Patrick Emmenegger

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

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. Theorizing 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 behavior. In addition, we demonstrate that business derives the content of its communication from its 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.”

Abstract: Swiss banking secrecy withstood international criticism for several decades. Yet after 2008 the Swiss Government made a series of major concessions that have dramatically restricted the scope of banking secrecy despite the Swiss Finance Minister's proclamation in early 2008 that Swiss banking secrecy would be "a nut too hard to crack". This article submits that two causal mechanisms led to the restriction of Swiss banking secrecy. First, the centrality of the U.S. financial market allows the USA to impose certain rules on foreign banks that make them subject to the U.S. legal system even if these regulations are at Odds with other countries' regulations. Having violated these rules, some major Swiss Banks repeatedly faced the threat of an indictment that could have led to bankruptcy, thus leaving the Swiss Government little choice but to make concessions on banking secrecy. Second, countries and organisations critical of banking secrecy took advantage of the investigations by U.S. authorities against Swiss banks to launch a new campaign for more information exchange in tax matters. Developing new global standards that increasingly rule out any form of banking secrecy the OECD started new rounds of blacklisting of countries that do not satisfy these standards. Thereby, the OECD benefitted from the fact that the conflict with the USA had tarnished Switzerland's reputation as an offshore financial centre, which made it difficult for Switzerland to win the rhetorical contest against the supporters of increased information exchange.