Michael Wallerstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 294963 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Wallerstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Wallerstein |
| SIGNATURE | WALLERSTEIN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1000 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1980 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads
The working class has traveled a long road from seeking to abolish the wage relation to attempting to insure that none are excluded from. The ideology that orients the current right-wing offensive is in many ways a ghost of the 1920s: antistatist, emphasizing the hegemony of the entrepreneur, portraying popular consumption as inimical to national interests, and based on the belief in the rationality of the market and in the autonomous importance …
Social Democracy as a Development Strategy
Social democracy, it is often said, is nice but pricey. Whatever its merits in the rich countries of Western Europe, social democracy is frequently dismissed as an infeasible model for developing countries. Based on generosity towards the poor and protection against market competition, the argument goes, social democracy is only possible in consensual, homogeneous and affluent societies with an extraordinary commitment to equality. In third world…
Unions in Decline? What Has Changed and Why
Unions are in big trouble, as everyone knows. Under attack by conservative politicians, battered by overseas competition, threatened by capital flight, bewildered by changes in the nature of work, and shackled by an outmoded egalitarian ideology, unions increasingly appear like large but aging dinosaurs struggling to adapt as the climate changes. The proportion of workers who belong to unions is in decline. Centralized systems of wage-setting are…
Social Democracy as a Development Strategy
Social democracy, it is often said, is nice but pricey. Whatever its merits in the rich countries of Western Europe, social democracy is frequently dismissed as an infeasible model for developing countries. Based on generosity towards the poor and protection against market competition, the argument goes, social democracy is only possible in consensual, homogeneous and affluent societies with an extraordinary commitment to equality. In third world…
Selected Works of Michael Wallerstein: The Political Economy of Inequality, Unions, and Social Democracy
Michael Wallerstein was a leader in developing a rigorous comparative political economy approach to understanding substantive issues of inequality, redistribution, and wage-determination. His early death from cancer left both a hole in the profession and a legacy that will surely provide the foundation for research on these topics. This volume collects his most important and influential contributions, organized by topic, with each topic preceded …
Globalization and Egalitarian Redistribution
Can the welfare state survive in an economically integrated world? Many have argued that globalization has undermined national policies to raise the living standards and enhance the economic opportunities of the poor. This book, by sixteen of the world's leading authorities in international economics and the welfare state, suggests a surprisingly different set of consequences: Globalization does not preclude social insurance and egalitarian redis…
Apsa Task Force on Graduate Education: 2004 Report to the Council
In spring 2002, APSA President-Elect Theda Skocpol appointed this Task Force on Graduate Education, representing a variety of institutions, political science subfields, scholarly backgrounds, and methodological viewpoints. She asked its members to report on ways to strengthen graduate education in political science. The Task Force quickly concluded that no single structure of graduate training could be appropriate for the wide range of institutio…
Does the Logic of Collective Action Explain the Logic of Corporatism
Mancur Olson's Logic of Collective Action has provided the dominant framework for understanding the impact of encompassing unions and employers confederations on wage-setting in Western Europe. In particular, scholars have drawn upon Olson's writing to describe corporatism as a means for attaining the collective goods of low unemployment and low inflation in highly unionized labor markets. The strongest impact of corporatist institutions in the l…
Earnings Inequality and Welfare Spending: A Disaggregated Analysis
The welfare state is generally viewed as either providing redistribution from rich to poor or as providing publicly financed insurance. Both views are incomplete. Welfare policies provide both insurance and redistribution in varying amounts, depending on the design of the policy. The authors explore the political consequences of the mix of redistribution and insurance in the context of studying the impact of income inequality on expenditures in d…
Popular sovereignty, State autonomy, and private property
The legitimacy of modern democratic institutions rests on the ideal of popular sovereignty. The purpose of this paper is to examine the contemporary status of this ideal. Since space limitations do not permit discussion that would place the concept of popular sovereignty in its historical and intellectual context, we simply postulate a definition. People, by whom we mean individuals acting on the bases of their current preferences, are collective…
Inequality, Social Insurance, and Redistribution
Is the political support for welfare policy higher or lower in less egalitarian societies? We answer the question using a model of welfare policy as publicly financed insurance that pays benefits in a redistributive manner. When voters have both redistributive and insurance motives for supporting welfare spending, the effect of inequality depends on how benefits are targeted. Greater inequality increases support for welfare expenditures when bene…
The Political Economy of European Integration: Reflections from the Peei Research Group
Unions in Decline? What Has Changed and Why
Between 1950 and 1980, labor markets grew increasingly organized in advanced industrial societies. Union membership in most countries expanded more rapidly than the labor force, centralized wage setting became more common, and union members became increasingly concentrated in a small number of large unions. Between 1980 and 1992, however, union density fell on average, and centralized wage setting grew increasingly rare. Only union concentration …
Social Democratic Labor Market Institutions: A Retrospective Analysis
The golden age of social democracy in western Europe in terms of both political prominence and economic performance might be dated as beginning in 1966, when the social democrats entered government in West Germany for the first time since 1930, and ending in 1974–1975, with the first serious slump of the postwar period. The high point of social democracy in terms of its academic reputation, however, was just beginning in 1974. During the 1960s an…
Wage-Setting Institutions and Pay Inequality in Advanced Industrial Societies
The distribution of pay differs significantly across countries and over time among advanced industrial societies. In this paper, institutional and political determinants of pay inequality are studied in sixteen countries from 1980 to 1992. The most important factor in explaining pay dispersion is the level of wage-setting, i.e., whether wages are set at the level of the individual, the plant, the industry, or the entire private sector. The impact…
Pay Inequality
We investigate the effects of wage compression through centralized collective bargaining when growth depends on the continual reallocation of labor from older, less productive plants to new, more productive plants. We first study the compression of wage differentials that derive from decentralized bargaining in heterogeneous plants. We then consider wage compression when wage difterentials arise from competition among employers over workers of di…
Unions, Employers' Associations, and Wage-Setting Institutions in Northern and Central Europe, 1950–1992
The eight countries examined in this study—Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—have long been viewed as exemplifying “corporatist” industrial relations systems, in which union coverage is high, unions are influential and commonly have strong ties to political parties, and collective bargaining is institutionalized and relatively centralized. Many observers have recently argued that such corporatist bar…
Unions, Employers' Associations, and Wage-Setting Institutions in Northern and Central Europe, 1950-1992
Michael Wallerstein, Miriam Golden, Peter Lange, Unions, Employers' Associations, and Wage-Setting Institutions in Northern and Central Europe, 1950-1992, ILR Review, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Apr., 1997), pp. 379-401
The Fragmentation of the Bargaining Society: Wage Setting in the Nordic Countries, 1950 to 1992
It is commonly believed that corporatist bargaining institutions have been in general decline in the 1980s and 1990s. The leading explanations of the purported universal trend toward greater decentralization of collective bargaining are the impact of technological change, changes in the occupational structure, and growing international economic integration. Decentralization should be particularly visible in the Nordic countries, because collectiv…
Redistribution of Assets Versus Redistribution of Income: Comments on “Efficient Redistribution” by Bowles and Gintis
In this comment we compare the asset-based approach of Bowles and Gintis with the alternative approach associated most closely with social democracy but followed in all advanced industrial societies to some extent
The End of Corporatism? Wage Setting in the Nordic and Germanic Countries
The discovery of corporatism and its successes in the 1980s fueled a “growth indus try” for comparative political economy. By the early 1990s, its decline and even collapse shifted the terms of debate. Whereas initially interest was sparked by the need to investigate corporatist success, the new focus centered on the causes and consequences of corporatism’s seeming demise. The analysis of Swedish political economy is paradigmatic of this shift. I…
Capital taxation with open borders
Since 1975, both corporate income tax rates and top marginal income tax rates have been lowered in most OECD countries. A common explanation of this phenomenon is that increased international capital mobility reduced the ability of governments to tax income from capital. In this paper, we examine the constraints on the taxation of income from capital with free capital mobility. We demonstrate that capital mobility increases the constraints on the…
How Social Democracy Worked: Labor-Market Institutions
Dans les pays nordiques, le corporatisme est associe au libre commerce et a la necessite de demeurer competitif. La centralisation des negociations a permis la reduction des differences salariales et le plein emploi (taux de chomage faible). Mais depuis quelque temps la politique sociale democrate, a l'origine des elements cites precedemment, est en declin non seulement en Europe et aux Etats-Unis mais aussi en Scandinavie
Industrial Concentration, Country Size, and Trade Union Membership
In his article, "Union Organization in Advanced Industrial Democracies" in the June 1989 issue of theReview, Michael Wallerstein advocated a model to account for cross-national differences in trade union organization rates. He argued that the size of the labor force provided the most important determinant of variation in union density. In this controversy, John Stephens takes issue with the operationalization of a key variable in Wallerstein's mo…
Centralized Bargaining and Wage Restraint
Inequality, Social Insurance, and Redistribution
Is the political support for welfare policy higher or lower in less egalitarian societies? We answer the question using a model of welfare policy as publicly financed insurance that pays benefits in a redistributive manner. When voters have both redistributive and insurance motives for supporting welfare spending, the effect of inequality depends on how benefits are targeted. Greater inequality increases support for welfare expenditures when bene…
Structural Dependence of the State on Capital
A central claim of both Marxist and neoclassical political theory is that under capitalism all governments must respect and protect the essential claims of those who own the productive wealth of society. This is the theory of "structural dependence of the state on capital." Using a formal model, the internal logic and the robustness of the theory is examined. We conclude that in a static sense the theory is false: virtually any distribution of co…
Wage-Setting Institutions and Pay Inequality in Advanced Industrial Societies
The distribution of pay differs significantly across countries and over time among advanced industrial societies. In this paper, institutional and political determinants of pay inequality are studied in sixteen countries from 1980 to 1992. The most important factor in explaining pay dispersion is the level of wage-setting, i.e., whether wages are set at the level of the individual, the plant, the industry, or the entire private sector. The impact…
Earnings Inequality and Welfare Spending: A Disaggregated Analysis
The welfare state is generally viewed as either providing redistribution from rich to poor or as providing publicly financed insurance. Both views are incomplete. Welfare policies provide both insurance and redistribution in varying amounts, depending on the design of the policy. The authors explore the political consequences of the mix of redistribution and insurance in the context of studying the impact of income inequality on expenditures in d…
Union Organization in Advanced Industrial Democracies
I suggest a new explanation of cross-national differences in unionization rates: the size of the labor force. Size matters because the gains unions are able to achieve in collective bargaining depend on the proportion of substitutable workers who are organized, while the costs of organizing depend in part on the absolute number to be recruited. The comparison of the costs and benefits of organizing new workers yields the conclusion that unions in…
Unions in Decline? What Has Changed and Why
Between 1950 and 1980, labor markets grew increasingly organized in advanced industrial societies. Union membership in most countries expanded more rapidly than the labor force, centralized wage setting became more common, and union members became increasingly concentrated in a small number of large unions. Between 1980 and 1992, however, union density fell on average, and centralized wage setting grew increasingly rare. Only union concentration …
The Structure of Class Conflict in Democratic Capitalist Societies
The article presents a theory of class conflict between workers and capitalists who pursue their material interests under a form of societal organization that combines private ownership of instruments of production with representative political institutions. There exist economic and political conditions under which both classes would simultaneously choose courses of action that constitute a class compromise: workers consent to the institution of …
Centralized Bargaining and Wage Restraint
The Fragmentation of the Bargaining Society: Wage Setting in the Nordic Countries, 1950 to 1992
It is commonly believed that corporatist bargaining institutions have been in general decline in the 1980s and 1990s. The leading explanations of the purported universal trend toward greater decentralization of collective bargaining are the impact of technological change, changes in the occupational structure, and growing international economic integration. Decentralization should be particularly visible in the Nordic countries, because collectiv…
How Social Democracy Worked: Labor-Market Institutions
Dans les pays nordiques, le corporatisme est associe au libre commerce et a la necessite de demeurer competitif. La centralisation des negociations a permis la reduction des differences salariales et le plein emploi (taux de chomage faible). Mais depuis quelque temps la politique sociale democrate, a l'origine des elements cites precedemment, est en declin non seulement en Europe et aux Etats-Unis mais aussi en Scandinavie
The Collapse of Democracy in Brazil: Its Economic Determinants
Perhaps the most common generalization linking political systems to other aspects of society has been that democracy is related to the state of economic development. The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.(Lipset 1960, p. 31)There are few examples in the history of Latin American studies of such generally accepted "facts" that were so contradicted by subsequent events as the association of democratic …
Unemployment, Collective Bargaining, and the Demand for Protection
There is a widespread consensus among nonacademic observers that labor unions with large numbers of unemployed members have been central actors in political coalitions demanding protectionist trade policies since the mid-1970s in advanced industrial societies. Yet trade unions and unemployment are hardly mentioned in most theories of the politics of international trade. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework for understan…
Industrial Concentration, Country Size, and Trade Union Membership
In his article, "Union Organization in Advanced Industrial Democracies" in the June 1989 issue of theReview, Michael Wallerstein advocated a model to account for cross-national differences in trade union organization rates. He argued that the size of the labor force provided the most important determinant of variation in union density. In this controversy, John Stephens takes issue with the operationalization of a key variable in Wallerstein's mo…
Unions, Employers' Associations, and Wage-Setting Institutions in Northern and Central Europe, 1950-1992
Michael Wallerstein, Miriam Golden, Peter Lange, Unions, Employers' Associations, and Wage-Setting Institutions in Northern and Central Europe, 1950-1992, ILR Review, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Apr., 1997), pp. 379-401
Capital taxation with open borders
Since 1975, both corporate income tax rates and top marginal income tax rates have been lowered in most OECD countries. A common explanation of this phenomenon is that increased international capital mobility reduced the ability of governments to tax income from capital. In this paper, we examine the constraints on the taxation of income from capital with free capital mobility. We demonstrate that capital mobility increases the constraints on the…
The Fall of Balmaceda and Public Finance in Chile: New Data for an Old Debate
The 1891 civil war that led to the downfall of President José Manuel Balmaceda is without doubt one of the most visible episodes of Chilean history. Already the subject of a voluminous bibliography by 1894 (Echeverría y Reyes, 1894), the "revolution's" importance to historians of Chile actually increased over time as a new generation of scholars came to view it not merely as a discrete event of limited intrinsic interest but as an important key t…
Unions, Employers' Associations, and Wage-Setting Institutions in Northern and Central Europe, 1950–1992
The eight countries examined in this study—Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—have long been viewed as exemplifying “corporatist” industrial relations systems, in which union coverage is high, unions are influential and commonly have strong ties to political parties, and collective bargaining is institutionalized and relatively centralized. Many observers have recently argued that such corporatist bar…
The Political Economy of European Integration: Reflections from the Peei Research Group
The Collapse of Democracy in Brazil: Its Economic Determinants
Perhaps the most common generalization linking political systems to other aspects of society has been that democracy is related to the state of economic development. The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances that it will sustain democracy.(Lipset 1960, p. 31)There are few examples in the history of Latin American studies of such generally accepted "facts" that were so contradicted by subsequent events as the association of democratic …
The Fall of Balmaceda and Public Finance in Chile: New Data for an Old Debate
The 1891 civil war that led to the downfall of President José Manuel Balmaceda is without doubt one of the most visible episodes of Chilean history. Already the subject of a voluminous bibliography by 1894 (Echeverría y Reyes, 1894), the "revolution's" importance to historians of Chile actually increased over time as a new generation of scholars came to view it not merely as a discrete event of limited intrinsic interest but as an important key t…
The Structure of Class Conflict in Democratic Capitalist Societies
The article presents a theory of class conflict between workers and capitalists who pursue their material interests under a form of societal organization that combines private ownership of instruments of production with representative political institutions. There exist economic and political conditions under which both classes would simultaneously choose courses of action that constitute a class compromise: workers consent to the institution of …
Popular sovereignty, State autonomy, and private property
The legitimacy of modern democratic institutions rests on the ideal of popular sovereignty. The purpose of this paper is to examine the contemporary status of this ideal. Since space limitations do not permit discussion that would place the concept of popular sovereignty in its historical and intellectual context, we simply postulate a definition. People, by whom we mean individuals acting on the bases of their current preferences, are collective…
Politics Against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power.Gosta Esping-Anderson
Unemployment, Collective Bargaining, and the Demand for Protection
There is a widespread consensus among nonacademic observers that labor unions with large numbers of unemployed members have been central actors in political coalitions demanding protectionist trade policies since the mid-1970s in advanced industrial societies. Yet trade unions and unemployment are hardly mentioned in most theories of the politics of international trade. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework for understan…
Varieties of Corporatism: Theory and Practice. Peter J. Williamson The Political Economy of Corporatism. Wyn Grant
Structural Dependence of the State on Capital
A central claim of both Marxist and neoclassical political theory is that under capitalism all governments must respect and protect the essential claims of those who own the productive wealth of society. This is the theory of "structural dependence of the state on capital." Using a formal model, the internal logic and the robustness of the theory is examined. We conclude that in a static sense the theory is false: virtually any distribution of co…
Democratic Socialism in Britain and Sweden. Malcolm B. Hamilton
Union Organization in Advanced Industrial Democracies
I suggest a new explanation of cross-national differences in unionization rates: the size of the labor force. Size matters because the gains unions are able to achieve in collective bargaining depend on the proportion of substitutable workers who are organized, while the costs of organizing depend in part on the absolute number to be recruited. The comparison of the costs and benefits of organizing new workers yields the conclusion that unions in…
Centralized Bargaining and Wage Restraint
Industrial Concentration, Country Size, and Trade Union Membership
In his article, "Union Organization in Advanced Industrial Democracies" in the June 1989 issue of theReview, Michael Wallerstein advocated a model to account for cross-national differences in trade union organization rates. He argued that the size of the labor force provided the most important determinant of variation in union density. In this controversy, John Stephens takes issue with the operationalization of a key variable in Wallerstein's mo…
The End of Corporatism? Wage Setting in the Nordic and Germanic Countries
The discovery of corporatism and its successes in the 1980s fueled a “growth indus try” for comparative political economy. By the early 1990s, its decline and even collapse shifted the terms of debate. Whereas initially interest was sparked by the need to investigate corporatist success, the new focus centered on the causes and consequences of corporatism’s seeming demise. The analysis of Swedish political economy is paradigmatic of this shift. I…
Capital taxation with open borders
Since 1975, both corporate income tax rates and top marginal income tax rates have been lowered in most OECD countries. A common explanation of this phenomenon is that increased international capital mobility reduced the ability of governments to tax income from capital. In this paper, we examine the constraints on the taxation of income from capital with free capital mobility. We demonstrate that capital mobility increases the constraints on the…
How Social Democracy Worked: Labor-Market Institutions
Dans les pays nordiques, le corporatisme est associe au libre commerce et a la necessite de demeurer competitif. La centralisation des negociations a permis la reduction des differences salariales et le plein emploi (taux de chomage faible). Mais depuis quelque temps la politique sociale democrate, a l'origine des elements cites precedemment, est en declin non seulement en Europe et aux Etats-Unis mais aussi en Scandinavie
Redistribution of Assets Versus Redistribution of Income: Comments on “Efficient Redistribution” by Bowles and Gintis
In this comment we compare the asset-based approach of Bowles and Gintis with the alternative approach associated most closely with social democracy but followed in all advanced industrial societies to some extent
Pay Inequality
We investigate the effects of wage compression through centralized collective bargaining when growth depends on the continual reallocation of labor from older, less productive plants to new, more productive plants. We first study the compression of wage differentials that derive from decentralized bargaining in heterogeneous plants. We then consider wage compression when wage difterentials arise from competition among employers over workers of di…
Unions, Employers' Associations, and Wage-Setting Institutions in Northern and Central Europe, 1950–1992
The eight countries examined in this study—Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden—have long been viewed as exemplifying “corporatist” industrial relations systems, in which union coverage is high, unions are influential and commonly have strong ties to political parties, and collective bargaining is institutionalized and relatively centralized. Many observers have recently argued that such corporatist bar…
Unions, Employers' Associations, and Wage-Setting Institutions in Northern and Central Europe, 1950-1992
Michael Wallerstein, Miriam Golden, Peter Lange, Unions, Employers' Associations, and Wage-Setting Institutions in Northern and Central Europe, 1950-1992, ILR Review, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Apr., 1997), pp. 379-401
The Fragmentation of the Bargaining Society: Wage Setting in the Nordic Countries, 1950 to 1992
It is commonly believed that corporatist bargaining institutions have been in general decline in the 1980s and 1990s. The leading explanations of the purported universal trend toward greater decentralization of collective bargaining are the impact of technological change, changes in the occupational structure, and growing international economic integration. Decentralization should be particularly visible in the Nordic countries, because collectiv…
Social Democratic Labor Market Institutions: A Retrospective Analysis
The golden age of social democracy in western Europe in terms of both political prominence and economic performance might be dated as beginning in 1966, when the social democrats entered government in West Germany for the first time since 1930, and ending in 1974–1975, with the first serious slump of the postwar period. The high point of social democracy in terms of its academic reputation, however, was just beginning in 1974. During the 1960s an…
Wage-Setting Institutions and Pay Inequality in Advanced Industrial Societies
The distribution of pay differs significantly across countries and over time among advanced industrial societies. In this paper, institutional and political determinants of pay inequality are studied in sixteen countries from 1980 to 1992. The most important factor in explaining pay dispersion is the level of wage-setting, i.e., whether wages are set at the level of the individual, the plant, the industry, or the entire private sector. The impact…
The Political Economy of European Integration: Reflections from the Peei Research Group
Unions in Decline? What Has Changed and Why
Between 1950 and 1980, labor markets grew increasingly organized in advanced industrial societies. Union membership in most countries expanded more rapidly than the labor force, centralized wage setting became more common, and union members became increasingly concentrated in a small number of large unions. Between 1980 and 1992, however, union density fell on average, and centralized wage setting grew increasingly rare. Only union concentration …
Popular sovereignty, State autonomy, and private property
The legitimacy of modern democratic institutions rests on the ideal of popular sovereignty. The purpose of this paper is to examine the contemporary status of this ideal. Since space limitations do not permit discussion that would place the concept of popular sovereignty in its historical and intellectual context, we simply postulate a definition. People, by whom we mean individuals acting on the bases of their current preferences, are collective…
Political science (31 works) · Economics (28 works) · Politics (24 works) · Law (18 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (18 works) · Labour economics (16 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Democracy (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (11 works)