The puzzle posed by the lack of viable parties in Western democracies in the left-authoritarian quadrant of a two-dimensional space likely has demand- as well as supply-side explanations. This paper focuses on the demand side and argues that left-authoritarian voters are internally divided by the extent to which they combine two distinct non-economic preferences: views on the socio-political order (libertarian vs. authoritarian) and views on immigration (cosmopolitan vs. nativist). Leftwing citizens holding the resulting three preference bundles - left-authoritarian-nativist, left-libertarian-nativist, and left-authoritarian-cosmopolitan - have distinct and predictable partisan leanings. This complicates party entry into the left-authoritarian quadrant. Furthermore, existing parties can try to preempt party entry by appealing to a subset of left-authoritarian citizens. Nevertheless, the lack of left-authoritarian parties is likely a fleeting historical phenomenon.

While there is a strong cross-sectional association between social class and political attitudes, recent research-based on longitudinal data-finds that changes in class are, at most, weakly related to changes in such attitudes. One common explanation for this finding is that early life socialization affects both social class and political attitudes and that class has little, if any, direct effect on them. In this manuscript, we explore an alternative explanation that centers on the importance of cumulative class experiences for the long-term evolution of attitudes. To evaluate this perspective, we leverage data from the British Household Panel Survey, which contains measures of economic values that span up to 16 years, as well as complete work-life histories of respondents that allow us to track individual class experiences over people's life span. Our findings show that cumulative class experiences are strongly associated with the development of economic values.

Income and political attitudes are powerfully correlated in cross-sectional data, yet research based on panel data finds at most a weak correlation. In this paper, we examine this puzzling pattern by exploring the long-term evolution of attitudes over the life cycle. We evaluate the predictions of five different explanations on the relationship between attitudes and income experiences. These explanations focus on, respectively: socialization, anticipation, myopic self-interest, learning and status maximization. We employ accelerated longitudinal design models using data on core political values that span up to sixteen years from the British Household Panel Survey. Our findings reconcile the mixed evidence in the literature: the correlation between income and political attitudes, strong in cross-sectional studies but weak in short panel studies, emerges because attitudes crystallize - slowly but systematically - as income evolves over the life cycle. This pattern is most consistent with the learning explanation.

This article proposes a framework to analyze realignment processes in countries that transition from industrial to knowledge societies. It characterizes the electorate in terms of two traits that are main predictors for attitudes in a two-dimensional policy space of economic and noneconomic issues: income (low vs. high) and education (low vs. high). The framework divides the electorate into four groups—based on the interaction of these two dichotomized traits—and predicts how and when the voting propensities of these four groups change over time. Using a wide variety of data sources, the article tests hypotheses regarding changing voting behavior of education-income groups, as well as cross-national differences across twenty-one rich democracies.

A core principle of the welfare state is that everyone pays taxes or contributions in exchange for universal insurance against social risks such as sickness, old age, unemployment, and plain bad luck. This solidarity principle assumes that everyone is a member of a single national insurance pool, and it is commonly explained by poor and asymmetric information, which undermines markets and creates the perception that we are all in the same boat. Living in the midst of an information revolution, this is no longer a satisfactory approach. This book explores, theoretically and empirically, the consequences of 'big data' for the politics of social protection. Torben Iversen and Philipp Rehm argue that more and better data polarize preferences over public insurance and often segment social insurance into smaller, more homogenous, and less redistributive pools, using cases studies of health and unemployment insurance and statistical analyses of life insurance, credit markets, and public opinion.

A central function of the welfare state is to provide social insurance. Most scholarship assumes that social insurance cannot be provided effectively through the market, mainly due to incomplete and asymmetric information. But, while this assumption may have held in the past, the data revolution is making it untenable today. This chapter asks what happens to the politics of social protection, and to inequality, when information about risks to health, life, employment, credit, and so on, becomes more widely available and shareable. It offers a framework to help us better understand the consequences of big data for social policy and inequality. The information revolution has the potential to undermine majority support for public social policy programs, but due to some countervailing forces, we expect variation across social policy domains.

Driven by financialization and rising demand for credit, household sector debt in OECD countries has risen sharply. We argue that this rise in private debt has become a significant driver of inequality because access to, and the terms of, credit vary by the risk of default, which is closely tied to income. The effect is magnified by a trove of new data that allow lenders to more accurately assess individual risks, thereby linking interest rates more closely to the underlying risk distribution. This inequalizing logic is conditioned by social transfers and by government regulation of financial markets. We test our model with data on mortgage interest rates and access to credit, using the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (FM/FM) in the United States (resulting in regulatory change) and the Hartz-IV reform in Germany (resulting in changes to social transfers) as exogenous changes in important parameters of our model.

Gesellschaften wandeln sich stetig – und mit ihnen die Bedürfnisse der Menschen. Der Politik kommt die Aufgabe zu, den Wandel zu begleiten und zu steuern. Der Sammelband vereint Beiträge aus der Forschung zu Innovation und Wohlfahrtsstaat, Parteien und Verbänden sowie zur Politikberatung und gibt so einen Überblick über aktuelle Entwicklungen. Dabei vermittelt er einen Einblick in die Vielschichtigkeit der Politikfeldanalyse in Forschung, Transfer und Beratung. Gleichzeitig ehrt der Band mit Josef Schmid einen Wissenschaftler, der in und mit seinem Wirken Theorie und Praxis, Beratung und Lehre in der Politikfeldanalyse und politischen Wirtschaftslehre verbunden, vorangebracht und maßgeblich geprägt hat. Mit Beiträgen von Reinhard Bahnmüller, Nils C. Bandelow, Rasmus C. Beck, Susanne Blancke, Mathias Bucksteeg, Daniel Buhr, Roland Czada, Christoph Deutschmann, Charlotte Fechter, Rolf Frankenberger, Stewart Gold, Anke Hassel, Rolf G. Heinze, Sven Hilgers, Steffen Jenner, Markus Jox, Ricard Bellera Kirchhof, Ralf Kleinfeld, Harald Kohler, Wilhelm Kohler, Norbert Kreuzkamp, Chris Kühn, Susanne Lütz, Erika Mezger, Philipp Rehm, Manfred G. Schmidt, Werner Schmidt, Sebastian Schneider, Wolfgang Schroeder, Werner Sesselmeier, Ulrike Single, Christian Steffen, Volquart Stoy, Roland Sturm, Ansgar Thiel, Heinrich Tiemann, Ingeborg Tömmel, Ulrich von Alemann, Hans-Georg Wehling, Rosemarie Wehling, Dorian R. Woods und Udo Zolleis.

Abstract Leading accounts of the politics of the welfare state focus on societal demands for risk-spreading policies. Yet current measures of the welfare state focus not on risk, but on inequality. To address this gap, this letter describes the development of two new measures, risk incidence and risk reduction, which correspond to the prevalence of large income losses and the degree to which welfare states reduce that prevalence, respectively. Unlike existing indicators, these measures require panel data, which the authors harmonize for twenty-one democracies. The study finds that large losses affect all income and education levels, making the welfare state valuable to a broad cross-section of citizens. It also finds that taxes and transfers greatly reduce the prevalence of such losses, though to varying degrees across countries and over time. Finally, it disaggregates the measures to identify specific ‘triggers’ of large losses, and finds that these triggers are associated with risks on which welfare states focus, such as unemployment and sickness.

This chapter examines four fundamental questions relating to political participation. First, it considers different modes of political participation such as social movements, interest groups, and political parties. Second, it analyses the determinants of political participation, focusing in particular on the paradox of collective action. Third, it explains political participation at the macro-level in order to identify which contextual conditions are conducive to participation and the role of economic affluence in political participation. Finally, the chapter discusses political participation at the micro-level. It shows that both formal associations and informal social networks, configured around family and friendship ties, supplement individual capacities to engage in political participation or compensate for weak capacities, so as to boost an individual's probability to become politically active.

This essay argues that several ongoing and future developments are likely to undermine the broad public support welfare states historically and currently enjoy. These developments-skill-biased technological change, privatization of pensions, higher rates of assortative mating, and the information revolution-can be expected to increase risk inequality, the predictability of risk, income and wealth inequality, and the overlap between income and risk. As a result, a plausible prediction is that intense polarization about social policy programs will replace their current broad appeal, pitting an increasing share of people with no jobs or poor jobs and little upward mobility against an increasing share of people with few incentives to support mandatory risk pooling because they can self-insure.