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This excellent anthology provides a comprehensive and thought-provoking overview of the current state of labor-affiliated Left parties in North America, Western Europe, and Israel. All but one of the essays [...]

Sweden's extensive and universalistic welfare state has long attracted the attention of foreign observers. More recently, Sweden has been invoked not only as a model of progressive social policy, but [...], This article analyzes the performance of the 'wage-earner funds' established in Sweden in 1983 - collective share-holding funds financed by special payroll and profits taxes. The authors' analysis indicates that although the wage-earner funds generally met the financial objectives set by the 1983 legislation, their significance in promoting 'wage solidarity' (wage determination based on the work performed rather than on firm or industry profitability) and in providing workers with substantial influence over corporate decisions was limited by the size of their stockholdings and the seven-year (1984-90) restriction on the inflow of revenues into the funds. The authors conclude that the funds achieved little in terms of furthering economic democracy when compared to the effects of the network of industrial and economic democracy legislation enacted in the 1970s in Sweden.

The comparative industrial relations literature tends to be rather descriptive, and edited volumes typically consist of national case studies, with an introduction or conclusion that seeks to generalize across these [...]

Reviewing the debate on why governments have failed to compensate low- and middle-income citizens for rising income inequality, this essay argues for a perspective that integrates demand-side and supply-side considerations and treats income bias in policy responsiveness as variable across countries and over time.

Using data from the European Social Survey (2002–14), this article explores the effect of union membership on support for redistribution. The authors hypothesize that the wage-bargaining practices of unions promote egalitarian distributive norms, which lead union members to support redistribution, and that this effect is strongest among high-wage workers. Consistent with the authors’ expectations, the empirical analysis shows that the solidarity effect of union membership is strongest when unions encompass a very large share of the labor force or primarily organize low-wage workers. The authors also show that low-wage workers have become a significantly less important union constituency in many European countries over the time period covered by the analysis.

Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference. By Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 262 pages. $55.00 clothAlberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser's recent book, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe, exemplifies the recent incursion of economists into the domains of political science and sociology. In thinking about welfare states, economists have traditionally been interested in their effects on the distribution of income and, above all, their implications for efficiency and growth. Alesina and Glaeser instead set out to explain why “Americans are much less willing to redistribute from the rich to the poor than Europeans” (2) or, in other words, why the American welfare state is so small by comparison to European welfare states. This, then, is a book about American exceptionalism in the realm of social policy, but Alesina and Glaeser's discussion also addresses the general problem of accounting for cross-national variation in the public provision of social welfare. Their project is to provide an account of the exceptional nature of the American welfare state that is consistent with and sheds light on differences among other welfare states as well. This makes for an audacious book that deserves critical scrutiny.

We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study to examine household market inequality, redistribution, and the relationship between market inequality and redistribution in affluent OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s. We observe sizeable increases in market household inequality in most countries. This development appears to have been driven largely, though not exclusively, by changes in employment: in countries with better employment performance, low-earning households benefited relative to high-earning ones; in nations with poor employment performance, low-earning households fared worse. In contrast to widespread rhetoric about the decline of the welfare state, redistribution increased in most countries during this period, as existing social-welfare programs compensated for the rise in market inequality. They did so in proportion to the degree of increase in inequality, producing a very strong positive association between changes in market inequality and changes in redistribution. We discuss the relevance of median-voter theory and power resources theory for understanding differences across countries and changes over time in the extent of compensatory redistribution.

This article draws on a new data set that enables the authors to compare the distribution of income from employment across OECD countries. Specifically, the article conducts a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of the determinants of wage inequality in sixteen countries from 1973 to 1995. The analysis shows that varieties of capitalism matter. The authors find that the qualities that distinguish social market economies from liberal market economies shape the way political and institutional variables influence wage inequality. Of particular interest to political scientists is the finding that the wage-distributive effects of government partisanship are contingent on institutional context. Union density emerges in the analysis as the single most important factor influencing wage inequality in both institutional contexts.

This article argues that the politics of new technology and job redesaign at the firm level is decisively influenced by 'external' political-economic conditions, and must be analysed from a broad perspective. The article compares the experiences of Volvo, a case of labour inclusion of industrial innovation, and British Leyland, a case of labour exclusion, and shows that the two firms have pursued two very different innovation strategies. Volvo's emphasis on upgrading assembly work reflects union demands, but should first and foremost be seen as a response to Swedish labour market conditions; in particular, high rates of labour turnover due to full employment and solidaristic wage policy. Operating under different labour and market conditions, British Leyland has been under much less pressure to break with traditional assembly-line principles.

Using a number of different quantitative measures, this article demonstrates that variations in the degree of social democratic decline in nine European countries can be viewed in large measure as a product of two structural economic changes: (1) the shift to smaller units of production; and (2) the growth of private nonindustrial employment. The article explores several causal arguments linking these variables to social democratic decline, and it marshals Swedish and British time-series data to show that the distribution of manufacturing employment by production unit helps explain both the rise and the decline of social democracy.

In recent years it has become commonplace for comparativists to emphasize the resilience of welfare states in advanced capitalist societies and the failure of neoliberal efforts to dismantle the welfare state. Challenging some tenets of the resilience thesis, this article seeks to broaden the discussion of welfare-state retrenchment. The authors argue that a sharp deceleration of social spending has occurred in most OECD countries since 1980, that welfare states have failed to offset the rise of market-generated inequality and insecurity, and that welfare programs have become less universalistic. They stress the distributive and political consequences of market-oriented reforms of the public sector.

In recent years it has become commonplace for comparativists to emphasize the resilience of welfare states in advanced capitalist societies and the failure of neoliberal efforts to dismantle the welfare state. Challenging some tenets of the resilience thesis, this article seeks to broaden the discussion of welfare-state retrenchment. The authors argue that a sharp deceleration of social spending has occurred in most oecd countries since 1980, that welfare states have failed to offset the rise of market-generated inequality and insecurity, and that welfare programs have become less universalistic. They stress the distributive and political consequences of market-oriented reforms of the public sector.

Making the EMU: The Politics of Budgetary Surveillance and the Enforcement of Maastricht. By James D. Savage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 239p. $85.00.As all students of contemporary European politics know, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 specified a series of criteria that member states of the European Union had to fulfill in order to join the single currency that would be launched in 1998–99. Most importantly, public debt had to be less than 60% of the GDP and government deficits were not to exceed 3% of GDP. When decisions on initial membership of the Eurozone were taken in 1998, the debt criterion was relaxed, but the deficit criterion was strictly enforced, and as result, Greek membership was postponed for several years. The Stability and Growth Pact adopted by the European Council in 1997, in turn, introduced a procedure whereby the European Commission would monitor the fiscal policies of Eurozone members and would be required to propose sanctions against states with persistent government deficits in excess of 3% of GDP. During 2002–4, the European Commission found Portugal, France, and Germany in violation of the Stability and Growth Pact, but the Council of Ministers declined to impose sanctions on any of these countries.