Andersson, Jessica
The impact of Welfare Regimes on the Electoral Connection Between Parties and Voters.
Esping-Andersen (1990) and others (Larsen 2008; Bean and Papadakis 1998; Myles 2006; Jaeger 2006; Svallfors 2004) established that the organization of welfare – entitlements, provisions, kinds of support, conditions, etc. – is quite different between countries, leading to the distinction of different ‘welfare regimes’ (conservative, social-democratic, liberal and radical ones). The magnitude of the welfare sectors in modern democracies is, moreover, large in terms of shares of GDP, numbers of people involved (as providers as well as recipients), and in terms of the popular conceptualization of ‘democracy’. As a consequence, it seems logical to expect that differences between welfare regimes affect the behavior of political actors –parties and voters in particular– and thus also the character and operation of representative democracy. Yet, research into this area is virtually absent.
We do not know in which way welfare regimes affect the interaction between voters and parties, an interaction that contributes to the formation and evolution of different ‘patterns of’ (Lijphart 1999) or ‘visions of’ (Powell 2000) representative democracy. This interaction is most visible in the electoral process, in which voters allocate policy-making power to parties, and in which political parties compete for the support of voters. It is therefore that my research will focus in particular on the way in which welfare regimes affect ‘the electoral connection’ that is at the heart of representative government. Implied in this focus are also questions about the role of the median voter (who generally is not an immediate beneficiary of welfare regimes), and about the dynamics of election campaigns in which parties have to decide how to ‘frame’ their proposed welfare policies, and how salient to make them.
MDI/School of Politics and IR fee waiver
Methods and Data Institute (MDI)
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Comparative welfare attitudes
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Comparative welfare policy
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Neo-institutionalism
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Party competition
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Text analysis