ABSTRACT
Social pacts are standing out as a prevalent mode of welfare, labor market, and wage reform since the early 1980s in Western Europe. Between 1980 and 2006, 110 pacts covered a total of 145 issues within these three domains in 16 Western European countries (EU15 plus Norway). In addition, trade unions (and sometimes employers) also rejected a sizeable number (47) of pacts that governments had offered, resulting in a total of 157 pact offers extended by governments to unions and employers. Unsurprisingly, given this empirical prominence, social pacts have become the subject of a growing body of scholarly research. 1 While much of this research addresses the question of why pacts emerged just when corporatism was perceived as declining, so far our understanding of this phenomenon remains patchy. Consider the following: Ireland has a continuous history of social pacts from 1987 despite the fact that as a liberal market economy it does not appear to possess the preconditions for effective tripartism; in Austria, with a long history of tripartism, agreements were repudiated by governments after 1999 as they opted instead for union exclusion and legislation; in Italy, successive governments have oscillated between a preference for pacts and a preference for legislation; and even in Scandinavia, where strong unions would seem to make some form of union involvement in policymaking highly probable, Danish and Swedish governments have at times opted for legislation while excluding unions. So far we do not have an encompassing explanation for why some governments sometimes prefer reforms through pacts, but at other times would rather legislate; why countries that have similar economic and industrial relations institutions or patterns of economic performance nonetheless vary significantly in the predominance of pacts; and why countries with strong histories of corporatism or union inclusion in policymaking occasionally abandon these paths and opt for legislation as their preferred mode of reform.
