New Politics and Class Politics in the Context of Austerity and Globalization: Welfare State Regress in 18 Countries, 1975–95

The relevance of socioeconomic class and of class-related parties for policymaking is a recurring issue in the social sciences. The “new politics” perspective holds that in the present era of austerity, class-based parties once driving welfare state expansion have been superseded by powerful new interest groups of welfare-state clients capable of largely resisting retrenchment pressures emanating from postindustrial forces. We argue that retrenchment can fruitfully be analyzed as distributive conflict involving a remaking of the early postwar social contract based on the full employment welfare state, a conflict in which partisan politics and welfare-state institutions are likely to matter. Pointing to…