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Abstract: This article contributes to recent research that seeks to understand the political consequences of ‘outsider’ labour market status. There is an emerging consensus that labour market outsiders have systematically different policy preferences and display systematically different political behaviour to securely employed ‘insiders’ in Europe. Yet the political consequences of outsider status in the USA are less clear. They may be expected to differ from those that have been documented in the European context, because: (1) the USA is characterized by low employment protection of insiders; and (2) there is evidence that Americans are more reluctant than Europeans to hold governments responsible for personal economic hardship. We therefore use the General Social Survey to examine how outsider labour market status is related to voting behaviour and to social policy preferences in the USA. We find that the concept of ‘labour market outsider’ – as conventionally operationalized – holds little explanatory power in the American context. Disaggregating the outsider category, our results suggest that the political consequences of outsider labour market status may be contingent on individual beliefs about government responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diversity of European responses to unemployment has increased since 2008. On the basis of an analysis of French labour market and employment policies since 2008, with a particular focus on the policy output under the Hollande presidency since 2012, this article argues that France has maintained a distinctive mix of labour market policies. Although in some respects France's pattern of labour market segmentation aligns it with what has been defined as a classic Mediterranean model, the Eurozone crisis has led to greater divergence between France and other countries in the Mediterranean cluster. Rather, France is one of several outliers in the continental economies that are undergoing distinctive dualizing processes of transition. Thus although the distinction between liberal market and coordinated market economies remains valid, there is evidence of converging pressures and trends (such as, at a very general level, deregulation and a search for bargained 'flexicurity') while at the same time multiple patterns of domestic change are at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the authors' chapter "Insider-Outsider Politics" in the book "The Age of Dualization," evaluating the electoral fate of the Swedish Social Democratic Party (Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti) from 1994 to 2010. Topics include the influence of insiders and outsiders on center-left political parties, the impact of unemployment and the labor market on Swedish politics, and the relation of economic issues to political campaigns in Sweden.

Unemployment emerged as a specific social issue in the late-19th century, but the nature of the threat it posed and the governing instruments available to address it varied widely. Using Britain and France as strongly contrasting cases, this article demonstrates the variable and historically contingent constructions of unemployment as a problem, and demonstrates how policy to address it was developed using administrative agencies that embodied specific, normative visions of how society and employment should operate. The different governing trajectories through which the issue was tackled is analyzed in terms of the context within which the problem of unemployment originally emerged. The article demonstrates the socio-political nature of unemployment's construction and, with reference to recent labour market change, questions its utility as a means of assessing economic or social well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study extends the traditional focus of active labour market policy evaluation from a static comparison of participation in a programme versus non-participation (or participation in another programme) to the evaluation of the effects of programme sequences, that is, multiple participation or timing of such programmes. Explicitly allowing for dynamic selection into different stages of such programme sequences we analyse multiple programmes, the timing of programmes, and the order of programmes. The analysis is based on comprehensive administrative data on the Austrian labour force. Our findings suggest that (i) active job search programmes are more effective after a qualification programme compared to the reverse order, (ii) multiple participation in qualification measures dominates single participation and (iii) the effectiveness of several labour market programmes deteriorates the later they start during an unemployment spell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]