Creating French-Style Pension Funds: Business, Labour and the Battle over Patient Capital

Over the past few decades, European governments have increasingly retreated from public pension provision and promoted the expansion of private retirement savings accounts. Analysts of comparative social policy have traditionally considered that the politics of pension privatisation has been driven by politicians’ and socio-economic actors’ concerns about the relative generosity and costs of different pension arrangements. But, when they are fully-funded instead of being financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, pension arrangements generate funds that are injected into the financial system. The existence of such a welfare-finance nexus means that stakeholders in the pension system are also attentive to how pension funds invest their assets, and may try to actively shape the institutional design of old-age pensions in accordance with such concerns. This paper focuses on the role of socio-economic actors – employers, trade unions and the financial services industry – in pension privatisation and develops theoretical expectations on how these actors’ interest in maximising control over private pension plans’ financial assets affects pension politics. The argument is tested with a case study of French pension debates between the 1980s and the 2000s.