Tuesday, June 25, 2013
C0.23 (Oudemanhuispoort)
Why are some cabinets able to adopt major pension reforms while others are not? Much of the literature argues that majority, and in particular single party majority cabinets have the largest reform capacity. We argue that while majority governments may be on the whole more likely to adopt reforms, minority cabinets are likely to be more successful in contexts where unions' mobilization capacity is high. Due to their electoral weakness, minority governments have an incentive to seek support from the unions and are therefore more likely to include them in policy making. In contrast, majority governments are more likely to try to bypass the unions - a strategy that may prove particularly costly in contexts characterized by militant unions. We hypothesize that the outcome in such cases is often failed reforms or reforms that are significantly watered down. We therefore expect that in the presence of militant unions, minority cabinets will have greater reform capacity than majority cabinets. While our argument is partly in line with accounts that emphasize reform capacity of consensus governments, it differs from them in that we do not expect surplus coalitions to behave the same way as minority cabinets. Because surplus coalitions already include a wide range of interests, they may be as reluctant as single party majority cabinets to include unions in the reform process. We test this argument on new data on pension reforms for 89 cabinets in Western Europe during 1985-2005 using ordinal probit regression and fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis.
