Quiet Politics of Employment Protection Legislation? Partisan Politics, Electoral Competition, and the Regulatory Welfare State

• Author: Reimut Zohlnhöfer,Linda Voigt
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0002716220964388

206 ANNALS, AAPSS, 691, September 2020

DOI: 10.1177/0002716220964388

Quiet Politics of

Employment

Protection

Legislation?

Partisan

Politics,

Electoral

Competition,

and the

Regulatory

Welfare State

By

LINDA VOIGT

and

REIMUT ZOHLNHÖFER

964388ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYPolitics and the Regulatory Welfare State

research-article2020

Political parties and party competition have been

important factors in the expansion and retrenchment of

the fiscal welfare state, but researchers have argued

that regulatory welfare is not part of political debate

among parties. We explore this claim theoretically, and

then empirically examine it in the case of employment

protection legislation (EPL) in twenty-one established

democracies since 1985. EPL is a mature and poten-

tially salient instrument of the regulatory welfare state

that has experienced substantial retrenchment. We test

three prominent mechanisms of how electoral competi-

tion conditions partisan effects: the composition of Left

parties’ electorates, the strength of pro-EPL parties,

and the emphasis put on social justice by pro-EPL par-

ties. We find that the partisan politics of EPL is condi-

tioned by electoral competition under only very specific

circumstances, namely when blame sharing becomes

possible in coalitions between EPL supporters.

Keywords: employment protection legislation; partisan

politics; regulatory welfare state; electoral

competition; welfare state retrenchment

The regulatory welfare state (RWS) is con-

sidered as a way to cater for “the social

needs of vulnerable groups” (Haber 2017, 445)

and can be a “redistributive instrument” that is

“functionally equivalent to social spending”

(Levi-Faur 2014, 604, 606). Nonetheless, there

are some relevant differences between regulat-

ing for welfare and social spending (as the clas-

sic way to deliver social security). As Levi-Faur

(2014, 610) observes: “Money is visible and

regulations are not.” This claim has two impli-

cations. First, agents that would need to pay for

Reimut Zohlnhöfer is a professor of political science at

Heidelberg University in Germany. His research inter-

ests include German politics, political economy, com-

parative public policy, and policy process theory. He

has published widely, in journals such as the British

Journal of Political Science and Comparative Political

Studies.

Correspondence: reimut.zohlnhoefer@ipw

.uni-heidelberg.de

POLITICS AND THE REGULATORY WELFARE STATE 207

social spending and that have increasingly obtained an exit option due to globali-

zation might be more willing to accept the invisible regulatory welfare state than

the visible levying of taxes and social security contributions. Consequently, regu-

lation is often seen as a rather attractive alternative to providing benefits from the

public purse in the era of “permanent austerity” (Pierson 1998). Policy-makers

hope that regulation will attain similar goals as welfare transfers without eliciting

significant public spending. In that sense, the regulatory state is sometimes

regarded as a potential “rescue of the welfare state” (Levi-Faur 2014, 610).

Therefore, the regulatory welfare state has been on the rise for quite some time

now.

Second, the greater visibility of spending compared with regulation may have

consequences for the politics of the different “faces” of the welfare state. It is

largely undisputed that the development of the spending welfare state was sig-

nificantly driven by credit-claiming parties that sought to attract voters by either

increasing (highly visible) welfare spending or by preventing tax increases for

their respective electorates (see, for example, Huber and Stephens 2001).

Likewise, retrenchment of the fiscal welfare state often became an exercise in

“blame avoidance” (Weaver 1986) due to the high visibility and electoral salience

of the respective programs (cf. Pierson 1994, 1996).

In contrast, the “quiet politics” (Culpepper 2010) of the regulatory welfare

state were much less salient among the voters and, consequently, parties may

have had fewer incentives to compete on this issue. This, in turn, might have led

to the irrelevance of partisan politics for the shaping of welfare regulation. Haber

(2017, 457), in a recent study on the regulatory welfare state, substantiates this

claim empirically: “The politics of regulatory welfare are not the high stakes,

ideological and highly conflictual politics of fiscal welfare. . . . regulatory welfare

is not politically contested: it is not a matter of party-political debate.”

In this article, we study the relation between political parties and the regula-

tory welfare state in more detail. We do so by analyzing employment protection

legislation (EPL) in twenty-one established democracies since 1985. The investi-

gation of EPL promises a number of new insights for the study of the regulatory

welfare state. First, EPL is not at all a recent addition to the welfare state and

was never meant to substitute social spending. Rather, it was complementing

spending programs to begin with.

Second, while the argument about regulation as the “rescue of the welfare

state” (Levi-Faur 2014, 610) suggests that the regulatory welfare state tends to be

expanded in times of “permanent austerity,” the example of EPL shows that more

regulation for welfare has not been the only game in town. Rather, while we see

that up until the 1980s EPL expanded in all advanced democracies, it was some-

what retrenched in many countries—particularly in temporary employment and

after the financial crisis of 2008 (Emmenegger and Marx 2019, 707–11). So, just

Linda Voigt is a PhD student and an assistant lecturer at the Institute of Political Science at

Heidelberg University in Germany. Her research interests include public policy analysis,

political psychology, as well as German and European politics. She has published in the journal

German Politics.