Competitive tendering for public services has triggered a heated academic debate. In political economy, competition is claimed to improve e¤ciency. If this is true, why are most governments faithful to the monopoly model? Political economists suggest that public sector employees and unions in£uence the preferences of the elected politicians. In new institutional theory, competition is claimed to undermine democratic governance. If this is true, why do some elected governments make use of competitive tendering? In this tradition, organisational solutions are seen as expressions of autonomous values and perceptions about the outcomes of organisational solutions^not as manifestations of vote-maximising politicians subject to self-interested interest groups. When governments use competition, it is due to misconceived management fads that have temporarily penetrated long-established perceptions and value systems.These propositions have not been subjected to proper empirical testing. We have analysed extensive data about Norwegian local politicians, and found support for the notion that the perceptions of elected politicians a¡ect their preferences for tendering for residential care services for elderly people and hospital services. But we found support for the political economy propositions as well. Party a¤liation, interest group background and economic situation in£uence the perceptions and organisational preferences of elected politicians. Reform may be a question of political values and perceived consequences, but these values, perceptions and policy preferences are in£uenced by political self-interest and can be changed by exogenous economic shocks.
The article investigates the impact of being unemployed on political marginalisation among young people. Are unemployed youth politically marginalised compared with employed youth? Is the impact of unemployment on political marginalisation related to the development of the welfare state? Based on Marshall’s concept of social citizenry, and Esping‐Andersen’s theory of decommodification politics, the impact of unemployment on political marginalisation was expected to be least in the most‐developed welfare states. In these countries, welfare policies were expected to counteract marginalisation among the unemployed. The analyses were based on the Eurobarometer survey Young Europeans from 1990. Three aspects of political marginalisation were investigated: political confidence, political interest and political extremism. Unemployed youth express less confidence in politics, they talk less about politics and they more frequently support revolutionary political ideas, compared with employed youth. The greatest difference in political confidence between unemployed and employed is found in Great Britain, while Italy represents a deviant case where the unemployed have more confidence than the employed. The development of the welfare state does not appear to be a crucial factor for political confidence among the unemployed.
Does mass immigration and increasing ethnic diversity challenge the legitimacy of the universal welfare state? Assuming that basic income can be seen as a radical extension of the universal welfare state, we pursue this question by investigating whether popular reactions towards a basic income proposal are susceptible to persuasion that invokes attitudes towards immigration. The study is based on survey data covering a representative sample of the Norwegian electorate. We find that a comfortable majority express sympathy with the idea of a basic income, and that the structure of initial support for the basic income proposal is well in line with established findings concerning attitudes towards welfare state institutions and redistributive policies more generally. However, by applying a persuasion experiment, we show that negative attitudes towards immigration can be mobilized to significantly reduce the scope of support for a basic income proposal among the Norwegian electorate.
Economic competition theory predicts that anti-immigration sentiments will increase in periods with high unemployment, in particular among low-skilled workers. Using five rounds of cross-sectional data from the European Social Survey and utilising the rise in unemployment in many European countries due to the financial crisis, this article provides a more effective empirical test of interest-based theories than previous studies. It employs hierarchical, two-stage regression techniques to estimate the relationship between aggregate unemployment rates and immigration opinion, and explores whether the relationship differs according to respondent's level of education. It is found that high unemployment rates are associated with a high level of economic concern over immigration -particularly if the size of the foreign-born population is large. The relationship is stronger among the low skilled, implying a tendency for polarisation of opinions about immigration in economic recessions. Finally, it is discovered that the general level of cultural concern over immigration is unrelated to variation in unemployment.Spurred by a substantial rise in immigration over the last decades, European attitudes to immigrants and immigration are high on the agenda of social research. The widespread anti-immigration sentiments that have been observed in many countries are considered to be an important constraint on migration policy and an obstacle to the successful integration of newcomers. Two perspectives dominate the literature on how individuals in the majority population form their attitudes towards immigrants. According to interest-based theories, anti-immigration attitudes have a rational core and are rooted in competition with immigrants over scarce resources (Mayda, 2006;Semyonov et al., 2006). The alternative view maintains that anti-immigration attitudes are the result of cultural conflicts and symbolic predispositions such as values, ideology and identity. This controversy over the sources of anti-immigration attitudes relates to the general theoretical and empirical debate about the role of self-interest for individuals' behaviour in general and for their political thinking in particular (Green and Shapiro
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