This article deals with the evolution of class voting in Switzerland from 1971 to 2011. It shows that class cleavage (working class versus owners/employers) has weakened in Switzerland. The existence of a large right-wing party with strong support among the working class contributes to blurring the traditional class divisions in voting. However, the analysis indicates that class cleavage has not completely disappeared. The centre-right parties display much continuity in their class basis over time, thus contributing to the persistence of class cleavage. Besides taking into account the diversity of the right-wing parties, the article also offers a new perspective by including nonvoting. Class differences in turnout are important in Switzerland, but the findings suggest that the most important change over time concerns party choice and not turnout.
This article examines the existence of a habituation effect to unemployment: Does the subjective well-being of unemployed people decline less if unemployment is more widespread? The underlying idea is that unemployment hysteresis may operate through a sociological channel: if many people in the community lose their job and remain unemployed over an extended period, the psychological cost of being unemployed diminishes, and the pressure to accept a new job declines. We analyse this question with individual-level data from the German socio-economic panel (1984–2010) and the Swiss household panel (2000–2010). Our fixed-effects estimates show no evidence for a mitigating effect of high surrounding unemployment on the subjective well-being of the unemployed. Becoming unemployed hurts as much when regional unemployment is high as when it is low. Likewise, the strongly harmful impact of being unemployed on well-being neither wears off over time, nor do repeated episodes of unemployment make it any better. It thus appears doubtful that an unemployment shock becomes persistent because the unemployed becomes used to, and hence reasonably content with, being without a job.
We examine the relationship between material deprivation and different types of responses to economic crises by civil society actors. We are interested in understanding whether material deprivation has an effect on civil society reactions to the crisis and whether political opportunity factors contribute to this relationship. In particular, we wish to ascertain if the effect of material deprivation is moderated by perceptions of political stability, on one hand, and of the effectiveness of government, on the other. Our results show that the effect of material deprivation on various aspects of responses to the crisis varies depending on the perceptions of the political environment. This suggests that perceptions of political stability and government effectiveness feed into the interpretation of present conditions. Therefore, perceptions of political stability and government effectiveness act as signals leading material deprivation to become politicized as a grievance.
Purpose – The goal of this chapter is to explore whether variation in the distribution of union members across the income distribution affects the role of unions in redistributive politics. Design/methodology/approach – The conceptual part of the study provides a theoretical motivation for disaggregating organized labor by income. The empirical part uses European Social Survey data for 15 West European countries 2006–2008 to describe the composition of union membership by income across countries and to explore, in a preliminary fashion, the implications of where union members are located in the income distribution for social protection and redistribution. Findings – In most countries, workers with incomes above the median are better organized than workers below the median and the income of the median union member exceeds the income of the median voter. The political implications of the overrepresentation of relatively well-off workers depend on the mechanism of preference aggregation within unions and the influence of unions in the policymaking process. While leaving a thorough examination of these issues for future research, we present descriptive regression results that indicate that the share of union members below the median does condition the association between aggregate union density and redistribution. It does not condition the association between union density and policy variables that pertain less directly to the distribution of income. Originality/value of paper – This is the first comparative study to map the distribution of union members across the income distribution and to examine the implications of compositional variation by income for redistributive politics.
Contrary to the wide majority of studies that try to characterise EU external governance by looking at the macro structures of association relations, our comparative analysis shows that overarching foreign policy initiatives such as the EEA, Swiss-EU Bilateralism or the ENP have little impact on the modes how the EU seeks to expand its policy boundaries in individual sectors. In contrast, modes of external governance follow sectoral dynamics which are astonishingly stable across countries. These findings highlight the importance of institutional path-dependencies in projecting governance modes from the internal to the external constellation, and question the capacity to steer these functionalist patterns of external governance through rationally planned foreign policy initiatives.
The concept of external governance seeks to capture the expanding scope of EU rules beyond EU borders. This article elaborates the theoretical foundations of this concept, differentiates the various institutional modes through which external governance takes place and suggests a set of hypotheses addressing the conditions under which EU external governance is effective. Here, we contrast institutionalist explanations, which are the most germane to an external governance approach, with competing expectations derived from power-based theories and approaches emphasizing the role of domestic factors in the target countries.
Traditionally a core aspect of state sovereignty, immigration control has first moved upwards to the intergovernmental sphere. It has then been brought closer to supranational governance, and is now gradually moving outwards towards the realm of EU foreign relations. This article interprets this move as the continuation of established patterns of transgovernmental cooperation in an altered geopolitical and institutional context. It explains internationalisation as a strategy of immigration ministers to increase their autonomy towards political, normative and institutional constraints on policy-making. Whereas these constraints were originally located at the national level, they are now increasingly perceived in communitarising immigration politics. The shift ‘outwards’ may thus be interpreted as a strategy to maximise the gains from Europeanisation while minimising the constraints resulting from deepening supranationalism. Yet this might in the long run also yield a widening of the external migration agenda, distracting it from the original focus on migration control.
