Silja Häusermann
Biographic Data
| ID | 279372 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Silja Häusermann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Silja |
| FAMILY NAME | Häusermann |
| SIGNATURE | HÄUSERMANN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Zurich |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2410-8959 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 65 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1113 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 56 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 8 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Who wants to accelerate digitalization? Evidence from the next generation EU program
Post-industrial governments around the world are increasingly prioritizing policies to accelerate digitalization, but despite the growing literature on technological change and the knowledge economy, we know little about public preferences regarding digitalization policies. We use the case of the Next Generation EU (NGEU) program, an initiative totaling nearly 800,000 million euros with at least 20 per cent earmarked to expedite digitalization in…
The welfare preferences of socially liberal and socially conservative voters
Trade-Offs of Social Democratic Party Strategies in a Pluralized Issue Space
This article provides a novel framework and empirical test of the strategic trade-offs of political parties’ programmatic appeals. In a pluralized issue space, political positions have the potential to create severe strategic trade-offs for political parties, with gains among one group of voters offset by losses among another. Existing research assumes that these trade-offs are especially prominent for social democratic parties but does not direc…
Realignment within the right field
The universalist divide
Social investment-A (mis)leading paradigm? Why we need to distinguish different types of social investments
Social investment has become a buzzword among social policy-makers and welfare state scholars alike. Social investments seem to be the natural social policy response to the emergence of the skill-focused knowledge economy. Proponents advocate social investment as simultaneously addressing social and economic goals. At the same time, the social investment approach has also been criticized for multiple reasons: Some claim that social investments of…
Politicizing Inequality in Times of Sociocultural Conflict
The antagonism between far right and new left parties has transformed West European politics through increasing sociocultural conflict. We ask what this new cleavage implies for the politicization of inequalities. We contrast two diverging theoretical expectations. The first expects a tradeoff between sociocultural and socioeconomic inequalities, with new left voters emphasizing the former over the latter, and vice versa for far right voters. The…
Under what conditions do citizens support future-oriented welfare reforms? Public opinion and second dimension welfare politics
Important reforms are necessary to adjust today's welfare states to the challenges of post-industrial knowledge economies. Public opinion, however, is often sceptical towards large-scale reforms, especially when the benefits will accrue only in the future. We analyse the conditions that affect citizens' support for such reforms on the basis of original survey experiments from two novel public opinion surveys in nine countries. We test the role of…
Partisan preference divides regarding welfare chauvinism and welfare populism – Appealing only to radical right voters or beyond
Welfare chauvinism and welfare populism as characteristic features of radical right parties’ welfare stances have become challenges to the welfare state. However, in order to understand how these claims may indeed affect welfare politics, it is essential to study whether welfare chauvinism and welfare populism attract voters beyond the radical right, especially among the mainstream right or even parts of the left. Results based on original public…
Attitudinal Consistency in Citizens’ Social Policy Preferences
Unequal Democracies
While economic inequality has risen in every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe, the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to distribute top-income shares to citizens with low- and middle-income? Unequal Democracies offers answers to this question, bringing together contributions that fo…
Social investments in the knowledge economy
As countries transition from industrial to post‐industrial knowledge economies, education and skills are crucial. Consequently, policy‐makers around the globe have increasingly focused on social investment, that is, policies aiming to create, mobilize, or preserve skills. Yet, countries around the globe have developed social investments to different degrees and in highly different forms. Our goal is twofold: First, we introduce a new typology of …
Aspiration Versus Apprehension
Recent studies take increasingly refined views of how socioeconomic conditions influence political behaviour. We add to this literature by exploring how voters' prospective evaluations of long-term economic and social opportunities relate to electoral contestation versus the stabilization of the political-economic system underpinning the knowledge society. Using survey data from eight West European countries, we show that positive prospects are a…
Toward a Worldwide View on the Politics of Social Investment
This introductory chapter presents the main objectives and contributions of the World Politics of Social Investment (WOPSI) project, which are to both map and explain the diversity of social investment policies adopted around the democratic world. The chapter starts with a review of the literature on social investment policies, pointing at several gaps. It then develops a typology of nine types of social investment policies, distinguishing three …
The Emergence of Knowledge Economies
This chapter traces the development of regional varieties of knowledge economies over the past two centuries from a global perspective. First, it shows massive educational expansion across all world regions, with a specific shift toward tertiary education and cognitive skills in the most advanced capitalist democracies. Second, focusing on the latter countries, it traces the relationship between educational expansion and labor market changes, sho…
Automation Risk, Social Policy Preferences, and Political Participation
How does automation affect the politics of the welfare state? People at risk of their human labor being automated may react by claiming social protection (passive social policy), upskilling/commodification (active social policy), or both. In this brief contribution, we make use of novel survey data on perceived automation risk and social policy preferences from eight West European countries to estimate the size and preferences of the group of vot…
The World Politics of Social Investment: Volume II
Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policymakers’ main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented “social investment” policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive variance in the development of social investment strategies. This is the second of two volumes of the …
The World Politics of Social Investment: Volume I
Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policymakers’ main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented “social investment” policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive variance in the development of social investment strategies. This is the first of two volumes of the W…
The Covid-crisis as an opportunity for welfare recalibration? Panel-data evidence on the effect of the Covid-crisis on welfare preferences in Spain, Germany, and Sweden
The reform capacity of welfare states to adapt to the needs of post-industrial labour markets has been a key question of the welfare literature for the last two decades. In a context of austerity, such adaptations (retrenchment or recalibration) are notoriously difficult because of extremely high levels of support for existing policies, particularly old age pensions. We investigate how the recent economic shock caused by the COVID-pandemic has ch…
Class and social policy in the knowledge economy
Recent studies of welfare state attitudes in the knowledge economy find very high generalized support for generous welfare state policies, both among the working and the middle classes. Has class become irrelevant as a predictor of social policy preferences? Or do we simply mis‐conceptualise today's class conflict over social policy? To what extent has it changed from a divide over the level of social policy generosity to a divide over the kind o…
Torn Between International Cooperation and National Sovereignty
This research note examines voter preferences in Swiss‐EU relations. We identify large shares of cross‐pressured voters, i.e., citizens who support the bilateral treaties but wish to either control immigration into Switzerland or oppose a liberalization of social protection measures on the job market. Voters experiencing a trade‐off between immigration control and international cooperation are mainly located on the Right. Their share decreased be…
Attitudinal polarization towards the redistributive role of the state in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis
The COVID-19 crisis presents a unique opportunity to study how public opinion towards the redistributive role of the state reacts to a major economic shock. The pandemic and the measures taken to stop it exposed citizens to both increased fiscal constraint and heightened redistributive capacity: historical drops in GDP (and fiscal revenue) coincided with unprecedented increases in public spending on healthcare provisions and social policy, as wel…
How “Us” and “Them” Relates to Voting Behavior—Social Structure, Social Identities, and Electoral Choice
The last decades have seen the emergence of a divide pitting the new left against the far right in advanced democracies. We study how this universalism-particularism divide is crystallizing into a full-blown cleavage, complete with structural, political and identity elements. So far, little research exists on the identities that voters themselves perceive as relevant for drawing in- and out-group boundaries along this divide. Based on an original…
Contention in Times of Crisis
This is the first comprehensive overview of the waves of protest mobilization that spread across Europe in the wake of the Great Recession. Documenting the extent of these protests in a study covering thirty countries, including the issues they addressed and the degree to which they replicated each other, this book maps the prevalence and nature of protest across Europe, and explains the interactions between economic and political grievances that…
Contention in Times of Crisis
The decline of the working-class vote, the reconfiguration of the welfare support coalition and consequences for the welfare state
The central political claim of Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism is that class actors, through the instruments of the democratic process, can modify capitalism. Where working-class mobilization is strong, left parties have sufficient electoral support in the political arena to alter markets politically in ways that decommodify and thereby empower workers. The decline of traditional class voting, however, has profoundly changed this dynamic of we…
How “Us” and “Them” Relates to Voting Behavior—Social Structure, Social Identities, and Electoral Choice
The last decades have seen the emergence of a divide pitting the new left against the far right in advanced democracies. We study how this universalism-particularism divide is crystallizing into a full-blown cleavage, complete with structural, political and identity elements. So far, little research exists on the identities that voters themselves perceive as relevant for drawing in- and out-group boundaries along this divide. Based on an original…
Who is in and who is out? A risk-based conceptualization of insiders and outsiders
With the post-industrialization and flexibilization of European labour markets, research on social and economic correlates of labour market vulnerability and weak labour market attachment is growing. Part of this literature conceptualizes these correlates in terms of dualization and insider–outsider divides in an attempt to explore their political implications: this article is written in order to contribute to this strand of research. In this art…
Economic grievances and political protest
How do economic grievances affect citizens’ inclination to protest? Given rising levels of inequality and widespread economic hardship in the aftermath of the Great Recession, this question is crucial for political science: if adverse economic conditions depress citizens’ engagement, as many contributions have argued, then the economic crisis may well feed into a crisis of democracy. However, the existing research on the link between economic gri…
High-skilled outsiders? Labor market vulnerability, education and welfare state preferences
Recent research has established that employment risk shapes social policy preferences. However, risk is often conceptualized as an alternative measure of the socio-economic status. We show that employment risk and socio-economic status are distinct, crosscutting determinants of social policy preferences. More specifically, we analyze the policy preferences of high-skilled labor market outsiders as a cross-pressured group. We first establish that …
Class and social policy in the knowledge economy
Recent studies of welfare state attitudes in the knowledge economy find very high generalized support for generous welfare state policies, both among the working and the middle classes. Has class become irrelevant as a predictor of social policy preferences? Or do we simply mis‐conceptualise today's class conflict over social policy? To what extent has it changed from a divide over the level of social policy generosity to a divide over the kind o…
Sharing the Risk? Households, Labor Market Vulnerability, and Social Policy Preferences in Western Europe
Explaining social policy preferences has become a major topic in comparative politics with labor market risk as a key determinant of these preferences. However, one question continues to loom large: are preference divides blurred by mixed households, that is, secure labor market participants living with vulnerable partners? In this article, we build on the insider-outsider literature and show that while the household does matter, its mitigating e…
The Politics of Trade-Offs
Welfare state reform in times of austerity is notoriously difficult because most citizens oppose retrenchment of social benefits. Governments, thus, tend to combine cutbacks with selective benefit expansions, thereby creating trade-offs: to secure new advantages, citizens must accept painful cutbacks. Prior research has been unable to assess the effectiveness of compensating components in restrictive welfare reforms. We provide novel evidence on …
How economic crises affect political representation
How do economic crises affect political representation in times of constrained government? Our paper shows that among voters salience of economic issues increases during economically harsh times. However, parties respond only to a limited degree to economic shocks, with the result that congruence between parties and voters decreases. We theorise the incentives and disincentives different political parties have in choosing a saliency strategy and …
The multidimensional politics of social investment in conservative welfare regimes
While we have many studies on social investment policies and their effects, we still know fairly little about the politics of social investment, especially in conservative welfare states, which provide the hardest ground for these reforms. What are the key conflicts in social investment politics? How do they intersect with compensatory welfare state conflict? Which coalition potentials exist? Based on a newly collected dataset, this contribution …
Solidarity with whom? Why organised labour is losing ground in Continental pension politics
This article explains why the power of organised labour in the reform of Swiss and German pension regimes has faded over the last three decades. Postindustrialisation has brought two different sets of reform issues onto the pension policy agendas of Continental European welfare states: retrenchment of existing benefit levels, and the pension coverage of new, postindustrial social risk groups. Recent pension reforms increasingly combine these two …
From Corporatism to Partisan Politics
The literature on neo‐corporatist agreements in social and labor market policy in the 1990s points to a decline of concertation in European countries with a long‐standing tradition of corporatist negotiation. This article identifies a similar trend in Switzerland and argues that three destabilizing factors account for it: 1) retrenchment pressure and ideological polarization prevent compromises; 2) the emergence of new social demands and interest…
Dualization and Electoral Realignment
The growing research on post-industrial labor market inequality bears a strong—yet widely misunderstood—relevance for the literature on electoral realignment. In this contribution, I contend that the assumption of “labor market outsiders” being equal to “globalization/modernization losers” is largely mistaken. Rather, atypical work and unemployment is most widespread among service workers, whose primary electoral choice is to abstain from voting.…
How Labor Market Inequality Transforms Mass Politics
Why do left parties lose vote shares in times of economic crisis and hardship? Why do right-wing governments implement seemingly left-wing policies, such as labor market activation? Why is representation becoming more and more unequal? And why do workers vote for right-wing populist parties? Several political science theories propose meaningful and important answers to these key questions for comparative politics, focusing on identity politics, p…
Economic regulatory reforms in Switzerland
During the 1990s, despite not being a member of the EU and despite the existence of numerous veto-points, Switzerland displayed an unexpectedly high degree of adjustment to inter- and supranational regulations, particularly in the field of economic regulatory reforms. The article explains this high capacity of adjustment by focusing on three major cases: the reform of competition policy, the liberalization of the telecom sector and the reforms of…
Changing coalitions in social policy reforms
Recent reforms in Swiss and German old-age insurance and family policy included elements directed at both ‘old’ and ‘new’ social needs. ‘Old risks’, such as old age and unemployment, are mainly covered by income-related insurance schemes for standard industrial breadwinners. By contrast, ‘new’ needs, such as infrastructure to reconcile work and care or insurance of atypical employment biographies, concern mainly ‘new’ risk groups, such as young p…
The politics of employment-friendly welfare reforms in post-industrial economies
The transition to post-industrialism has generated a range of new tensions between welfare arrangements and labour market performance, which confront today's welfare states with new challenges for employment-friendly recalibration, such as flexicurity, activation and work-care conciliation. Hence, the question of whether, how and to what extent current welfare states are able to adapt to the conditions and needs of post-industrial labour markets …
Aspiration Versus Apprehension
Recent studies take increasingly refined views of how socioeconomic conditions influence political behaviour. We add to this literature by exploring how voters' prospective evaluations of long-term economic and social opportunities relate to electoral contestation versus the stabilization of the political-economic system underpinning the knowledge society. Using survey data from eight West European countries, we show that positive prospects are a…
Participation in hard times
Existing studies on electoral turnout in times of economic crisis have predominantly focused on disadvantaged voters. However, during the recent economic crisis, turnout among highly educated citizens has strongly declined as well. Existing resource-based theories of political participation cannot account for this. This article suggests that the anticipation of government inefficacy is an important driver of abstention among highly educated. Wher…
Social Policy Preferences and Party Choice in the 2011 Swiss Elections
To what extent do social policy preferences explain party choice? This question has received little attention over the past years, because the bulk of the literature has argued that electoral choice is increasingly shaped by identity‐based attitudes, rather than by preferences for economic‐distributive social policies. We argue that in the wake of this debate, the significance of social policy preferences for electoral choice has been underestima…
Who Wants What From the Welfare State
This article investigates socio-structural cleavages in relation to social policies in Switzerland. It examines the extent to which vertical stratification, age and gender explain variation in individual social policy preferences. We use survey data on reported voting behaviour in 22 direct democratic referendums on distributional issues between 1981 and 2004. Our two main findings are the following: (1) age seems to be the most relevant line of …
The Covid-crisis as an opportunity for welfare recalibration? Panel-data evidence on the effect of the Covid-crisis on welfare preferences in Spain, Germany, and Sweden
The reform capacity of welfare states to adapt to the needs of post-industrial labour markets has been a key question of the welfare literature for the last two decades. In a context of austerity, such adaptations (retrenchment or recalibration) are notoriously difficult because of extremely high levels of support for existing policies, particularly old age pensions. We investigate how the recent economic shock caused by the COVID-pandemic has ch…
Introduction
Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Swiss political system became firmly anchored in three principles of governance: sovereignty, proximity of decision-makers and citizens, and elite consensus. The contributions to this special issue of the Swiss Political Science Review explore to what extent these three principles still adequately describe the functioning and political culture of this country. In our introduction, we …
Trade-Offs of Social Democratic Party Strategies in a Pluralized Issue Space
This article provides a novel framework and empirical test of the strategic trade-offs of political parties’ programmatic appeals. In a pluralized issue space, political positions have the potential to create severe strategic trade-offs for political parties, with gains among one group of voters offset by losses among another. Existing research assumes that these trade-offs are especially prominent for social democratic parties but does not direc…
Social investments in the knowledge economy
As countries transition from industrial to post‐industrial knowledge economies, education and skills are crucial. Consequently, policy‐makers around the globe have increasingly focused on social investment, that is, policies aiming to create, mobilize, or preserve skills. Yet, countries around the globe have developed social investments to different degrees and in highly different forms. Our goal is twofold: First, we introduce a new typology of …
Economic regulatory reforms in Switzerland
During the 1990s, despite not being a member of the EU and despite the existence of numerous veto-points, Switzerland displayed an unexpectedly high degree of adjustment to inter- and supranational regulations, particularly in the field of economic regulatory reforms. The article explains this high capacity of adjustment by focusing on three major cases: the reform of competition policy, the liberalization of the telecom sector and the reforms of…
From Corporatism to Partisan Politics
The literature on neo‐corporatist agreements in social and labor market policy in the 1990s points to a decline of concertation in European countries with a long‐standing tradition of corporatist negotiation. This article identifies a similar trend in Switzerland and argues that three destabilizing factors account for it: 1) retrenchment pressure and ideological polarization prevent compromises; 2) the emergence of new social demands and interest…
Changing coalitions in social policy reforms
Recent reforms in Swiss and German old-age insurance and family policy included elements directed at both ‘old’ and ‘new’ social needs. ‘Old risks’, such as old age and unemployment, are mainly covered by income-related insurance schemes for standard industrial breadwinners. By contrast, ‘new’ needs, such as infrastructure to reconcile work and care or insurance of atypical employment biographies, concern mainly ‘new’ risk groups, such as young p…
The politics of employment-friendly welfare reforms in post-industrial economies
The transition to post-industrialism has generated a range of new tensions between welfare arrangements and labour market performance, which confront today's welfare states with new challenges for employment-friendly recalibration, such as flexicurity, activation and work-care conciliation. Hence, the question of whether, how and to what extent current welfare states are able to adapt to the conditions and needs of post-industrial labour markets …
Who Wants What From the Welfare State
This article investigates socio-structural cleavages in relation to social policies in Switzerland. It examines the extent to which vertical stratification, age and gender explain variation in individual social policy preferences. We use survey data on reported voting behaviour in 22 direct democratic referendums on distributional issues between 1981 and 2004. Our two main findings are the following: (1) age seems to be the most relevant line of …
Reform Opportunities in a Bismarckian Latecomer
With the transition to post-industrialism and financial austerity, most bismarckian welfare states have started to face similar structural challenges for reforms since the 1970s: budgetary pressures for retrenchment contrast sharply with new demands for
The Politics of Welfare State Reform in Continental Europe
This book challenges existing theories of welfare state change by analyzing pension reforms in France, Germany, and Switzerland between 1970 and 2004. It explains why all three countries were able to adopt far-reaching reforms, adapting their pension regimes to both financial austerity and new social risks. In a radical departure from the neo-institutionalist emphasis on policy stability, the book argues that socio-structural change has led to a …
Who Wants What from the Welfare State? Socio-structural Cleavages in Distributional Politics
Solidarity with whom? Why organised labour is losing ground in Continental pension politics
This article explains why the power of organised labour in the reform of Swiss and German pension regimes has faded over the last three decades. Postindustrialisation has brought two different sets of reform issues onto the pension policy agendas of Continental European welfare states: retrenchment of existing benefit levels, and the pension coverage of new, postindustrial social risk groups. Recent pension reforms increasingly combine these two …
The Age of Dualization
Poverty, increased inequality, and social exclusion are back on the political agenda in Western Europe, not only as a consequence of the Great Recession that hit the global economy in 2008, but also as a consequence of a seemingly structural trend towards increased inequality that began some time ago. How can we explain this increase in inequalities? In this book, it is argued that social and labor market policies contribute to shaping the forms …
How Rich Countries Cope with Deindustrialization
This conclusive chapter reviews the comparative evidence accumulated throughout the book on the new, widening and deepening divides between insiders and outsiders. It answers two key questions: who are the outsiders? And what is driving dualization? Most importantly, the comparative evidence discussed in this chapter points to the crucial importance of political choice in shaping the social outcomes of deindustrialization. Hence, insider-outsider…
The age of dualization
Poverty, increased inequality, and social exclusion are back on the political agenda, not only as a consequence of the Great Recession of 2008, but also because of a seemingly structural trend towards increased inequality in advanced industrial societies that has persisted since the 1970s. Policies in labor markets, social policy, and political representation are strongly linked in the creation, widening, and deepening of insider-outsider divides…
Varieties Of Dualization?
This chapter demonstrates that the extent to which labor market segmentation leads to economic, social and political insider-outsider divides depends on the institutional context. Based on survey and income data, it shows that both the composition, as well as the economic and social situation of insiders and outsiders varies across countries and welfare regimes. The share of outsiders is highest in liberal and continental countries, followed by t…
The Politics of Old and New Social Policies
This chapter develops three arguments. First, in line with much of the recent literature, that policy reforms of the ‘new welfare state’ in Europe imply several dimensions of new and old social policy instruments. Second, that the conflict lines which divide supporters and opponents of these ‘old’ and ‘new’ reforms are cross-cutting, because ‘old’ and ‘new’ policies affect different social groups in different ways. And third, that the ensuing com…
How we Grow Unequal
This chapter introduces the concept of dualization. Poverty, inequality, and social exclusion are back on the political agenda in many rich democracies of Western Europe and North America, not only as a consequence of the Great Recession that hit the global economy in 2008. It argues that the translation of structural pressures into policies and outcomes has to be understood as a political process. Dualization is a political process that is chara…
Who is in and who is out? A risk-based conceptualization of insiders and outsiders
With the post-industrialization and flexibilization of European labour markets, research on social and economic correlates of labour market vulnerability and weak labour market attachment is growing. Part of this literature conceptualizes these correlates in terms of dualization and insider–outsider divides in an attempt to explore their political implications: this article is written in order to contribute to this strand of research. In this art…
Making Markets in the Welfare State
High-skilled outsiders? Labor market vulnerability, education and welfare state preferences
Recent research has established that employment risk shapes social policy preferences. However, risk is often conceptualized as an alternative measure of the socio-economic status. We show that employment risk and socio-economic status are distinct, crosscutting determinants of social policy preferences. More specifically, we analyze the policy preferences of high-skilled labor market outsiders as a cross-pressured group. We first establish that …
Social Policy Preferences and Party Choice in the 2011 Swiss Elections
To what extent do social policy preferences explain party choice? This question has received little attention over the past years, because the bulk of the literature has argued that electoral choice is increasingly shaped by identity‐based attitudes, rather than by preferences for economic‐distributive social policies. We argue that in the wake of this debate, the significance of social policy preferences for electoral choice has been underestima…
Introduction
In the concluding chapter of the 1999 volume Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism, the then-editors affirmed that the most challenging part of the characterization of contemporary capitalism is to determine "how the cross-sectional patterns of variation, locked in through intricate pathways of industrialization and democratization, are shaped by growing global interdependence and domestic political and socioeconomic change" (Kitschelt…
What Do Voters Want? Dimensions and Configurations in Individual-Level Preferences and Party Choice
ERC POLCON project funded.
Politics of Advanced Capitalism
The Politics of Advanced Capitalism
This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democraci…
The decline of the working-class vote, the reconfiguration of the welfare support coalition and consequences for the welfare state
The central political claim of Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism is that class actors, through the instruments of the democratic process, can modify capitalism. Where working-class mobilization is strong, left parties have sufficient electoral support in the political arena to alter markets politically in ways that decommodify and thereby empower workers. The decline of traditional class voting, however, has profoundly changed this dynamic of we…
Introduction
Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Swiss political system became firmly anchored in three principles of governance: sovereignty, proximity of decision-makers and citizens, and elite consensus. The contributions to this special issue of the Swiss Political Science Review explore to what extent these three principles still adequately describe the functioning and political culture of this country. In our introduction, we …
Political science (60 works) · Economics (56 works) · Politics (56 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (53 works) · Political economy (37 works) · Law (31 works) · Market economy (28 works) · Economic system (24 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Welfare (20 works)