What happens to welfare states when conditional financial aid is provided by an external financial actor? The conventional wisdom is that conditionality brings about welfare state retrenchment. The two cases analysed in this article – Korea during the financial crisis of 1997–1998 and Italy during the Eurozone crisis since 2011 – do not seem to confirm this received wisdom. This article tackles the puzzle of expansionary welfare reforms in the presence of economic conditionality, as transpired in Italy and Korea. We argue that conditionality and its contents interacted with, activated and had an impact on domestic political dynamics that led to progressive choices in welfare policy. Utilizing the Most Different Systems Design, we stress the importance of government ideology or partisanship and political contestation and competition – focusing on political actors that could threaten the government’s legitimacy when acquiescing to conditionality if not balancing neoliberal elements with expansion of social rights – and political agency underpinning government strategies in effectively introducing and implementing policy reforms.
a b s t r a c tThis study investigates why South Korea has maintained a minimalist welfare state with little redistribution of income. Inspired by the behavioral/attitudinal approach of Alesina and his colleagues, this study focuses on the perception that people who do not work become lazy. This belief is related to the anti-welfare sentiment that non-working benefits encourage laziness. This study shows that perceptions of work and laziness are associated with preferences for redistribution, not only among South Koreans, but also among individuals in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries. Further, such perceptions are also associated with the redistribution policies chosen in a country. This study provides evidence that societal beliefs about work and laziness, along with several other political and economic factors, such as pre-tax income inequality, political institutions, and union density, may explain the small-scale redistribution in South Korea.
This study investigates the voting behavior of Korean the electorate using Dalton’s four concepts of contemporary voters. We demonstrate that cognitive partisans, who possess strong party identification and high levels of cognitive skills, respond to regional party cue and ideology when voting. Ritual partisans and cognitive partisans behave alike but, for ritual partisans, ideology plays a diminished role due to their low cognitive skills. Two independent groups—apartisans and apoliticals—are prone to swing votes from election to election. Unlike apoliticals, apartisans are influenced by ideology as they possess higher levels of cognitive abilities. Our findings suggest that Dalton’s framework can be useful to understand voting patterns of electorates in new democracies as well as advanced democracies.
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