(Page 9 of 51) - A Cross-national Comparative Study of the Policy Effects of Referendums authored by Hug, Simon. and Gilland Lutz, Karin.

but seem to put the stress on political actors’ ability to make choices ’now’ that
are independent of previous choices. Nevertheless, these authors, too, accept the
weight of history on the present (referred to as “structural limitation” (Huber
and Stephens, 2001, 29) in their work). Substantively, their argument is that
the relative inﬂuence of social democracy and Christian democracy on policy-
making is the foremost determinant of labor regulation policy output (see also
for more on the importance of left-party domination Korpi, 1983; Stephens, 1979;
Shalev, 2001): “the greater the dominance of social democratic ideology within
the labor movement and in the social consciousness of wage and salary earners,
the greater the power and labor vis--vis capital and the more redistributive the
policy outcomes” (Shalev, 2001, 26-27) they explain with respect to social democ-
racy. The diﬀerence between social and Christian democracy in this context is
that Christian democracy is associated primarily with transfer payments to work-
ers (exposing non-employed individuals to far greater social risks than employed
ones) and social democracy with redistribution less focused on workers and more
on citizens, which, the authors argue, reﬁnes the hitherto understanding of the
roles these types of political parties in forming policy outcomes (and here they
clearly draw on the work of Esping-Andersen (1990), see also Van Kersbergen
(1995)).

Huber, Ragin and Stephens (1993) also consider what they term state or con-

stitutional structures, meaning the institutions regulating conﬂict in a country.
Of particular interest in the current paper are not the policy-making activities of
bureaucrats, the eﬀects of past policy, political parties (which have already been
discussed above), or the state’s bureaucratic capacity, all of which are consid-
ered state structures by the three authors, but the degree of state centralization.
They write that “[T]hose features of constitutions that make it diﬃcult to reach
and implement decisions on the basis of narrow majorities - and that, conversely,
let minority interests obstruct legislation - will impede far-reaching reforms in
social policy, especially reforms that might beneﬁt the underprivileged majority.
[A]spects of constitutional structure that disperse political power and oﬀer mul-
tiple points of inﬂuence on the making and implementation of policy are inimical
to welfare state expansion” (Huber, Ragin and Stephens, 1993, 722). Since the
present paper is concerned with the policy eﬀects of direct-democratic institu-
tions, which create additional points of inﬂuence, the most obvious point to take