Friday, March 14, 2014
Calvert (Omni Shoreham)
How do party politicians deal with the fundamental tension at the core of any welfare state reform in modern welfare states?: the status quo is very popular, and reforms are needed to sustain similar levels of services. More precisely, we examine whether and how different types of reform pressure and opportunities are present in the public campaign rhetoric of large parties in three rich welfare states with stable economies. We apply a content analysis to the speeches of the prime ministerial candidates at the party conferences before the national elections in Germany, Norway and Sweden between 2000 and 2010. The main findings are: (1) prime ministerial candidates spent a significant amount of time on topics of reform pressures and opportunities (rpo) with right leaders spending even more; (2) among the rpo topics, mass unemployment/labor market exclusion as well as international factors, such as economic internationalisation, are consistently talked about most; (3) mass unemployment is a superior rpo topic that is mentioned often, always accompanies other topics and is often linked to direct policy references. In contrast, international factors are rarely mentioned with reference to concrete policy. In sum, the evidence seems to suggest blame avoidance is not the whole story as a more open, and probably more democratically appealing, reform legitimation discourse has materialized. As a result, potentially problematic “reform pressures” on the welfare state are openly and frequently discussed by both dominant parties in all these three affluent welfare states.
