ABSTRACT
What accounts for the variation in the presence of social pacts or legislation to reform wages, welfare policies, and labor markets across countries and within countries over time in Western Europe? To obtain systematic evidence about the factors that privilege reform through pacts or legislation, this chapter presents a statistical analysis of variables that we expect to matter if our argument about electoral considerations and governments’ reform strategies is valid. Chapter 2 summarized some of the prominent explanations the literature has proposed concerning the genesis of social pacts and pointed to the prominence of variables relating to economic institutions and labor relations. Chapter 3 laid out the reasoning for our focus on governments as political actors rather than just economic managers by linking governments to political parties and voters in an increasingly volatile and competitive electoral environment. We then explained how governments can use social pacts or legislation to minimize the potential electoral backlash to reforms. Here, we build on these literatures. In furthering the arguments presented in the previous two chapters, we hypothesize more specifically the conditions under which governments might be more likely to prefer pacts or legislation to embrace wage, welfare, or labor market reforms that are potentially unpopular with electoral constituencies.
