Social and political movements have a wide range of effects. The biographical consequences of social movements are one of them. They can be defined as effects on the life-course of individuals who have participated in movement activities, effects that are at least in part due to involvement in those activities (see McAdam 1989; Goldstone & McAdam 2001; Giugni 2004 for reviews). Other types of effects include political and cultural outcomes. Political consequences are those effects of movement activities that alter in some way the movements' political environment. Policy outcomes, a special category of political outcomes consisting of changes in legislation or other policy measures induced by social movements, are among the most often studied. Cultural outcomes are those effects of movement activities that alter in some way the movements' cultural environment. They are perhaps the most difficult to study empirically as they are not easily identified, they depend on a wide range of other actors and events, and often they make themselves felt only in the long run. In addition, one can also imagine the existence of that which some have called spillover effects, that is, effects of movements on each other.
Using data from the European Social Survey (2002-14), this paper explores the effect of union membership on support for redistribution. We hypothesize that the wage-bargaining practices of unions promote egalitarian distributive norms among low-wage and high-wage union members alike and that distributive norms in turn lead union members to support redistribution. Consistent with our 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. We also show that low-wage workers have become a significantly less important union constituency in many European countries over the time period covered by our analysis.
The literature on the politics of inequality and redistribution in advanced democracies has become very large in recent years. This article focuses on several areas where important new arguments are being put forward. It reviews recent work on the interaction of unions and employers, the role of political parties and electoral institutions, and the effects of racial and religious diversity. It also discusses the implications of recent work in behavioural economics and political science that helps us to understand cross-national variation in political responses to inequality. It highlights the distinctive contributions of several ‘schools' of research, and identifies linkages across different analytical approaches.
In Austria, the social democrats suffered major electoral losses in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, and these losses translated primarily into gains for right-wing populism. In Sweden, by contrast, the social democrats have pretty much held their own in recent elections (except for 1991) and protest voting has assumed leftist as well as rightist forms. Commonly regarded as prototypical instances of 'corporatism', the two countries have also diverged with respect to union density, which fell precipitously in Austria while it rose in Sweden from 1970 to 1990. This dual divergence suggests that strong unions remain an important electoral asset for social-democratic parties. The divergent trajectories of trade-union membership are in turn related to differences between Austrian and Swedish corporatism.
ThisarticleinvestigatesfiscalpolicyresponsestotheGreatRecessioninhistoricalperspective.It explores general trends in the frequency, size and composition of fiscal stimulus as well as the impact of government partisanship on fiscal policy outputs during the four international recessions of 1980–1981, 1990–1991, 2001–2002 and 2008–2009. Encompassing 17–23 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, the analysis calls into question the idea of a general retreat from fiscal policy activism since the early 1980s. The propensity of governments to respond to economic downturns by engaging in fiscal stimulus has increased over time and no secular trend in the size of stimulus measures is observed. At the same time, OECD governments have relied more on tax cuts to stimulate demand in the two recessions of the 2000s than they did in the early 1980s or early 1990s. Regarding government partisanship, no significant direct partisan effects on either the size or the composition of fiscal stimulus is found for any of the four recession episodes. However, the size of the welfare state conditioned the impact of government partisanship in the two recessions of the 2000s, with left-leaning governments distinctly more prone to engaging in discretionary fiscal stimulus and/or spending increases in large welfare states, but not in small welfare states.
