New project on labor market dualization started.
In August 2011, Hanna Schwander and I started the project "Who is in and who is out? The political representation of insiders and outsiders in Western Europe" funded by the SNF
The project has a duration of 24 month. Here is the project summary (for more information, go to "research"):
Inequality is on the rise in almost all Western European countries as a result of policy reforms liberalizing labor markets and retrenching social welfare. These reforms have led to an increasing division of the workforce into labor market insiders and outsiders, a divide referred to as dualization. In this project, we investigate the political implications of dualization. Thereby, we focus on electoral politics, i.e. the representation of insiders and outsiders in political parties. We contend that the presence or absence of a radical right- or left-wing rival to moderate left parties explains whether outsiders are mobilized and represented, or ignored. Empirically, we analyze the extent of dualization, voting behavior, as well as party constituencies in 12 European democracies with micro-level survey data, before investigating more closely the match between voter policy preferences and party positions in six countries on the basis of coded policy positions during electoral campaigns. Currently, we are working on several papers mapping dualization across Europe on the basis of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (SILC-data), and we are preparing the coding process together with our research assistants.
