political opponents’ policy options. Although one has to account for unintended consequences, this mechanism points to the existence of institutionalized partisan effects. The analytical framework is applied to pension politics in Sweden and the United Kingdom since the late 1950s.