Now showing 1 - 10 of 184
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Education as social policy: New tensions in maturing knowledge economies

2023-03-01 , Carstensen, Martin B. , Emmenegger, Patrick

Abstract Education has long played an important role in social policy as a means for strengthening labour market integration and increasing social mobility. The shift towards a knowledge economy has placed education policy even more centrally in efforts to provide the institutional preconditions for making economic efficiency compatible with social inclusion. To provide conceptual and theoretical context to the special issue, this paper first explores the key tension in the role of education in modern economies between serving concerns for efficiency and inclusion. Second, it argues that it remains possible for education policy to balance between efficiency and inclusion, but that the capacity of advanced economies to do so is politically mediated. Finally, the paper reviews the four main arenas in which such mediation processes take place—the parliamentary arena, the corporatist arena, the state, and public opinion—and how the contributions to the special issue study these

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The Limits of Decentralised Cooperation: The Promotion of Inclusiveness in Collective Skill Formation Systems?

2021 , Bonoli, Giuliano , Emmenegger, Patrick

This paper examines how collective skill formation systems balance economic objectives related to competitiveness and social objectives related to inclusion. Based on a simple theoretical model, we argue that there are clear limits to how much inclusiveness can be achieved in collective skill formation systems. Firms are generally successful in resisting pressure by governments to be more inclusive because they benefit from their structural power in collective skill formation systems. Therefore, most pro-inclusiveness policies in such training systems do not require any firm-specific involvement. If pro-inclusiveness policies involve firms, employer associations typically participate in their development, trying to align the goal of inclusion with the economic interest of employers. Our two-level game model helps to understand this complex interaction between governments and firms. Empirical examples substantiate our expectations. They show how important it is to consider both levels simultaneously when analyzing inclusion-oriented training policy reforms.

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Social partner involvement in collective skill formation governance. A comparison of Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland

2020-02-12 , Emmenegger, Patrick , Seitzl, Lina

Dual vocational education and training (VET) with social partner involvement in its governance can typically be found in collective skill formation systems. This article reviews the diversity of collective skill formation systems with a particular focus on their systemic governance. In particular, we look at the actors involved as well as how the systemic governance is organised in terms of corporatist decision-making bodies. The article shows that there are important cross-national differences. First, the social partners do not always participate in the decision-making at the political-strategic level. Second, social partner involvement is not always on equal terms (parity), with trade unions in some cases being less strongly involved. Third, differences in VET governance are particularly pronounced at the technical-operational level. Empirically, the article focuses on the five prototypical collective skill formation systems Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

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The Governance of Decentralized Cooperation in Collective Training Systems: A Review and Conceptualization

2019 , Emmenegger, Patrick , Graf, Lukas , Trampusch, Christine

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How Coordinated Capitalism Adapts to the Knowledge Economy: Different Upskilling Strategies in Germany and Switzerland

2023 , Patrick Emmenegger , Scherwin Michael Bajka , Cecilia Ivardi Ganapini

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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Disproportional Threat: Redistricting as an Alternative to Proportional Representation.

2021-07 , Emmenegger, Patrick , Walter, André

Analyzing the voting behavior of Swiss members of parliament (MP) using newly collected individual, district, and cantonal level data, we show that both electoral disproportionalities and the insurgent parties’ electoral potential are important determinants of MP voting behavior on the adoption of proportional representation (PR). However, in contrast to the prominent electoral threat thesis, the insurgent party’s high electoral potential decreases the probability that MPs of established parties support PR. The reason for this relationship is partisan redistricting, whose relevance has so far been largely ignored in the literature. We demonstrate that adapting electoral district boundaries for political reasons, if possible in a given institutional context, can be a powerful alternative to the adoption of PR, because it allows established parties to retain parliamentary majorities even as an insurgent party’s electoral potential increases.

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Why Do Junctures Become Critical? Political Discourse, Agency, and Joint Belief Shifts in Comparative Perspective

2020-10 , Rinscheid, Adrian , Eberlein, Burkard , Emmenegger, Patrick , Schneider, Volker

Why do junctures become critical in some cases but not in others? Building on the critical juncture framework and perspectives on the formation and diffusion of beliefs, we develop a theoretically parsimonious and empirically traceable account of divergence in institutional outcomes. By illuminating the role of agency and joint belief shifts we further open the “black box” of critical junctures. In particular, we develop the argument that the role agents play is conditioned by conflict lines that structure an institutional field before a juncture sets in. Empirically, we trace political discourses around the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident in Canada, Germany, and Japan using discourse network analysis. Through comparative investigation, we empirically show that discursive interactions during potential critical junctures indicate institutional outcomes that are shaped by causally relevant historical legacies.

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Designing Electoral Districts for New Proportional Representation Systems: How Electoral Geography and Partisan Politics Constrain Proportionality and Create Bias.

2023 , Walter, André , Patrick Emmenegger

Proportional representation (PR) electoral systems have become widespread because they are expected to ensure the representation of interests with small or geographically inefficiently distributed voter bases. Yet in reality, most PR systems consist of a large number of districts that vary substantially in size, and some have surprisingly low magnitude. Existing research shows that such differences matter greatly for political outcomes but offers no explanation for their origins. We argue that the design of electoral districts in newly adopted PR systems is systematically linked to electoral geography and partisan politics. If parties with concentrated voter bases can influence the design of the new electoral system, they will create a significant number of low-magnitude districts. In general, parties involved in designing districts benefit from electoral disproportionalities under the new PR rules. Empirically, we use newly collected district-level data for several Western European countries in the early twentieth century.

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New Interest Associations in a Neo-Corporatist System: Adapting the Swiss Training System to the Service Economy.

2021-09 , Strebel, Alexandra , Emmenegger, Patrick , Graf, Lukas

Collective skill formation systems need to adapt to economic change, most notably the expansion of the service economy. However, deeply anchored in the craft and industrial sectors, these systems rely on neo-corporatist institutions to undergird firms’ training provision, which are often missing in the service sector. We show that Switzerland's voluntaristic approach to interest intermediation provided the flexibility needed to extend vocational training to economic sectors without neo-corporatist institutions. Yet, these adaptations resulted in the emergence of interest associations characterised by low levels of generalisability and governability. These new associations co-exist with neo-corporatist ones, rendering the overall training system surprisingly heterogeneous.

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Masters of grey zones and elusive champions of the tax ‘optimization’ industry (book symposium with Oliver Godechot and Patrick Inglis).

2019 , Emmenegger, Patrick