A new approach to the study of partisan effects on social policy

Abstract:

Much research has analysed the influence of government partisanship on social policies. This contribution addresses three challenges in that literature. First, it advocates a dynamic linear modelling (DLM) approach well suited to address time-varying partisan effects.

Second, the DLM makes it possible to examine partisan effects country-by-country, thereby avoiding the cross-national pooling approach dominating this literature. Third, it offers a new approach to the challenge of choosing the right control variables. Empirically, we demonstrate the approach using data from 1972 to 2011 from 14 Western European countries.

The main conclusion is that the relationship between government partisanship and welfare generosity does not appear to vary over time according to any pattern predicted by existing theories. More generally, findings indicate that in the countries and years covered by this study, government partisanship has very little or no association with the five different social policy measures included in the analyses.