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Europe's political landscapes are in turmoil, and new radical parties challenge the established political order. This book locates Europe's contemporary challenges within the longer economic and political trajectories of its 'welfare democracies'. The book argues that it is imperative to understand the specific structures of political competition and voter-party links to make sense of the political and economic turmoil of the last decades. In four distinct European welfare democracies (Nordic, Continental, Southern, and Anglo-Saxon), the political economy, the party system, and the structure of the political space are co-determined in a specific way. Accordingly, different packages of policies and politics and distinct patterns of alignment between core electoral groups and political parties exist in the four welfare democracies and shape the reactions of European welfare democracies to the current turmoil.
This volume provides an analytical framework that links welfare states to party systems, combining recent contributions to the comparative political economy of the welfare state and insights from party and electoral politics. It states three phenomena. First, concerning electoral politics, the book identifies a certain homogenization of European party systems, the emergence of a new combination of leftist socio-economic and rightist socio-cultural positions in many parties, and, finally, the different electoral success of the radical right in the north of Europe and of the radical left in the south. Secondly, the contributions to this book indicate a confluence toward renewed welfare state support among parties and voters. Thirdly it demonstrates that the Europeanization of political dynamics, combined with incompatible growth models, has created pronounced European cleavages.
The article analyses the electoral strategies of social democratic parties in the context of increased and new inequalities among its electorate. The literature on the politics of dualization argues that social democratic parties are essentially insider parties. By contrast, I argue that they also target outsiders by promoting policies that facilitate the integration of outsiders into the labour market and enhance their social protection. There are two reasons that make outsiders electorally attractive for social democratic parties: first, the share of outsiders has been growing strongly, while the share of insiders has been decreasing. As a consequence, social democratic parties cannot hope to win elections solely on the basis of their insider constituency. Second, outsiders are not as politically inactive as the original insider–outsider literature suggests which makes them electorally more attractive to social democratic parties. To analyse the electoral strategies of social democratic parties, I rely on original data on party statements as reported in newspapers during election campaigns between 2007 and 2010 in four continental European countries (Spain, France, Germany and the Netherlands). The evidence clearly suggests that social democratic parties are no insider parties but propose policies in the interests of outsiders.
Reflecting the importance of inequality for individuals’ lives, the implications of labor market inequality for core elements of democracy are crucial topics in comparative politics and comparative political economy. This article critically reviews the main findings of the emerging literature on insider–outsider divides to highlight its possible contributions to adjacent fields, in particular the research on party politics, the literatures on economic voting, political participation, and democratic representation or the study of social movements. The conflict between labor market insiders and outsiders demonstrates that in today’s societies with their diversified risk structure and sophisticated welfare states, distributive conflicts are about specific social and regulatory policies that have different implications for individuals depending on their situation on the labor market. By drawing our attention to new divides within the social democratic electorate, the insider–outsider literature reveals an additional argument why the social democratic parties find it hard to mobilize their voters and to win elections. Moreover, the insider–outsider literature can help to bring the economic dimension of politics back to the study of social movements and to light on the relationship between contentious and conventional politics.
The political relevance of labor market insecurity has been questioned because (a) insider-outsider divides were considered to be a divide within the low-skilled and politically less active working class and (b) labor market insecurity runs through the middle of the household. Outsiders might therefore align their preferences with those of insiders. This contribution provides, first, evidence that labor market insecurity extends well into the higher-skilled middle class, in particular to high-skilled young adults and high-skilled women. Second, the contribution sheds light on the “household question”, that is the question whether mixed households dampen the political relevance of labor market insecurity. If labor market insecurity is concentrated in specific social groups (young adults, women) that tend to cohabit with secure insiders, the political relevance of labor market insecurity might depend on whether or not outsiders align their preferences with those of the household. In this contribution, I discuss recent work on the relevance of the household in translating labor market divides into preferences divides presenting recent work that shows that the household does not render insider-outsider divides politically irrelevant. In sum, insider-outsider divides have all the potential to become politically relevant.