European Journal of Political Research 31: 99107, 1997. c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

99

NOMINATIONS AND REFLECTIONS

Does politics matter?

Does politics matter? An analysis of the public welfare commitment in advanced democratic states by Frank Castles, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK & Robert D. McKinlay, Department of Politics, University of Lancaster, UK EJPR 7 (1979): 169186. Abstract. The overriding conclusion of the majority of recent policy studies is that political factors play an insignicant role in inuencing policy outputs. We establish a number of models, comprising both economic and political variables, which are used in an attempt to indicate the relative salience of rival determinants of public welfare commitment in advanced democratic states. Though we cannot dismiss some inuence of economic factors, the main ndings run counter to the conventional wisdom of policy studies in indicating the greater salience of political factors as determinants of public welfare outputs.

Nomination: Comparative politics matters

GEOFFREY K. ROBERTS University of Manchester, United Kingdom Complying with a request to nominate one article from all those produced during the rst twenty-ve years of the European Journal of Political Research proved to be difcult, since so many articles have, in different ways, been inuential on ones own scholarship, academic reection and teaching. My choice of the article from the 1979 volume of the EJPR by Castles and McKinlay was made because of two no, three qualities which it seemed to possess: it dealt with a topic of interest in itself (the question of whether politics really did make a difference to policy outcomes); it treated that topic by means of an explicit comparative methodology; and it was extremely lucid in its exposition.

100 I have often utilised that article (and other work by Castles and his associates in the eld of comparative policy studies) for teaching purposes on courses concerned with comparative political analysis, because of its transparency as an exercise in comparative analysis. It rst discusses and denes the problem or question. The authors justify their concern with the issue of whether politics can be as irrelevant to the outcome of policy as various theorists of convergence and authors of books on the decline of ideology have suggested. This anti-politics literature is succinctly reviewed and placed in context. The purpose of the research is then explained (pp. 171172). Castles and McKinlay then consider the appropriate strategy and theoretical basis for the research (which they call in this article: research design, a good synonym) (pp. 172176). Within this part of the article, they identify their population: advanced democratic states, dened by their continuous and continuing possession of democratic politics and by a certain minimum level of GNP per capita ($2000 in 1974). Dependent variables are selected, and hypotheses are developed. Two of these hypotheses are intended to test the claim that politics is irrelevant, that it is indeed economic development which explains differences in welfare measures in advanced democratic states. Three hypotheses test the utility of the claim that politics does indeed matter, in terms of the unitary or federal structure of the state, in terms of the type of political leadership, and in terms of dominance of a secular or religious right-wing party in government. A nal hypothesis is designed to test the extent to which a combination of economic and political factors can explain differences in levels of public welfare commitment. The rationale of each hypothesis is explicated in relation to the overall purpose of the research investigation. The application of the data from 19 countries to the models being used to test the hypotheses then follows, producing an informative chart of these countries in terms of their GDP and position on a welfare index. The articles conclusion puts these ndings in context, carefully noting that the exercise seems to have identied a role for politics, but at the price of conrming how much levels of economic development also matter. The topic chosen by the authors is still an important one. The lucid exposition of their methodology by the authors would enable a skilled postgraduate to undertake a replication, and it would be fascinating to see what, if anything, had changed. Would Belgiums position in the Figure on p. 180 be altered signicantly by its crossing of the boundary between unitary and federal state structures? What of post-reunication Germany? What changes have been experienced by Britain in the period of Conservative rule since precisely this publication year of 1979? Or France during Mitterrands fourteen-year spell which commenced so soon afterwards? For a British scholar, the convergence between the policy proposals of the Blairs new Labour party and

101 the ThatcherMajor period of Conservative policymaking in areas of welfare, given that the share of GNP disbursed by the British state is hardly different now than it was under the premiership of Harold Wilson, would make such replication piquant indeed. The debate about the crisis of the welfare state, and the problems which the French, German and Italian governments have had and will continue to have (EMU convergence criteria and all) in keeping to a manageable size both the public sector outgoings on welfare spending and the expectations of the workforce concerning welfare provision, raise new questions about the ability of politicians to affect welfare budgets; and the consequences if they dont. Of course, alternative approaches to the subject have ourished as well: the work of Hofferbert, Klingemann and their associates on tests of the correlations between party programmes and policy outcomes (see, for example, their article in EJPR, Vol. 18 (1990): 277304) is particularly illuminating. And this article was published in 1979, nearly twenty years ago! This was a time when policy analysis in any systematic or scientic sense seemed still to be mainly an American preserve. The British had public administration instead. The use of statistical testing in political science was very much reserved to research in topics to do with political behaviour, and especially psephological studies (and until a few years previously had been suspect because of its association with newfangled American ideas). It is a measure of the inuence of pioneering articles such as this that it is no longer unusual for articles in the EJPR (and other scholarly political science journals), for papers at the joint workshops of the European Consortium for Political Research, for PhD theses in British universities, even, indeed, for undergraduate courses in departments of political science, to focus upon the systematic, often quantitative, investigation of comparative policy analysis. Finally, the authors unwittingly offered (on p. 182) what could well be adopted by the European Journal of Political Research as its motto for the next quarter-century: In short, politics does matter!

102

Reflections: Does politics matter? Increasing complexity and renewed challenges

FRANCIS G. CASTLES1 & ROBERT D. McKINLAY2 1 Australian National University; 2 University of Lancaster, UK 1. What we did When, in 1979, we set out to use the methods of applied quantitative research to test the sociological orthodoxy which at that time imbued much of analysis and theory in comparative politics and political sociology, that ultimately the determinants of political action were largely economic and social, our underlying concern was with the credentials of political science as an explanatory social science discipline. Already the post-war decades had seen Political Man (Lipset 1963) become an epiphenomenon of economic modernization and now, it appeared, that the case was being very widely accepted that state intervention to ameliorate the condition of the poor and helpless was also a function of modernity rather than of the conscious choice of concerned citizens or the efforts of movements of reform. If politics was not a question of choice, if the votes of voters and the actions of politicians were irrelevant to policy outcomes, what price democracy and what rationale for a discipline condemned merely to describe a process declared in advance to be a mere charade? The problem was that, circa 1979, the weapons available to political scientists to defend the view that politics mattered were not deployed to anything like maximum advantage. Within the discipline, the use of sophisticated quantitative techniques was, at the time largely quarantined to what was then described as the area of political behaviour, leaving policy-making as the descriptive domain of public administration and policy outcomes to be accounted for by economists and sociologists, the former using longitudinal research designs and the latter favouring large sample, cross-sectional, analysis. Our problem was that we believed very strongly in the scientic value of precisely the kind of quantitative methods that had produced the ndings which challenged the rationale for our disciplines continued intellectual relevance. We started, then, from a belief that entirely the wrong conclusions were being arrived at by more or less the right methods. The question was how that could be and our answer was that the sociologists were looking in the wrong place if they really wanted to prove what Wilensky asserted they had proved: that all rich countries had developed a similar set of conicting values and beliefs and had experienced a general convergence of social security

103 practice (Wilensky 1975: 49). The reason the sociologists were looking in the wrong place was that their guiding functionalist paradigm focused on the impact of modernization, leading comparativists in this tradition to base their ndings on large samples of countries at very diverse levels of economic development. There were two problems with this approach. First, it rested on a most different rather than most similar strategy of comparison (Przeworski & Teune 1970), ill-suited to locating the kinds of differences that the sociologists were only too ready to assert had disappeared. Second, as we sought to demonstrate (Castles & McKinlay 1979: 184), this particular comparison of very rich and very poor nations has inherent methodological problems, because the bipolar distribution of extreme values cancels out any variation which exists in these extreme groups. Our study employed an extremely simple research design. Basing our analysis on a most similar sample of 18 OECD nations, and building on prior research by Castles (1978), we focused on four measures of public welfare (educational expenditure, transfer payments, infant mortality rates and an additive index of general welfare) and examined the extent to which these co-varied with GDP per capita (our control for the socio-economic orthodoxy), type of political structure (federal/unitary), type of leadership (competitive/coalescent) and dominant political ideology (extent of Right political dominance). Our ndings are generally cited as an early contribution to that school of thought which emphasises the role of partisan control in the determination of policy outcomes, but, for reasons which will become apparent, that is not our own assessment of our contribution. Rather our satisfaction is a function of the fact that our paper was one of a wave of studies (in the same year, and in much the same subject area, examples include Gough (1979) and Stephens (1979)) which demonstrated the continued relevance of politics by showing that it mattered precisely where it was supposed to matter: in the determination of policy outcomes. Prior to 1979, research on the factors determining policy outcomes was the Achilles heel of academic political science. In the intervening years, comparative public policy has become a thriving sub-eld of the political science discipline and its hallmark has been an analytic strategy premised on the use of a most similar systems design. We are pleased to have been in at the beginning. 2. What has been done since Over nearly two decades, quantitative research on the determinants of public policy outcomes has become enormously more methodologically sophisticated. The quantum leap in methods terms has been the adoption largely by American scholars of pooled time-series methods. The promise of this

104 methodology is its potential to unleash a vastly greater explanatory power than hitherto and to reveal a complexity of causation previously inaccessible to quantitative analysis. Whereas, hitherto, our problem has been one of too many theories, not enough variables, it has now become possible to examine an array of cases limited only by the number of years that government agencies have been collecting outcomes data. OFCD data collected on an annual basis since 1960 generates around 600 degrees of freedom, where we worked with fewer than 20. So far this research effort has rarely realised its full potential. That is for two reasons. Both stem ultimately from a formalism bred of concerns for the professional status of the discipline. On the one hand, there are many for whom methodological bravura has become more important than intellectual substance. The result has been a series of studies which have been more concerned to improve the degree of explained variance than to generate cumulative and consistent ndings. On the other hand, comparative policy outcomes research has remained a battleground on which the claims of diverse disciplines and approaches have been contested. Where once the rival armies were those of sociology and political science, now the protagonists are often the adherents of diverse political science paradigms. Too often, papers have seemed less interested in building around the area of consensually agreed ndings and more concerned to demonstrate the explanatory priority of a power resources, a pluralist or a statist interpretation as a prior step to arguing for the hegemonic claims of a particular approach to political phenomena in general. That is the reason that we are not wholly attered to be seen solely as once valiant warriors in the cause of the party control hypothesis, an early variant of the power resources model. This is not because we do not believe that parties matter, but rather because our 1979 paper demonstrated that they mattered along with socio-economic factors and a variety of other political factors. Indeed, our paper showed that the signicance of decentralised political structures as impediments to active welfare intervention was markedly greater than the negative inuence of Right political dominance (Castles & McKinlay 1979: 180) and we saw this evidence for the impact of constitutional forms as constituting support for the view that politics mattered just as much as did the impact of parties. It, therefore, saddens us to be regarded as archetypical cold warriors in the battle of the paradigms or to encounter papers which perpetuate the notion that the battle remains worth ghting. The very best papers now using advanced quantitative methodology are those which are most catholic in their approach and which seek to use the new freedom to include a very wide range of independent variables in pooled designs consciously to explore the diversity of factors inuencing policy

105 outcomes. Excellent examples of what can be done with such a methodology are contributions by Hicks & Misra (1993) and by Huber, Ragin & Stephens (1993) to a symposium on the welfare state in the American Journal of Sociology in November 1993. Both of the these papers show what we hoped we had already demonstrated: that politics matters in a variety of ways and that the task of comparative public policy research is to map the range of that diversity, not restrictively to delimit its contours. 3. Where we are now In the past few years, there has been an increasing groundswell of concern that the broad focus of comparative policy research on the determinants of public intervention has been, in some respects, an inappropriate one. This is for two quite different kinds of reason. The rst is an increasing anxiety that we are not measuring what we thought we were measuring. The second involves a concern that the object of our investigations has ceased to be important. The rst issue has been well articulated by G sta Esping-Andersen (1990) o in his seminal research project on welfare state regimes. His basic critique of much of the kind of research we have been discussing here is that it has utilised public spending gures as proxies for policy outcomes, but that these outcomes are poorly if at all captured by expenditure data. If our claim that politics matters is premised on the notion that the state intervenes to alter the distribution of income in favour of the least well off, it is possibly anomalous to count as exemplars of redistribution those nations which spend most because they offer income-related social insurance. The point is that we should devote more attention to outcomes for individuals rather than to outputs from government (for another articulation of this argument, see Rose 1989: 110129) or rather that we should be mapping how the wide range of outputs from government become transformed into outcomes for individuals. Insofar as we make a move towards more adequate measures of individual outcomes, the story told by comparative public policy research is likely to become overlaid by a new layer of complexity. Almost axiomatically, the gross differences in policy outcomes discovered by contemporary research will be found to be smaller than once imagined, as it is realised that governments frequently achieve comparable outcomes via diverse means. To give but one instance, low pension expenditures in most Anglo-American nations are at least partially offset by policies encouraging high levels of home ownership which diminish the need for income support in old age. On the other hand, a story focusing on real outcomes is unlikely to be one of a lessened importance of politics, for, in place of differences often too vast to be convincing (is concern for the poor and helpless three times greater in Sweden than in Australia because in 1990 public expenditure on social protection in Sweden

106 was almost three times as great? see data in OECD 1994), there will be more subtle comparisons involving choice and evaluation of diverse policy instruments to often quite similar policy goals. The second source of dissatisfaction with the subject-matter of comparative research is that it is seen by some as being built around a problematic that is no longer relevant. From the beginning, the focus of this research has been primarily on national diversity in the development of the welfare state precisely because building the welfare state was seen to be the big project of the post-war epoch. To show that politics was important in this endeavour was to demonstrate that, in an age when ideologies were proclaimed to be dead, political choice remained signicant. Today, however, many would argue that the post-war welfare state project is complete or even defunct as governments everywhere are constrained to cut back on the size of the state. This view represents a renewed challenge to the politics matters position and has met with a variety of responses from comparative public policy scholars. One has been to declare the delayed death of ideology a temporary aberration now being dissolved by a globalization process, whose implications for domestic policy autonomy are not really so different from those attributed to socio-economic modernization only two decades past. This is the oft told story of the early 1990s: of the demise of the social democratic project and of the waning efcacy of corporatist political economy. In this account, domestic policy-making again falls victim to modernity, but modernity dened not so much in terms of economic growth as of the victory of international nance capitalism. Another, more novel and more interesting response, is to locate a new kind of politics of the welfare state, one that is concerned with the logistics and strategy of dismantling what a previous generation built (see Pierson 1994). Finally, there are some who want to question whether the new orthodoxy of the demise of the welfare state is any more compelling than the old orthodoxy of a universal convergence to a social security state. These latter scholars (see Swank 1992; Garrett 1995; Castles & Pierson 1996) remain part of a tradition which is unwilling to offer obsequies for politics in the absence of the corpus delicti. References
Castles, F.G. (1978). The social democratic image of society. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Castles, F.C. & McKinlay, R.D. (1979). Does politics matter? An analysis of public welfare commitment in advanced democratic states, European Journal of Political Research 7(2): 169186. Castles, F.G. & Pierson, C. (1996). A new convergence? Recent social policy developments in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, Politics and Policy (in press). Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Cambridge: Polity.

107
Garrett, G. (1995). Capital mobility, trade, and the domestic politics of economic policy, International Organization 49(4): 657687. Gough, I. (1979). The political economy of the welfare state. London: Macmillan. Hicks, A. & Misra, J. (1993). Political resources and the growth of welfare in afuent capitalist democracies, 19601982, American Journal of Sociology 99(3): 668710. Hofferbert, R.I. & Klingemann, H-D. (1990). The policy impact of party programmes and government declarations in the Federal Republic of Germany, European Journal of Political Research 18(3): 277304. Huber, E., Ragin, C. & Stephens, J.D. (1993). Social democracy, Christian democracy, constitutional structure, and the welfare state, American Journal of Sociology 99(3): 710749. Lipset, S.M. (1963). Political man. London: Mercury Books. OECD (1994). New orientations for social policy. Paris. Pierson, P. (1994). Dismantling the welfare state? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Przeworski, A. & Teune, H. (1970). The logic of comparative social inquiry. New York: John Wiley. Rose, R. (1989). Ordinary people in public policy. Beverly Hills, CA/London: Sage Publications. Stephens, J.D. (1979). The transformation from capitalism to socialism. London: Macmillan. Swank, D. (1992). Politics and the structural dependence of the State in democratic capitalist nations, American Political Science Review 86: 3854. Wilensky, H. (1975). The welfare state and equality. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.