Patrick Emmenegger

In 2015, Swiss voters had the opportunity to impose a tax on the super rich in a popular vote and thereby fund a redistributive policy. However, a large majority voted against its seemingly obvious self-interest and rejected the tax. We propose an explanation for this puzzling outcome, bridging the usually separate behavioralist and institutionalist perspectives on the politics of inequality. We start from the observation that political economy tends to neglect processes of preference formation. Theorising preferences as socially constructed, we show that interest groups played a major role in shaping the outcome of the vote. Business frames were multiplied through allied parties and the media and had a major impact on individual voting behaviour. In addition, we demonstrate that interest groups representing business interests derive the content of their communication from business’s structurally privileged position in the capitalist economy. Specifically, creating uncertainty about possible perverse effects of government policies on jobs and growth is a powerful tool to undermine popular support. Frames based on this structural power ultimately explain why the Swiss refrained from ‘soaking the rich.’

Does unemployment reduce political interest? This contribution argues that the answer depends on life-cycle stages. Political interest becomes resilient with age, which in turn diminishes the negative effect of unemployment. However, if unemployment occurs at a young age, unemployment can inhibit the socialization process that leads to political interest. This effect is especially pervasive among young adults with weak social networks. This socialization perspective complements existing accounts that emphasize the role of workplace-related resources. The longitudinal analyses made in connection with this study show that unemployment does indeed reduce political interest primarily among young respondents, an effect that is particularly strong among respondents who lack strong social networks. Furthermore, unemployment at a young age produces persistent, negative effects on political interest.

It is often argued that unemployment depresses political involvement because unemployment deprives workers of important workplace-related resources. We challenge this argument from two sides. Theoretically, we argue that the resource approach neglects life cycle stages. Socialization theory suggests that workplace-related resources influence political involvement mostly during adolescence and early adulthood but not later in life. Ignoring life cycle stages therefore risks underestimating unemployment effects on young workers and overestimating them for older workers. Our second criticism is methodological. Existing literature on unemployment and political involvement largely uses cross-sectional data, which makes it impossible to eliminate unobserved heterogeneity. Using German panel data, we show that unemployment depresses the growth of political interest in early adulthood, while it does not have an effect later in life. Moreover, we find that early unemployment experiences have scarring effects that reduce the long-term level of political interest and participation.

In this introduction to the special issue, we review the various debates spurred by Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Tracing its impact since the book's publication in 1990, we show that Three Worlds continues to be the point of reference for comparative welfare state research. A content analysis of articles in the Journal of European Social Policy citing the book indicates that Three Worlds may even have obtained a paradigmatic status and that its claims and findings are often taken for granted rather than challenged. We conclude that Three Worlds has become a classic that is likely to continue to have a major influence on welfare state research in its next 25?years.

How does labour market disadvantage translate into political behaviour? Bringing together the literatures on political alienation, redistribution preferences and insider-outsider politics, we identify three mechanisms by which labour market disadvantages influence voting behaviour. Disadvantages can increase support for redistribution, reduce internal political efficacy or lower external political efficacy. This translates into support for pro-redistribution parties, vote abstention or support for protest parties. Using the Dutch LISS survey, we observe a twin effect of increased support for redistribution and decreased external efficacy. Mediated through redistributive preferences, we find a positive effect of labour market disadvantage on voting for left parties. Mediated through external efficacy we find a positive effect of labour market disadvantage on protest voting. In contrast, we do not find any effect of labour market disadvantage on internal efficacy. Hence, the observed effect of labour market disadvantage on political abstention is entirely mediated by external efficacy.

This article examines the role of business in the historical development of job security regulations in Germany from their creation in the inter-war period to the dawn of the crisis of the ‘German Model' in the 1990s. It contrasts a varieties of capitalism perspective, which views business as a protagonist, or at the very least a consenter, in the development of job security regulations, with a conflict-oriented perspective, which has the labour movement as the protagonist and business as an antagonist in the development of job security regulations. The empirical analysis is based on primary and secondary sources and shows that German employers have never favoured strict over flexible job security regulations. Quite the contrary, high levels of job security regulations were forced upon employers during periods of business weakness by a radicalized labour movement in the aftermath of both World Wars.

There is a classical literature in political economy arguing that negative labour market experiences, such as unemployment, might depress political participation and political interest. Political psychologists have found, however, that political participation and interest become habitual and are therefore resilient to change over the life course. In this perspective, labour market experiences should have a stronger effect on participation and interest, if they occur at a young age, that is, during the "impressionable years". In this paper, we use panel data and within-case estimation to analyse the effect of unemployment on political interest, which is a hard test for the hypothesis, because political interest is generally found to be very stable over time. We show that unemployment indeed has a negative effect on political interest among young labour market entrants. This negative effect, we demonstrate, is primarily the result of the important role of political socialisation in the workplace, because the negative effect is particularly strong among young labour market entrants scoring low on extraversion. As extraverts generally have larger social networks, they are less dependent on their political socialisation in the workplace.