Who’s in Control? Voters, Parties and Policy Sectors

In order to account for social policy change, three groups of explanations have been developed in the literature, yet not systematically compared and simultaneously tested. First, social policy change may be explained by electoral incentives, whose impact is mediated by system-level factors (e.g. frequency of veto players’ election, frequency of first-order elections). Second, other works emphasize the role of party politics factors (e.g. partisan affiliation of ruling governments). They rely on the assumption that political parties have incentives to use social policy to differentiate their political offer from their competitors. Third, comparative public policy scholars analyze policy change mostly with policy sector based variables (e.g. existing policy institutions, interest intermediation systems). Taking stock of these strands of research, the paper investigates their respective explanatory power in accounting for social policy change. Based on Scruggs and Allan’ measures of social policy outputs which cover several European countries, we also take into account various social policy to be specific about what explanatory is most relevant in each social policy sector.