In Zurich, the TECHNO team consists of myself, Thomas Kurer and Reto Bürgisser TECHNO (2020-2024) addresses political consequences of rapid technological progress and explores how technological change in the workplace contributes to ongoing deep political transformations, the adoption of policies to address change, and the political consequences of such policies. The project should also result in recommendations of politically viable and effective policies to help workers and communities adapt to a fast-changing economic landscape and increased insecurity. The Project is a cooperation between four research teams, led by Prof. Henning Finseraas Institute for Social Research (Norway) Prof. Alex Kuo University of Oxford (UK) Prof. Aina Gallego Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (Spain) Professor Silja Häusermann University of Zurich (Switzerland)
I work on the transformation of Social Democracy in several complementary contexts: In my own research, I study the transformation of the electoral potential of social democratic parties and how this transformation affects welfare politics. Jointly with Tarik Abou-Chadi (UZH), Markus Wagner (Uni Vienna), Reto Mitteregger (UZH) and Nadja Mosimann (UZH), I study the determinants of electoral preferences for different programmatic profiles of Social Democratic parties via different types of observational and experimental survey designs. Jointly with Herbert Kitschelt, I co-direct the project “Beyond Social Democracy: Transformation of the Left in Emerging Knowledge Societies”, whose output is a book (edited volume) on the topic and a wide range of exchanges with different European Social Democratic Parties and organizations close to them. Jointly with Tarik Abou-Chadi, Reto Bürgisser, Matthias Enggist, Reto Mitteregger, Nadja Mosimann and Delia Zollinger, I am writing a book (in Geman, geared to a broader audience) on the electorate and strategic perspectives of the Swiss Social Democratic Party („Wählerschaft und Perspektiven der Sozialdemokratie in der Schweiz“, forthcoming with NZZ Libro Verlag in 2022).
The welfarepriorities-team consists of myself, Macarena Ares, Reto Bürgisser, Matthias Enggist, Michael Pinggera, and Fabienne Eisenring. Current project output is on the project website. WELFAREPRIORITIES is a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) running from September 2017 to March 2023. The goal of the project is to rethink social policy conflict. In times of austerity, the politics of the welfare state involve tough choices and even trade-offs: whose risks should benefit from social solidarity in a context of shrinking resources? Should the welfare state prioritize the needs of the elderly or those of the young? Those of people in the workforce or outside of the workforce? Of natives or of immigrants? How countries answer these key questions depends on the welfare state priorities of citizens, political elites and economic elites. However, we know still very little about these priorities and their determinants, and we know even less about the mechanisms that foster support for social solidarity – i.e. support for inclusive social security beyond self-interest. This project wants to make use of recent methodological advances to investigate precisely these priorities and mechanisms. The project has two phases: the goal of the first phase is to identify the most salient distributive conflicts and welfare trade-offs in eight European countries via observational and experimental survey data in 8 West European countries (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, UK and Ireland). The second phase goes beyond conflict towards coalitions. It identifies the factors that foster support for social policies among those social groups who are unlikely to benefit directly from these policies themselves.
SNF Grant100017_159341; CHF 348’553.-, main applicant with Denise Traber, Thomas Kurer and Michael Pinggera Under what conditions can welfare states be reformed? More specifically: how can established social policy programmes be adapted to changing demographic, economic and social constraints? These are the key questions in today’s welfare state politics, and they have consequently become the key questions in political science research on the welfare state. In this research project, we made use of the exceptional conjunction of theoretical advances in the relevant literature, methodological innovation in public opinion research and the unfolding of the most ambitious and encompassing pension reform in Switzerland in decades to provide answers to precisely these questions With regard to the literature on welfare state reforms, one of the key insights of research over the past decade has been that welfare politics are multidimensional. This means that individuals are not just “in favor or against social policy”, but they hold specific preferences for different aspects of social policy. One major difficulty – for researchers as well as policy-makers – is, however, that the relative importance that individuals or social groups attribute to these different dimensions is almost impossible to observe reliably in standard survey analysis. Conjoint analysis is an experimental survey method that allows to measure whether changes in the composition of a reform package lead to sizeable shifts in support among the public as a whole, or among specific groups. The Swiss pension reform “Altersvorsorge 2020” was an ambitious attempt at reforming the entire system of old age income protection. It therefore provided the perfect opportunity to combine the insights in welfare state theory regarding multidimensionality with conjoint analysis. We conducted a panel study which accompanied the political reform process.
Two volumes published in 2022 with Oxford University Press: Volume I: The World Politics of Social Investment (Volume II): Welfare States in the Knowledge Economy. Volume II: The World Politics of Social Investment (Volume II): The Politics of Varying Social Investment Strategies. The “World Politics of Social Investment” (WoPSI) is a collaborative research project which has brought together an international research network and aims at explaining variance in social investment agendas and social investment reforms across democratic countries in different regions of the World. Recent research on the development and implementation of social investment (investment in human capital, work-care support policies and active labor market policies) has shown that there is some level of implementation of social investment policies not only in different regions of Europe, but also in Latin America and South East Asia. However, one cannot speak of a general development of a social investment welfare state, as the phase but also-and especially-the specific substance of the social investment agenda varies strongly between these regions. Why have social investment ideas and policies been more developed in some regions and countries than in others? Going beyond different structural pressure, the project aims at theorizing the politics of social investment and testing different explanations empirically. The aim is to assess what are the political conditions for the development of social investment policies. Given that similar governments in different contexts have adopted different strategies with regard to social investment, the project investigates the institutional and socio-structural factors that enable or prevent political support coalitions for social investment. This project will assess the political conditions for the development of social investment policies, investigate the politics of Social Investment in Europe, Latin America and East Asia along the following three questions: What explains the content of the social investment agenda? (empirically: identify framing and the effect of institutional legacies – constraints, economic strategy- on the social investment agenda in different regions of the world) How does political conflict over social investment map onto other conflict lines and cleavages? (empirically: identify actor positions, dimensionality, links between actor positions on different issues). What political coalitions support or prevent a social investment turn ? (empirically: identify reform coalitions and the institutional and structural conditions that produce them)
SNF Grant 100017_146104; CHF 246’958.-, main applicant with Bruno Wüest, Thomas Kurer and Matthias Enggist This project was concerned with the political reactions of European citizens to the financial disaster and the harsh economic consequences that hit them from the late 2008 onwards. Starting from a political economy perspective, we asked how European citizens reacted towards the crisis and what implications these individual reactions had for the variation of protests at the societal level. By integrating previously separate research on social movements, economic voting and social risks, we offered an encompassing analytical argument to explain the variation in protest reactions across Europe.
SNF Grant 100017_146104; CHF 246’958.-, main applicant with Bruno Wüest, Thomas Kurer and Matthias Enggist This project was concerned with the political reactions of European citizens to the financial disaster and the harsh economic consequences that hit them from the late 2008 onwards. Starting from a political economy perspective, we asked how European citizens reacted towards the crisis and what implications these individual reactions had for the variation of protests at the societal level. By integrating previously separate research on social movements, economic voting and social risks, we offered an encompassing analytical argument to explain the variation in protest reactions across Europe.
We worked on the dualization of labor markets and welfare states in Western democracies. We wanted to know to what extent, why and with which political and electoral consequences post-industrial societies become more and more divided in insiders and outsiders. Work in this project is situated in two institutional contexts: a) The project was linked the the EU Network of Excellence „Reconciling Work and Welfare RECWOWE“. From the collaborative research in this project, we published the book „The Age of Dualization. The Changing Face of Inequality in Deindustrializing Societies“ (2012, OUP). I am a co-editor, together with Profs. Patrick Emmenegger, Bruno Palier and Martin Seeleib-Kaiser. The book shows that dualization of labor markets and societies is not a mere structural trend, but rather the result of political decisions. b) On dualization, I also worked with Hanna Schwander (University of Bremen) and Thomas Kurer (UZH), on the SNF-project „Who is in and who is out? The political representation of insiders and outsiders in Western Europe“ of which I am the main applicant (2011-2013, Grant number 100017_131994; 138’800.- CHF). Inequality is on the rise in almost all Western European countries for the first time in more than five decades. 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. Labor market insiders hold standard, protected and stable jobs, while outsiders are marginally or atypically employed, and more likely to be unemployed. The determinants, structure and outcomes of dualization are increasingly well researched by sociologists and economists. However, we still know relatively little about the extent of dualization across countries, about the politics of dualization and about policy feedback. We 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? In this project, we combine the analysis of a variety of data sources (household panel data, comparative survey data, coded media content analysis) in order to contribute to the understanding of one of the most acute and salient topics that West European societies need to deal with in the current context of crisis and austerity, namely how to distribute increasingly scarce resources between different segments of the society.
SNF Grant 100018_153140; CHF 279’122.- , co-applicant with Hanspeter Kriesi with Hanspeter Kriesi and Dominik Geering This project dealt with the electoral transformations of political parties in advanced post-industrial democracies and investigates the consequences of electoral change on distributive politics. It linked recent research on the transformation of party systems and party competition with current theory and research on institutional change.