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Did the financial and economic crisis (2008/2009) induce a permanent shift to more economic intervention in the advanced democracies? Three relevant theoretical perspectives are considered. First, the crisis could have led all governments to intervene more, irrespective of their partisan composition. Second, voter demand could have shifted towards more intervention due to the crisis, again inducing all governments to expand economic intervention. Third, increasing salience of economic issues could have led to an accentuation of partisan differences in economic policy which should have led to an expansion of economic intervention under left governments only. We present data from a new index of economic intervention, which show that governments increased economic intervention during the immediate crisis but returned to liberalization afterward. Similarly, statistical analyses show that partisan differences disappear during the acute crisis but return thereafter. Hence, the financial and economic crisis did not constitute a game‐changer in economic policymaking in advanced democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Did electoral competition shape the policies of the fourth Merkel government? We answer this question in five steps. First, we theoretically discuss under which conditions electoral competition affects public policies. Only in publicly salient issue areas in which opposition parties advocate credible alternatives and only if policy satisfaction influences voting intention will the government modify its policies. Next, we identify the two most salient issue areas, climate change and the Corona pandemic. Third, opposition parties offered credible alternatives, the Greens (and the Left) in climate policy and the FDP (and the AfD) regarding Corona management. Fourth, governing parties could not be certain to participate in the next government. Furthermore, voting intention for the Christian democrats as leading party of the government was related to policy success, while the Greens (and the Left) and the FDP (and the AfD) could benefit from dissatisfaction with climate change policy and Corona management, respectively. Finally, only regarding climate change did the government respond to electoral pressure by an increase in press releases, while communication about Corona was driven by voters' problem perception. These findings are corroborated by brief case studies of policy-making processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the special issue first describes the cumbersome process of forming the fourth and final Merkel government. Both coalition partners experienced severe electoral losses in 2017 and were not particularly close to one another programmatically. This made the formation of a new coalition difficult. Next, the to-do-list is discussed. It turns out that, as a response to the Fridays-for-Future protests, voters considered climate change to be the most important problem in 2019, while the Corona pandemic dominated the agenda from early 2020. Interestingly, none of the coalition parties 'owned' either of these issues and this could have made policy-making even more intricate. In the third part, we summarise the policy profile of the fourth Merkel government, based mostly on the contributions to this special issue. It turns out that the policies of the fourth Merkel government mirrored those of its predecessor. In the socio-economic dimension a gentle de-liberalisation continued, while the policies on the social dimension followed a moderately liberal path. In the final section, the plan of the special issue is outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of whether political parties make a systematic difference in terms of public policies is one of the classics of comparative public policy research. However, unstable class cleavages and changing party strategies challenge the assumptions of traditional partisan theory, namely that parties represent a stable group of voters and implement policies according to the preferences of this group. Against this backdrop, several recent studies have called for an "electoral turn" in partisan theory and suggest establishing a party–voter link on the microlevel, depending on the policy area at stake. In this article, we propose a different view on partisan effects. While we do not argue that public opinion is unimportant for parties, we maintain that the electoral turn literature has a tendency to black-box the political actors and their preferences, because they become mere agents of voter preferences. Our argument builds on a growing literature that shows that political actors both at the party member and the elite level do have preferences and that these may or may not be coherent with those of the voters. Hence, the effect of partisan ideology on public policies may also be situated on the level of the parties or policy-makers themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties are likely to hold differing views about employment protection legislation (EPL). While pro-welfare parties could support EPL, pro-market parties might focus on labour market deregulation. In this paper, we investigate empirically whether partisan politics, especially the government participation of Social democrats and Christian democrats, matter for EPL in 21 established OECD countries from 1985 to 2019. We show that during the golden age of the welfare state, the level of EPL was much higher where Social and Christian democrats dominated the government than elsewhere. After the golden age and under conditions of high unemployment, these unconditional effects mostly disappeared. Instead, the level of unemployment conditions partisan differences. Christian democrats liberalize EPL for regular employment significantly less than other parties under high levels of unemployment. In contrast, Social democrats defend high levels of EPL for regular and temporary employment when unemployment is low. Against expectations, they even liberalize employment protection for labour market insiders more than other parties at very high levels of unemployment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]