Category: Uncategorized

Taking stock of Welfare State Determinants: A new approach to assessing robustness in quantitative comparative research

By Michael Ganslmeier (University of Exeter) and Tim Vlandas (University of Oxford). First posted at SPA blog

The growth of quantitative comparative social policy research

Since Wilensky’s seminal work in 1975, the comparative welfare state literature has seen hundreds of quantitative studies exploring why some countries have more generous welfare states than others. Over time, the list of proposed determinants has grown substantially: economic growth and development, partisanship and party politics, globalisation and migration, union strength and economic coordination, political institution and fiscal capacity, and public opinion; to name just a few.

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New publication on estimating the Extent and Sources of Model Uncertainty in Political Science now out in PNAS

Together with Dr Michael Ganslmeier (University of Exeter), we have co-authored a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), titled Estimating the Extent and Sources of Model Uncertainty in Political Science. The article addresses a fundamental challenge in empirical social science: the extent to which published findings depend on defensible but ultimately variable modelling decisions.

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How and why actual class decline leads to far-right party support

Does downward class mobility increase the likelihood of voting for far-right parties? If so, why, and through which mechanisms? How important is the group of downwardly mobile individuals for driving far-right party success? In a new article with Alexi Gugushvili and Daphne Halikiopoulou we argue that downward class mobility significantly affects far-right voting but only under specific conditions.

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New article on Jihadist terrorist attacks and far right party preferences accepted in Perspectives on Politics

My joint article (with Halikiopoulou) entitled “Jihadist terrorist attacks and far right party preferences: An ‘unexpected event during survey design’ in four European countries” has now been accepted in Perspectives on Politics.

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New Political Quarterly article “From Gerontocracy to Gerontonomia”

One in five people in the EU and nearly one in ten in the world are now aged 65 and over. This demographic transformation is one of the great successes of the twentieth century and has been the focus of a large scholarship in the social sciences. Ageing has also profoundly altered the composition of electorates in many democracies. My new article for the political quarterly entitled “The Politics of Economic Stagnation in Ageing Democracies” explores whether and how this population ageing reshapes the relationship between democracy and capitalism. I argue that ageing changes the economic and policy priorities of a growing share of democracies’ electorates in ways that incentivise elected governments to prioritise certain social policies and economic outcomes, such as pensions and low inflation, at the expense of others, most notably greater social investments and pursuing economic growth. As a result, gerontocracies increasingly lead to what I call a ‘gerontonomia’ characterised by democratically sustained economic stagnation.

A summary of this article has appeared in the political quarterly blog and the LSE Europe blog. A more extensive version of this research project has been published as a Nuffield College working paper at the University of Oxford.