Coalition Patterns in Labour Market Policy – How Activation Policies Restructure the Political Contest in Western Europe

Activation policies became the means of choice to address typically post-industrial unemployment rates in a context of “permanent austerity” (Pierson 1996). However, comparatively little is known about how these “novel” policy instruments influence the political contest and the coalition formation mechanisms in this policy domain.

First, in line with the debate on multidimensional modernising reforms (Bonoli and Natali 2012; Häusermann 2010; Clasen and Clegg 2011) this paper investigates the nature of the political conflict in the domain of labour market policy and addresses the question whether the political elite’s preferences pertain to more than one dimension.

Second, the analyses address the political elite’s coalition patterns by focusing in particular on the political left testing the hypothesis whether social democratic parties address rather insider or outsiders’ interests (Rueda 2007, Schwander 2012).

The empirical analyses are based on a novel elite survey which captures labour market policy preferences of all actors involved in the political decision-making process, i.e. parties, state bodies, unions, employers’ and social movement organisations in three dualising (France, Germany, Italy) and in two flexicurity-oriented countries (Denmark, Switzerland). The analytical strategy relies on factor and cluster analyses of preference measures weighted by the respective issue salience (cf. Kriesi et al. 2008).

The empirical findings suggest that politics is essentially shaped by policy. In other words, the political elite's preference and coalition patterns are determined foremost by the regime specific institutional legacies and are structured on a redistributive and on an activation dimension. Interestingly, the most salient and controversial issues are related to policies which do not pertain to the conventional repertoire of the labour market regime at stake. Finally, the results support scholars arguing that mainstream left parties support the interests of both insiders and outsiders (Schwander 2012), however, it results that the precise nature of coalitions is regime specific.