Search

Building on studies on the political business cycle, the literature on welfare state retrenchment has argued that governments which cut the welfare state try to avoid blame by implementing painful measures in the beginning of the mandate and expanding benefits as elections approach. In contrast to this linear relationship, this article argues that governments often feel pressured to fulfil (mostly expansionary) campaign promises during the first months in office. Consequently, cutting right away is not what should be expected. Instead, a more nuanced, U-shaped timing trajectory is probable with a period in the beginning characterised by both cuts and fulfilment of expansionary pledges, followed by a period of cutbacks, and finally an expansive phase towards the end of a mandate. This argument is tested on our new original dataset of legislative changes in five European countries – Britain, Denmark, Finland, France and Germany – during the last four decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Carmines and Stimson’s seminal work, the concept of issue evolution has become a common theoretical toolkit to examine and explain polarization around cultural issues and partisan realignment in the United States. However, very few studies outside the United States have applied the concept of issue evolution to explain electoral change and realignment around new issues at national elections over time. Analyzing whether and how Carmines and Stimson’s concept travels to electoral change in a multiparty system would provide more theoretical leverage and create empirical knowledge on the logic of issue evolution outside the United States and also whether the logic of electoral change differs from U.S.-style two-party systems. This article applies the issue evolution concept to a multidimensional multiparty system using micro-level data from 1971 to 2011 in combination with data on elite-level polarization to demonstrate that partisan realignment in Denmark follows an issue evolution process with niche parties as main drivers. Moreover, niche party polarization on the new dimension of conflict has a stronger effect on vote choice than mainstream party polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent elections yielded sweeping majorities for the centre-right in Scandinavia with a decade of pure centre-right majorities in Denmark and the longest sitting centre-right coalition in Sweden for decades. This is a blind spot in the issue voting literature, which would not expect centre-right parties to flourish in contexts where welfare issues have a natural salience as in the case of universal welfare states. In contrast, Scandinavian universal welfare states ought to benefit social democracy when it comes to issue voting on welfare issues. It is argued in this article that centre-right parties can beat social democrats by credibly converging to its social democratic opponent on issues of universal welfare. Issue ownership voting to the benefit of centre-right parties will then be strongest among voters perceiving the centre-right to have converged to social democracy and perceiving the centre-right as issue-owner. Using Danish National Election Studies, 1998-2007, the article shows that the Danish Liberal Party outperformed the Social Democrats on traditional welfare issues among those voters perceiving the Liberals to be ideologically close to the social democrats. The findings help us to understand why centre-right parties have recently turned into serious competitors on social democracy's turf: the universal welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article demonstrates that the big electoral defeat for Danish social democracy in the 2001 elections was not solely the consequence of the immigration issue, but of the welfare state reforms implemented by the Social Democratic government (1993-2001). Social democratic core voters opposed the reforms since they broke with the decommodification paradigm and turned away from social democracy. Against the arguments from the literature, the left-wing competitor Socialist People's Party's could not benefit from the reforms given its function as supporter party. Rather, the reforms caused the realignment of social democratic core voters with the Liberals and the Danish People's Party having expanded their voter base in 2001 as a consequence of the welfare reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]