To understand how the welfare state adjusts to economic shocks it is important to explain both th... more To understand how the welfare state adjusts to economic shocks it is important to explain both the genesis of popular preferences and the institutional incentives of governments to respond to these preferences. This paper attempts to do both, using a general theoretical framework and detailed data at both the individual and national levels. In a first step, we focus on how risk exposure and income are related to preferences for redistribution. To test our hypotheses, we extract detailed risk exposure measures from labor force surveys and marry them to cross-national survey data. In a second step, we turn our attention to the supply side of government redistribution. Institutions, we argue, mediate governments' reactions to redistributional demands following economic shocks. Using time-series crosscountry data, we demonstrate how national training systems, electoral institutions as well as government partisanship shape government responses.
Thomas Cusack's book makes contributions to three different analytical problems in comparative po... more Thomas Cusack's book makes contributions to three different analytical problems in comparative political science. First, it compares local elected and administrative political personnel and political decision making processes in postindustrial capitalist and postcommunist democratic polities (chapters 2 and 4). Second, it probes into the explanatory power of cultural vs rational choice institutionalist approaches to comparative politics by explaining differences in citizens' satisfaction with local political governance (chapter 5). Third, Cusack analyses patterns of citizens' and elites' preferences over economic and non-economic policy issues (chapter 3). Chapters 2, 4, and 5 are explicitly concerned with local governance. Chapter 3, which might have been placed at the end of the volume, deals with patterns of ideological preference formation more generally. The empirical raw material of the book is a large survey among local elites in 40 Western German and 37 Eastern German municipalities, together with corresponding data in a population survey. This East-West-comparison is nested in a broader set of surveys providing identical information for a number of other West and East European countries, all taken in the mid-1990s. While these broader cross-national comparisons are brought in to provide benchmarks, the emphasis of the book is on the internal German East-West pair. Chapters 3-5 are each innovative in their own way, although the author does not always exploit all the theoretically interesting aspects of his data. Chapter 2 is a bread-and-butter survey of local political elite sociodemographics with only marginally interesting findings. Local elites, for example, come from a higher socioeconomic background than the average citizen in their community, but the gap is less than to national elites. Let us concentrate on the more interesting chapters 3-5. Chapter 5 (originally published as a journal article) provides a marvelous comparison of cultural and institutional determinants that affect citizens' perception of local government performance. The author develops a very innovative analytical characterization of local governance patterns and then tests for its relevance in shaping perceptions of government performance. It
Military spending in the West generally declined after the Cold War. Given the economic pressures... more Military spending in the West generally declined after the Cold War. Given the economic pressures that many of these states confronted, they can be said to have experienced a fortuitous conjunction of lessening security demands with stable if not rising pressures to allocate more resources to social purposes. However, with declining financial resources a good part of military capital in these countries was reduced and most of what remains is growing obsolete. The excessive rise in relative prices associated with major military capital items, a rise only partially associated with an increase in real effectiveness, poses a challenge for many of these states if they are to retain their capacity to provide in some meaningful way for their own military defense.
This paper provides an overview of the arms accumulation process and explicates two central and r... more This paper provides an overview of the arms accumulation process and explicates two central and related items within that process: the factors that go into the production of a state's military capabilities and the choices that states make between these factors. Using data on fifty major countries for the time span from 1962 to 1980, measures of capital and labor inputs are produced by employing principal components analysis in a pooled cross section/time series context. These measures are then used as the basis for assessing the level of conventional military capability available to states given a capability production function which assumes diminishing marginal returns to isolated factor inputs. The choice between inputs to capability production is discussed and a model representing the major considerations in such a decision is subject to empirical scrutiny. Zusammenfassung Dieser Aufsatz beinhaltet einen Uberblick iiber Prozesse des Ausbaus von militarischem Machtpotential. Zwei wesentliche und eng miteinander verkniipfte Komponenten, die in den RiistungsprozeB eingehen, sowie die Wahl, die Staaten beziiglich dieser Komponenten treffen, werden erlautert. Mafie fur"den eingebrachten Aufwand an Kapital und Arbeitskraft werden fur 50 Staaten wahrend der Jahre 1962 bis 1980 entwickelt. Dafiir wird eine Hauptkomponenten-Analyse mit der aus aggregierten Querschnittsdaten zusammengestellten Zeitreihe durchgefiihrt. Die so erhaltenen MaBe werden fur die Bewertung des vorhandenen konventionellen Riistungspotentials der Staaten herangezogen. Sie gehen in eine P'roduktionsfunk'tion ein, die von der Annahme abnehmenden Grenznutzens isolierter Input-Faktoren (Personal, Kapital) ausgeht. Die Wahl zwischen den Input-Faktoren Kapital und Personal fur das Rustungspotential der Staaten wird diskutiert. Ein Modell, in das die wichtigsten Bedingungen fur diese Entscheidung eingehen, wird empirisch uberpriift.
European Journal of Political Research, Jul 1, 1989
An examination of public employment and expenditure data for 17 OECD countries for the period 196... more An examination of public employment and expenditure data for 17 OECD countries for the period 1963-1983 reveals decelerating growth in public employment after 1970, whereas expenditure growth rates have been accelerating. Two contrary tendencies in public sector employment since the early 1970s are apparent: a general decline in goods and market services, and a significant increase in communal and social services. Comparative empirical analysis, using a pooled cross section-time series technique, confirms the important contribution of increasing wealth to public employment growth. Similarly, a strong societal position for organised labour and increasing unemployment rates contribute to public employment growth, thereby suggesting the presence of a discretionary stabilization policy. Contrary to expectations, however, increased trade dependence exerts a negative impact. With regard to the relationship between expenditure and employment, a general increase in the employment creation efficiency of spending can be discerned. Empirical estimates again suggest that the importance of labour in political-economic decision-making has intensified the employment creation effect of public spending.
n addition to his broader points that we address in our printed response, the bulk of Kreuzer’s c... more n addition to his broader points that we address in our printed response, the bulk of Kreuzer’s critique is a repudiation of some of our historical evidence. In our view, with one exception, every historical “inaccuracy ” which Kreuzer raises in relation to our original article is incorrect, misplaced, or misleading; and many of his own historical assertions are wrong. The problems Kreuzer alleges can be summarized as follows (with a preview of our responses): (1) Historical inaccuracies in our Table 4. Kreuzer argues that 12 of the 90 Yes/No entries in our key historical Table 4 are incorrect. These entries all concern economic institutions. If he were right, the consequent changes would be damaging to our theory as well as to our econometric results. But we believe that our entries are perfectly correct in 11 out of 12 of these cases. To do so we use detailed historical evidence which we referenced but did not set out in CIS, and we bring in additional evidence including from Kreu...
Der Weg vom Weltfrieden zum Weltkrieg hat mehrere kritische Abzweigungen. Nimmt die politische En... more Der Weg vom Weltfrieden zum Weltkrieg hat mehrere kritische Abzweigungen. Nimmt die politische Entwicklung eine Richtung, dann ist der Ausbruch von Kriegen wahrscheinlicher. Nimmt sie eine andere, dann sinkt die Kriegsgefahr. Nur allzu oft werden diese Abzweigungen (oder Wendepunkte) von den Betrachtern willkurlich — ad hoc oder nachtraglich — bestimmt, und die eingeschlagene Richtung idiosynkratischen Faktoren zugeschrieben.
Dieses Kapitel1 untersucht die politisch-institutionellen Bestimmungsfaktoren der Staatsausgaben.... more Dieses Kapitel1 untersucht die politisch-institutionellen Bestimmungsfaktoren der Staatsausgaben. Wir zeigen, dass eine der dramatischsten Entwicklungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in der enormen Ausdehnung von staatlicher Kontrollmacht uber okonomische Ressourcen bestand. Obwohl es sich dabei um einen allgemeinen Trend handelt, variiert die Geschwindigkeit der Ausdehnung des offentlichen Sektors zwischen den OECD-Landern betrachtlich. Wir werden zeigen, dass nicht nur okonomische, sondern auch politische Krafte die Expansion des Staatssektors im letzten Jahrhunderts masgeblich beeinflusst haben.
A recent wave of studies explores the effects of electoral institutions on economic interests. Th... more A recent wave of studies explores the effects of electoral institutions on economic interests. This paper instead examines the effects of economic interests on electoral institutions. We argue that electoral rules are a function of the nature and geographical dispersion of economic interests. Where class is the only economic division, the right always prefers majoritarian institutions (consistent with the distributive effects these institutions are known to have). Where interests are defined by investments in co-specific assets, and where these investments are geographically dispersed, (at least some) right parties will ally with the left to produce proportional representation (PR). They do so to protect their co-specific investments because PR is a representative system that permits opposition influence over regulatory policies. We explore the argument with historical data on economic structure and electoral systems. In recent years a wave of studies has shown the critical role of ...
The standard explanation for the choice of electoral institutions, building on Rokkan's semin... more The standard explanation for the choice of electoral institutions, building on Rokkan's seminal work, is that proportional representation (PR) was adopted by a divided right to defend its class interests against a rising left. But new evidence shows that PR strengthens the left and redistribution, and we argue the standard view is wrong historically, analytically, and empirically. We offer a radically different explanation. Integrating two opposed interpretations of PR—minimum winning coalitions versus consensus—we propose that the right adopted PR when their support for consensual regulatory frameworks, especially those of labor markets and skill formation where co-specific investments were important, outweighed their opposition to the redistributive consequences; this occurred in countries with previously densely organized local economies. In countries with adversarial industrial relations, and weak coordination of business and unions, keeping majoritarian institutions helped ...
... per608 = Multiculturalism: Negative. per701 = Labour Groups: Positive. per702 = Labour Groups... more ... per608 = Multiculturalism: Negative. per701 = Labour Groups: Positive. per702 = Labour Groups:Negative. per703 = Agriculture and Farmers. ... i. If you receive an error message such as 'fill_y.sav could not be erased it is read only or currently in use', just ignore it. ...
To understand how the welfare state adjusts to economic shocks it is important to explain both th... more To understand how the welfare state adjusts to economic shocks it is important to explain both the genesis of popular preferences and the institutional incentives of governments to respond to these preferences. This paper attempts to do both, using a general theoretical framework and detailed data at both the individual and national levels. In a first step, we focus on how risk exposure and income are related to preferences for redistribution. To test our hypotheses, we extract detailed risk exposure measures from labor force surveys and marry them to cross-national survey data. In a second step, we turn our attention to the supply side of government redistribution. Institutions, we argue, mediate governments' reactions to redistributional demands following economic shocks. Using time-series crosscountry data, we demonstrate how national training systems, electoral institutions as well as government partisanship shape government responses.
Thomas Cusack's book makes contributions to three different analytical problems in comparative po... more Thomas Cusack's book makes contributions to three different analytical problems in comparative political science. First, it compares local elected and administrative political personnel and political decision making processes in postindustrial capitalist and postcommunist democratic polities (chapters 2 and 4). Second, it probes into the explanatory power of cultural vs rational choice institutionalist approaches to comparative politics by explaining differences in citizens' satisfaction with local political governance (chapter 5). Third, Cusack analyses patterns of citizens' and elites' preferences over economic and non-economic policy issues (chapter 3). Chapters 2, 4, and 5 are explicitly concerned with local governance. Chapter 3, which might have been placed at the end of the volume, deals with patterns of ideological preference formation more generally. The empirical raw material of the book is a large survey among local elites in 40 Western German and 37 Eastern German municipalities, together with corresponding data in a population survey. This East-West-comparison is nested in a broader set of surveys providing identical information for a number of other West and East European countries, all taken in the mid-1990s. While these broader cross-national comparisons are brought in to provide benchmarks, the emphasis of the book is on the internal German East-West pair. Chapters 3-5 are each innovative in their own way, although the author does not always exploit all the theoretically interesting aspects of his data. Chapter 2 is a bread-and-butter survey of local political elite sociodemographics with only marginally interesting findings. Local elites, for example, come from a higher socioeconomic background than the average citizen in their community, but the gap is less than to national elites. Let us concentrate on the more interesting chapters 3-5. Chapter 5 (originally published as a journal article) provides a marvelous comparison of cultural and institutional determinants that affect citizens' perception of local government performance. The author develops a very innovative analytical characterization of local governance patterns and then tests for its relevance in shaping perceptions of government performance. It
Military spending in the West generally declined after the Cold War. Given the economic pressures... more Military spending in the West generally declined after the Cold War. Given the economic pressures that many of these states confronted, they can be said to have experienced a fortuitous conjunction of lessening security demands with stable if not rising pressures to allocate more resources to social purposes. However, with declining financial resources a good part of military capital in these countries was reduced and most of what remains is growing obsolete. The excessive rise in relative prices associated with major military capital items, a rise only partially associated with an increase in real effectiveness, poses a challenge for many of these states if they are to retain their capacity to provide in some meaningful way for their own military defense.
This paper provides an overview of the arms accumulation process and explicates two central and r... more This paper provides an overview of the arms accumulation process and explicates two central and related items within that process: the factors that go into the production of a state's military capabilities and the choices that states make between these factors. Using data on fifty major countries for the time span from 1962 to 1980, measures of capital and labor inputs are produced by employing principal components analysis in a pooled cross section/time series context. These measures are then used as the basis for assessing the level of conventional military capability available to states given a capability production function which assumes diminishing marginal returns to isolated factor inputs. The choice between inputs to capability production is discussed and a model representing the major considerations in such a decision is subject to empirical scrutiny. Zusammenfassung Dieser Aufsatz beinhaltet einen Uberblick iiber Prozesse des Ausbaus von militarischem Machtpotential. Zwei wesentliche und eng miteinander verkniipfte Komponenten, die in den RiistungsprozeB eingehen, sowie die Wahl, die Staaten beziiglich dieser Komponenten treffen, werden erlautert. Mafie fur"den eingebrachten Aufwand an Kapital und Arbeitskraft werden fur 50 Staaten wahrend der Jahre 1962 bis 1980 entwickelt. Dafiir wird eine Hauptkomponenten-Analyse mit der aus aggregierten Querschnittsdaten zusammengestellten Zeitreihe durchgefiihrt. Die so erhaltenen MaBe werden fur die Bewertung des vorhandenen konventionellen Riistungspotentials der Staaten herangezogen. Sie gehen in eine P'roduktionsfunk'tion ein, die von der Annahme abnehmenden Grenznutzens isolierter Input-Faktoren (Personal, Kapital) ausgeht. Die Wahl zwischen den Input-Faktoren Kapital und Personal fur das Rustungspotential der Staaten wird diskutiert. Ein Modell, in das die wichtigsten Bedingungen fur diese Entscheidung eingehen, wird empirisch uberpriift.
European Journal of Political Research, Jul 1, 1989
An examination of public employment and expenditure data for 17 OECD countries for the period 196... more An examination of public employment and expenditure data for 17 OECD countries for the period 1963-1983 reveals decelerating growth in public employment after 1970, whereas expenditure growth rates have been accelerating. Two contrary tendencies in public sector employment since the early 1970s are apparent: a general decline in goods and market services, and a significant increase in communal and social services. Comparative empirical analysis, using a pooled cross section-time series technique, confirms the important contribution of increasing wealth to public employment growth. Similarly, a strong societal position for organised labour and increasing unemployment rates contribute to public employment growth, thereby suggesting the presence of a discretionary stabilization policy. Contrary to expectations, however, increased trade dependence exerts a negative impact. With regard to the relationship between expenditure and employment, a general increase in the employment creation efficiency of spending can be discerned. Empirical estimates again suggest that the importance of labour in political-economic decision-making has intensified the employment creation effect of public spending.
n addition to his broader points that we address in our printed response, the bulk of Kreuzer’s c... more n addition to his broader points that we address in our printed response, the bulk of Kreuzer’s critique is a repudiation of some of our historical evidence. In our view, with one exception, every historical “inaccuracy ” which Kreuzer raises in relation to our original article is incorrect, misplaced, or misleading; and many of his own historical assertions are wrong. The problems Kreuzer alleges can be summarized as follows (with a preview of our responses): (1) Historical inaccuracies in our Table 4. Kreuzer argues that 12 of the 90 Yes/No entries in our key historical Table 4 are incorrect. These entries all concern economic institutions. If he were right, the consequent changes would be damaging to our theory as well as to our econometric results. But we believe that our entries are perfectly correct in 11 out of 12 of these cases. To do so we use detailed historical evidence which we referenced but did not set out in CIS, and we bring in additional evidence including from Kreu...
Der Weg vom Weltfrieden zum Weltkrieg hat mehrere kritische Abzweigungen. Nimmt die politische En... more Der Weg vom Weltfrieden zum Weltkrieg hat mehrere kritische Abzweigungen. Nimmt die politische Entwicklung eine Richtung, dann ist der Ausbruch von Kriegen wahrscheinlicher. Nimmt sie eine andere, dann sinkt die Kriegsgefahr. Nur allzu oft werden diese Abzweigungen (oder Wendepunkte) von den Betrachtern willkurlich — ad hoc oder nachtraglich — bestimmt, und die eingeschlagene Richtung idiosynkratischen Faktoren zugeschrieben.
Dieses Kapitel1 untersucht die politisch-institutionellen Bestimmungsfaktoren der Staatsausgaben.... more Dieses Kapitel1 untersucht die politisch-institutionellen Bestimmungsfaktoren der Staatsausgaben. Wir zeigen, dass eine der dramatischsten Entwicklungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in der enormen Ausdehnung von staatlicher Kontrollmacht uber okonomische Ressourcen bestand. Obwohl es sich dabei um einen allgemeinen Trend handelt, variiert die Geschwindigkeit der Ausdehnung des offentlichen Sektors zwischen den OECD-Landern betrachtlich. Wir werden zeigen, dass nicht nur okonomische, sondern auch politische Krafte die Expansion des Staatssektors im letzten Jahrhunderts masgeblich beeinflusst haben.
A recent wave of studies explores the effects of electoral institutions on economic interests. Th... more A recent wave of studies explores the effects of electoral institutions on economic interests. This paper instead examines the effects of economic interests on electoral institutions. We argue that electoral rules are a function of the nature and geographical dispersion of economic interests. Where class is the only economic division, the right always prefers majoritarian institutions (consistent with the distributive effects these institutions are known to have). Where interests are defined by investments in co-specific assets, and where these investments are geographically dispersed, (at least some) right parties will ally with the left to produce proportional representation (PR). They do so to protect their co-specific investments because PR is a representative system that permits opposition influence over regulatory policies. We explore the argument with historical data on economic structure and electoral systems. In recent years a wave of studies has shown the critical role of ...
The standard explanation for the choice of electoral institutions, building on Rokkan's semin... more The standard explanation for the choice of electoral institutions, building on Rokkan's seminal work, is that proportional representation (PR) was adopted by a divided right to defend its class interests against a rising left. But new evidence shows that PR strengthens the left and redistribution, and we argue the standard view is wrong historically, analytically, and empirically. We offer a radically different explanation. Integrating two opposed interpretations of PR—minimum winning coalitions versus consensus—we propose that the right adopted PR when their support for consensual regulatory frameworks, especially those of labor markets and skill formation where co-specific investments were important, outweighed their opposition to the redistributive consequences; this occurred in countries with previously densely organized local economies. In countries with adversarial industrial relations, and weak coordination of business and unions, keeping majoritarian institutions helped ...
... per608 = Multiculturalism: Negative. per701 = Labour Groups: Positive. per702 = Labour Groups... more ... per608 = Multiculturalism: Negative. per701 = Labour Groups: Positive. per702 = Labour Groups:Negative. per703 = Agriculture and Farmers. ... i. If you receive an error message such as 'fill_y.sav could not be erased it is read only or currently in use', just ignore it. ...
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Papers by Thomas Cusack