through the 1980s, followed by a spike in the first half of the 1990s, and then a second decline.
Clearly, these results are not consistent with expectations that one might reasonably derive from
the VofC literature (as well as earlier literature on the consensual nature of politics in corporatist
countries).
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section 1, we review some of the
literature on government partisanship and welfare spending. In section 2, we introduce the VofC
approach, and derive the expectations about the effects of partisanship articulated above.
Sections 3-6 set up our empirical analysis: we briefly elaborate on our use of growth of social
spending per capita as the dependent variable in section 3, introduce alternative measures of
government partisanship in section 4, describe the battery of control variables that are included in
our analysis in section 5, and present our regression model in section 6. In section 7, we present
our empirical results for the 1962-98 period as a whole and in section 8 we present the results of
our moving-windows analysis. Finally, we conclude (in section 9) by discussing the implications
of our results for the VofC approach to the welfare state and speculate on why it might be that the
public provision of social welfare has apparently become more politically contentious in SMEs
than in LMEs over the last two decades.
1. Government partisanship and welfare spending
In the welfare state literature, the proposition that the partisan composition of government
matters to policy outcomes is closely associated with the “power resources model” developed by
Korpi (1978, 1983, 1989) and adopted, sometimes with modifications, by many other scholars,
most notably Stephens (1979) and Esping-Andersen (1985, 1990). As formulated by Korpi, the
power resources model treats trade unions and Left parties as representative of working-class
interests in the “democratic class struggle.” The public provision of social welfare caters to the
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