‘Modernize<i>and</i>Die’? German social democracy and the electoral consequences of the Agenda 2010

Schwander, Hanna; Manow, Philip

doi:10.1093/ser/mww011

Cited by 23 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…In the time period under investigation, Germany witnessed the emergence of two new populist parties, first in 2005 Die. Linke as a reaction to the encompassing labor market reforms enacted by the red-green government (Schwander and Manow, 2017b), and then in 2013 the radical right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a reaction to the euro and refugee crises (Franzmann, 2016;Schwander and Manow, 2017a). Despite several arguments in the literature that populist parties might increase turnout (Immerzeel and Pickup, 2015;Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017), we cannot see any such effect here [see also Schwander et al (2019) and Leininger and Meijers (2017) for similar findings].…”

Section: Regional Inequality and Turnout In Germanymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Don’t play if you can’t win’: does economic inequality undermine political equality?

Schäfer

Schwander

2019

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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In this paper, we investigate whether income inequality negatively affects voter turnout. Despite some progress, the answer to this question is still debated due to methodological disagreements and differences in the selection of countries and time periods. We contribute to this debate by triangulating data and methods. More specifically, we use three kinds of data to resolve the question: first, we use cross-sectional aggregate data of 21 OECD countries in the time period from 1980 to 2014 to study the relationship between inequality and electoral participation. Second, we zoom in on the German case and examine local data from 402 administrative districts between 1998 and 2017. Focusing on within-country variation eliminates differences that are linked to features of the political system. Finally, we combine survey data with macro-data to investigate the impact of inequality on individual voting. This final step also allows us to test whether the effect of income inequality on voter turnout differs across income groups. Taken together, we offer the most comprehensive analysis of the impact of social inequality on political inequality to date. We corroborate accounts that argue that economic inequality exacerbates participatory inequality.

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Section: Regional Inequality and Turnout In Germanymentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Don’t play if you can’t win’: does economic inequality undermine political equality?

Schäfer

Schwander

2019

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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“…Third, the eligibility criteria have been tightened with immediate sanctions being imposed if unemployed workers reject available job offers. In addition to the threat of losing income within a very short time, this implies that (high-)skilled workers may be pushed into low-skilled or even unskilled jobs (for a tabular summary of the different reforms, see Schwander and Manow, 2017).…”

Section: The Hartz Reformsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, it develops a new perspective on the discussion about the Hartz reforms that highlights the importance of considering its political consequences. To the best of my knowledge, a similar approach has only been adopted in the recent contribution by Schwander and Manow (2017), who assess the consequences for the social democratic party (SPD) which has implemented the reform. However, further political consequences have not yet been considered.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic miracle, political disaster? Political consequences of Hartz IV

Fervers

2018

Journal of European Social Policy

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The German Hartz IV reform has been a far-reaching labour market reform which reduced unemployment benefit generosity. The encompassing economic evaluation tends to confirm that the reform was an initial spark for the improvement of German labour market performance. At the same time, welfare state scholars have recently expressed concerns that such reforms may have far-reaching and detrimental political effects. In this article, I contribute to this discussion and analyse the political effects of Hartz IV including decreasing satisfaction with democracy, decreasing political participation and an increase of protest voting and political polarization. To identify the effect of the reform, I rely on bi-weekly representative survey data and exploit the announcement of the Hartz reforms as natural experiment. Comparing political attitudes of persons interviewed immediately before and after the announcement in regression analyses confirms that there was a sharp drop in satisfaction with democracy and the intention to participate in the next election, as well as increasing affinity to non-established and left-wing parties. Supplementary analyses show that the effect is stronger for unemployed workers who are more directly affected by the reform. These results are robust to different model specifications and estimation techniques. Moreover, placebo tests for past and previous years refute the concern that the effect is driven by other factors such as calendar time effects. These findings indicate that the political consequences of welfare state retrenchment go far beyond electoral punishment. This is possibly more relevant today than ever before as the current increase of populist parties substantially impedes the functioning of political systems in modern democracies.

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“…On average, 81 percent of the answers on Hartz IV were correct in Heidelberg compared with 63.8 percent on kontanthjælp in Aarhus. This difference has likely to do with the very high salience of the Hartz IV issue in Germany which has dominated the social policy discourse in that country ever since the reform was adopted in 2003 (Schwander & Manow, ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Policy knowledge among ‘elite citizens’

Jensen

Zohlnhöfer

2020

European Policy Analysis

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We have a very limited understanding of citizens’ knowledge about their social rights. It is well‐established that people on average know little about politics and research also suggests that many harbor substantial misperceptions about the outcomes of benefit systems in terms of the amount of fraud, trends in claims, and overall costs. Yet, we lack solid insights into people's knowledge about the design of social rights (what we label ‘policy knowledge’ for short). It is precisely this knowledge on the design of social policies, however, which is of prime importance for scholars of social policy because this is what governments actually change when reforming the welfare state. Employing survey evidence from Denmark and Germany, we try to address this lacuna. We find a mixed picture in the sense that policy knowledge in a few specific issues is high, but typically, when the issue has been salient in the public. Overall, policy knowledge is low.

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‘ModernizeandDie’? German social democracy and the electoral consequences of the Agenda 2010

Cited by 23 publications

References 47 publications

‘Don’t play if you can’t win’: does economic inequality undermine political equality?

‘Don’t play if you can’t win’: does economic inequality undermine political equality?

Economic miracle, political disaster? Political consequences of Hartz IV

Policy knowledge among ‘elite citizens’

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