Playing Normative Legacies

• Author: Tobias Schulze-Cleven,J. Timo Weishaupt
• Published date: 01 June 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329215571291
• Date: 01 June 2015
• Subject Matter: Articles

Politics & Society

2015, Vol. 43(2) 269 –299

© 2015 SAGE Publications

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329215571291

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Article

Playing Normative Legacies:

Partisanship and Employment

Policies in Crisis-Ridden

Europe

Tobias Schulze-Cleven

Rutgers University–New Brunswick, USA

J. Timo Weishaupt

University of Göttingen, Germany

Abstract

Europe’s affluent democracies adopted different policy strategies to buffer their

labor markets from the effects of the worldwide recession that followed the financial

crisis in 2007. This article offers a sociologically anchored historical institutionalist

explanation to account for this divergence. Reviewing the politics of employment

policymaking before, during, and after the crisis in the United Kingdom, Germany,

and Denmark, the article traces partisan actors’ tactics of maneuvering within the

constraints of institutionally embedded mass preferences to legitimate their policies

and improve their electoral performance. The analysis moves beyond contemporary

treatments of path-dependent institutional evolution in two important ways. Rather

than focusing on how arrangements at the work-welfare nexus provide actors with

particular functional benefits and differential power resources, it examines institutions’

ideational effects on the construction of electorates’ interests. Moreover, it illuminates

partisan politicians’ room for strategic agency, breaking with interpretations that view

government responses as the product of particular producer group coalitions.

Keywords

financial crisis, employment policy, institutional change, historical institutionalism,

ideas

Corresponding Author:

Tobias Schulze-Cleven, School of Management & Labor Relations, Rutgers University, 50 Labor Center

Way, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.

Email: tschulzecleven@work.rutgers.edu

571291PASXXX10.1177/0032329215571291Politics & SocietySchulze-Cleven and Weishaupt

research-article2015

270 Politics & Society 43(2)

What began as financial market insecurity in 2007 quickly morphed into the deepest

global economic crisis since the Great Depression eight decades ago. Particularly

among the affluent democracies, economic activity plummeted and unemployment

rose sharply. As these wealthy countries stabilized their financial sectors through size-

able infusions of money in 2008 and 2009, they found themselves in a double bind. On

the one hand, with unemployment remaining stubbornly high, increased demand for

public services required further state action. But, on the other hand, rapidly growing

fiscal deficits strongly constrained public spending on social protection. As welfare

states were being pulled in diametrically opposing directions, national governments

addressed these mounting tensions with very different policies at the work-welfare

nexus.

Contemporary scholarship characterizes these national responses as “reactive pol-

icy strategies” that saw countries with different economic and welfare institutions fall

“back on old habits,” independent of government partisanship.1 At the same time,

historical institutionalists’ causal accounts for path-dependent institutional evolution

tend to strongly rely on varieties-of-capitalism (VoC) theorizing inspired by institu-

tional economics, viewing policy choices as driven by powerful, cross-class coalitions

among producer groups that seek to exploit economic institutions’ inherited compara-

tive advantage.2 In either case, elected policymakers of different political colors are

seen to have little autonomy to independently pursue institutional innovation. Their

actions are viewed as constrained by groups, whose interests and respective power

depend on institutions’ material effects. However, this conception of institutional

influence underspecifies the set of causal mechanisms behind institutional reproduc-

tion and promotes the misleading interpretation that governments are locked in by

external forces.

This article seeks to overcome these limitations by theorizing and demonstrating

the room for governments’ agency and political choice, albeit under the influence of

institutionally supported ideas across countries. We develop our argument in two

steps. First, we argue that a national citizenry’s shared expectations about the appro-

priate scope of public intervention in the labor market—grounded in people’s experi-

ence of living under a particular welfare regime and anchored in the collective

imaginary that these institutions sustain—define a delimited policy space and struc-

ture political competition among political parties.3 Second, we show how there exists

ample room for politicians’ strategic partisan maneuvering to pursue institutional

innovation within these limits. As governments and opposition groups from both the

right and the left equally draw on images of collectively shared purposes to legitimate

their favored policies and improve their electoral performance, institutional continuity

and change become a function primarily of struggles within and about ideational

boundaries.

The argument will be elaborated through the analysis of shifts in employment poli-

cymaking in the broader context of the crisis across three countries: the United

Kingdom (UK), Germany, and Denmark. Each country’s universe of political dis-

course revolves around distinct and long-standing principles guiding state action in the

labor market, which are widely accepted among the respective national populace.4