With regard to dualizatoin, I want to know to what extent post-industrial labor markets become segmented into two groups: insiders with access to standard work and outsiders who incure stronger risks of unemployment or atypical work. The wider research project (encompassing the SNF-project and several more selective collaborations) analyzes the extent of dualization, the variation of dualization across countries, as well as the social and political consequences of dualization with regard to politics, policies and outcomes.
Project description
(go to publications --> conference papers to download a series of recent conference papers related to this project)
Inequality is on the rise in almost all Western European countries for the first time in more than five decades (OECD 2009). To scholars of comparative political economy, this does not come as a surprise, since both the flexibilization of labor markets as well as welfare state retrenchment have been major trends in the policy development of these countries since the 1980s. These reforms, in combination with de-industrialization and sluggish economic growth have led to an increasing division of the working class into labor market insiders and outsiders (Rueda 2005). Labor market insiders hold standard, protected and stable jobs, while outsiders are marginally or atypically employed, and more likely to be unemployed. This divide of the working class in people with “good jobs” and people with “bad jobs” is referred to as dualization (Berger and Piore 1980, Palier and Thelen 2010), and it is a major source of growing inequality.
The determinants, structure and outcomes of dualization are increasingly well researched by sociologists and economists. However, we know almost nothing about the extent of dualization across countries, about the politics of dualization and about policy feedback. This is where this project finds its starting point. I want to investigate how deep the divide between insiders and outsiders has become in different European countries, whether this divide impacts on the democratic process and which policy feedbacks result from it.
Key questions are the following: What is dualization and how can we measure it? Who are the insiders and outsiders across different countries? Do we see differences in the levels of participation and party choices of insiders and outsiders? What are the policy preferences of these groups? Are outsiders mobilized by radical right-wing or left-wing parties? What policies do these parties advocate? To what extent do their labor market policies feed back into the dualization process, by either reinforcing or weakening dualization?
Concerning the variation of dualization across countries, the following paper and abstract presents the thrust of the ongoing work:
Paper “Varieties of dualization? Identifying outsiders across countries” (with Hanna Schwander).
Abstract: All post-industrial labor markets become increasingly segmented between insiders who are in standard employment, and outsiders who incur a greater risk of unemployment and/or atypical employment. In this paper, we analyze to what extent this segmentation translates into actual economic, social and political dualism. We argue that this translation depends on institutional welfare regimes. While some regimes countervail segmentation – thereby preventing actual dualism in outcomes -, others perpetuate or even reinforce insider-outsider divides. Empirically, we show that structural change towards post-industrial labor markets has produced similar, but not identical sets of insiders and outsiders across regimes. We then examine the distributional consequences of segmentation with regard to three sets of outcomes: a) labor market dualism, i.e. gross earnings power as well as access to job mobility and training; b) social protection dualism, i.e. the effect of taxes and transfers on net income differentials between insiders and outsiders, pension policy and labor market policy coverage; and c) political integration dualism, i.e. the insider outsider gap in terms of trade union membership and political participation.
The paper demonstrates that the structural trend of labor market segmentation results in different patterns of dualization: continental and southern European regimes perpetuate and even reinforce the insider outsider divide with regard to all three dimensions of dualism. In liberal welfare regimes, outsiders face strong disadvantages in the labor market. However, the liberal welfare state contributes to narrowing the gap between insiders and outsiders in terms of net income. In the Nordic welfare regimes, labor market segmentation is also a reality. However, insiders and outsiders fare more equally with regard to job perspectives, income, welfare rights and political integration.
Concerning social policy and political preferences of insiders and outsiders, the following papers and abstracts provide an overview of the thrust of my ongoing work with different co-authors:
Paper "Restructuring welfare politics: post-industrial labor markets, globalization and welfare preferences" (with Stefanie Walter)
Abstract: While the welfare states in advanced capitalist economies reflect the class politics that have shaped them in the industrial age, welfare politics have changed in the post-industrial era. Permanent financial austerity has transformed welfare politics into a zero-sum game, because welfare gains for one group of beneficiaries now tend to come at the cost of other groups. In this context of sharpened distributional conflict, increasingly dualized labor markets and globalization have led to the emergence of new conflict lines within the labor force.
Our paper makes two contributions. First, we analyze whether contemporary welfare politics is indeed characterized by new conflict lines. For this purpose, we analyze how the new cleavages between labor market insiders and outsiders and between globalization winners and losers, in interaction with different skill-levels, determine preferences for two different types of welfare-related policies: redistribution (i.e. the political lowering of income differences) and structural protectionism (i.e. the political support for jobs in declining industries). We show that the insider/outsider divide and globalization contribute to explaining individual-level variation in policy preferences. Second, we explore different determinants to explain cross-national differences in the saliency of these new conflicts by analyzing them in a multi-level framework. We examine the relevance of the welfare regime and the size of the welfare state, as well as the country’s openness for the saliency of the new post-industrial conflict lines. On the micro-level, our analysis is based on ordered logit models performed on cross-national survey data from the ISSP RoG IV 2006.
Paper "Explaining welfare preferences in dualized societies" (with Hanna Schwander)
Abstract: A growing literature argues that politics in mature welfare states is characterized by new distributive conflicts. New risk groups are expected to advocate specific policies, which respond to their particular needs. The dualization-literature conceptualizes these risk groups in terms of insiders and outsiders, depending on their labor market vulnerability. In this paper, we test whether insiders and outsiders differ in their policy preferences. Redistribution and social investment typically target the needs of outsiders, while social insurance and performance-related incomes are more advantageous for insiders. Hence, we test whether we find insider-outsider divides with regard to preferences for these policies. In addition, we also test interaction effects with education, since high- and low-skilled outsiders have distinctive risk profiles and needs. The analysis is based on micro-level data from the ESS 2008.
The results consistently confirm the expected insider-outsider divide with regard to all analyzed policy preferences (redistribution, social investment, social insurance and the respondent’s support for performance-related incomes). Further, the analysis of interaction effects with education shows that insider-outsider divides on social investment and social insurance prevail only among the medium- and high-skilled respondents, whereas attitudes on the redistribution of income differ between insiders and outsiders throughout the whole workforce. The paper provides evidence that the increasing dualization of labor markets is reflected in individual preferences and attitudes. This is an important result for studies that analyze the political mobilization of insiders and outsiders and – more generally – the implications of dualization for post-industrial welfare politics.
Concerning the electoral study of dualization, I have received funding for a 2-year SNF-project. This is the summary of the project:
We contend that the electoral implications of dualization depend on the configuration of party competition. 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. The representation of outsiders and insiders in the party system then conditions the policies these parties defend while in government. In order to test these hypotheses, we will proceed in three steps. On the basis of micro-level data, we will first develop a measure of dualization, based on the proportion of outsiders and their relative economic deprivation for all Western European countries. Second, we will analyze the electoral dynamics of dualization and third, we will investigate policy preferences and policy choices of political parties in relation to their constituencies. The project will analyze voting behavior and party constituencies in all West European democracies based on survey data, before investigating more closely the match between constituency preferences and party positions in six countries, on the basis of survey data and coded party positions. It will provide the first comparative empirical analysis of how labor market dualization affects representation in Western democracies.
Our objective is to make four main contributions with this project.
First, it will develop a measure of dualization, based on the proportion of outsiders in a country and their relative economic status. This will be the first quantitative measure of dualization, which can be easily adapted for more countries and updated over time.
Second, the project will develop and test an analytical model of the electoral behavior of insiders and outsiders based on the incidence of dualization and the configuration of the party system. The goal here is to advance our knowledge on the democratic relevance of the insider-outsider divide.
Third, it will analyze how parties respond to these changes, i.e. to what extent their policy preferences and government behavior reflects insider- and outsider-interests.
Finally, the project will make a contribution on the level of data and methods, by developing a method of coding party positions and government policies on the basis of media documents and parliamentary sources, so they can be compared to the preferences of voter constituencies. Technically, it will rely on a technique of semi-automatic content analysis (COSA “core-sentence annotation”) that has been developed for the analysis of election campaigns. We would like to introduce this method to the study of policy change.
In this project, I analyze the role of political parties, business associations and trade unions in the reform of family policies in France, Germany and Switzerland.
This project analyzes changes in the socio-structural composition of the electoral constituencies of the major political parties in western Europe and investigates the consequences of these changes on the policy positions of these parties (both in electoral campaigns and in policy-processes) with regard to distributive policies (labor market policy, income tax policy, family policy).
This project investigates to what extent post-industrial labor markets become segmented into two groups: insiders with access to standard work and outsiders who incure stronger risks of unemployment or atypical work. The project analyzes the extent of dualization, the variation of dualization across countries, as well as the social and political consequences of dualization with regard to politics, policies and outcomes. My research on this topic is done in two institutional settings: on the one hand it is part of a new SNF-project that I conduct together with Hanna Schwander "Who is in and who is out? The political representation of insiders and outsiders in Western Europe" (August 2011-2013). On the other hand, it is part of the European Network of Excellence "Reconciling Work and Welfare RECWOWE".