Social Welfare Policies

This chapter tests the policy role of ministerial types employing three different indicators of social welfare generosity: welfare state de-commodification, unemployment generosity insurance, and sickness generosity insurance. Both hypotheses find strong empirical support in a sample of eighteen parliamentary democracies. Left ideologues and left partisans, alike, have played a central role in advancing social welfare expansion. Equivalently, right ideologues have been behind social welfare retrenchment. These effects are the strongest in multiparty and in minority cabinets. In the presence of strict fiscal rules and/or powerful finance ministers, only left partisans have a positive and independent effect on social welfare reform. Importantly, ministerial types explain policy change better than the ideological gravity of cabinets or the partisanship of the premier.