Thesis
Reference
La reconfiguration de la politique de la clase ouvrière
GALINDO ALFONSO, Jorge
Abstract
Pour beaucoup de personnes dans les pays occidentaux, avoir un emploi à vie ne peut plus être considéré comme sûre. Au cours des deux dernières décennies, la précarité de l'emploi a augmenté de manière prononcée et constante. La crise économique et institutionnelle, provoquée par ces facteurs structurels, a porté la démocratie à ce qu'on comprend maintenant comme un moment politique et institutionnel déterminant. Les principaux partis qui ont traditionnellement soutenu l'élaboration des politiques en Europe ont perdu rapidement du terrain au profit d'un groupe très hétérogène de nouvelles formations anti-établissement. La crise est particulièrement aiguë pour les partis sociaux-démocrates: ils perdent leur espace en tant que négociateurs politiques parmi groupes de classe. La présente thèse examine comment et pourquoi ces changements se produisent en termes de modèles de vote, de préférences politiques et de reformes de politiques.
GALINDO ALFONSO, Jorge. La reconfiguration de la politique de la clase ouvrière . Thèse de doctorat : Univ. Genève, 2019, no. SdS 109
URN : urn:nbn:ch:unige-1173060
DOI : 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:117306
Available at:
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:117306
Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.
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politics
THÈSE
présentée à la Faculté des sciences de la société de l’Université de Genève
par
Jorge Galindo Alfonso
sous la direction de
prof. Lucio Baccaro
pour l’obtention du grade de
Docteur en sciences de la société mention sociologie
Membres du jury de thèse:
M. Bruno AMABLE, Professeur M. Lucio BACCARO, Professeur Mme. Silja HAUSERMANN, Professeur
M. Harry Jonas PONTUSSON, Professeur, président du jury
Thèse no 104 Genève, 25 février 2019
Thèse no 109
La Faculté des sciences de la société, sur préavis du jury, a autorisé l’impression de la présente thèse, sans entendre, par-là, émettre aucune opinion sur les propositions qui s’y trouvent énoncées et qui n’engagent que la responsabilité de leur auteur.
Genève, le 25 Février 2019
Le doyen
Bernard DEBARBIEUX
Impression d'après le manuscrit de l'auteur
Abstract ... vii
Remerciements - Acknowledgements ... ix
Chapter 1. Introduction ... 11
1.1 Part I. New trajectories and determinants of working class vote ... 11
1.1.1 A new notion of the working class? ... 12
1.1.2 Rising working class divisions ... 13
1.2 Part II. The new fight for labour market policies among workers ... 15
1.3 Outline of the dissertation ... 16
Chapter 2. Where Have All the Working Class Voters Gone? ... 21
2.1 The new faces of working class vote ... 22
2.2 Why these changes? ... 24
2.2.1 A matter of mistrust? ... 24
2.2.2 Economic anxiety vs identity? ... 25
2.3 Analysis: setup and results ... 26
2.3.1 Measuring working class vote propensity ... 26
2.3.2 Explaining working class vote choices ... 29
2.3.3 Cross-factor comparison and summing up results ... 34
2.4 Interpreting and concluding ... 34
Chapter 3. Dualism, Welfare State, and the Populist Radical Right ... 41
3.1 Populism and the Transformation of European Party Systems ... 42
3.1.1 Exclusion (or the fear of it) as a determinant of PRR vote ... 42
3.1.2 Insiders, outsiders and the exclusionary far-right ... 44
3.2 Data, methodology and results ... 46
3.2.1 Dualisation and PRR vote ... 46
3.2.2 Pinning down the mechanism ... 48
3.2.3 Country-level effects ... 50
3.3 Concluding remarks ... 51
Chapter 4. Workers’ preferences on flexicurity ... 59
4.1 The insider/outsider framework and its main critiques ... 60
4.1.1 The basic framework ... 60
4.1.2 The class/occupation critique ... 60
4.1.3 Combined approaches ... 61
4.2 What works best? ... 62
4.3 Operationalisation & methods ... 64
4.4 Results ... 67
4.5 Interpreting and concluding ... 69
Chapter 5. A (social democratic) escape from dualisation? ... 75
5.1 When elite battles take it from the base ... 76
5.2 Dualisation and its consequences over social democratic parties: the emergence of an internal battle ... 77
5.2.1 The origins of dualisation ... 77
5.2.2 The battle over dualisation within party structures ... 78
5.3 When structural factors meet the internal divisions ... 80
5.3.1 The crisis in Spain and Zapatero’s labour market reform ... 81
5.3.2 The crisis in Italy: Fornero’s and Renzi’s reform ... 83
5.4 Reconsidering alternative explanations ... 87
5.5 Concluding ... 88
Chapter 6. Concluding remarks ... 97
6.1 Voting choices: class matters (somehow) ... 97
6.2 Policy choices: class vs job position ... 98
6.3 Cross-chapter potential connections: paths for future research ... 98
6.4 Beyond research ... 99
Appendix ... 101
Résumé
Pour beaucoup de personnes dans les pays occidentaux, avoir un emploi à vie ne peut plus être considéré comme sûre. Au cours des deux dernières décennies, la précarité de l'emploi a augmenté de manière prononcée et constante. Les syndicats, les travailleurs privés de leurs droits, les experts et les politiciens soulignent tous que le travail précaire est un problème majeur fortement lié à certaines dispositions légales qui permettent et même renforcent son existence. Dans ce contexte, la récession européenne du période 2008-2013 a eu d'énormes conséquences.
La crise économique et institutionnelle, provoquée par ces facteurs structurels, a porté la démocratie à ce qu’on comprend maintenant comme un moment politique et institutionnel déterminant. Les principaux partis qui ont traditionnellement soutenu l'élaboration des politiques en Europe ont perdu rapidement du terrain au profit d'un groupe très hétérogène de nouvelles formations anti- établissement. La crise est particulièrement aiguë pour les partis sociaux-démocrates: ils perdent leur espace en tant que négociateurs politiques parmi groupes de classe.
Je considère que la disparition des partis traditionnels, en tant que responsables directs de la tendance enregistrée dans la réglementation du marché du travail (et d'autres domaines) depuis 1973, ne peut pas être comprise isolement de l'élaboration des politiques. L'évolution des préférences politiques des électeurs compte tenu de leur position au sein de la structure économique et de son lien avec l'offre de politique constitue le fil conducteur de la présente thèse. Compte tenu de sa grande portée, allant depuis préférences réglementaires et sociopolitiques générales jusqu’à des choix et des résultats spécifiques, je suis une structure à quatre papiers regroupés en deux parties, ce qui me permet de tester quatre arguments différents. Les résultats combinés nous aident à mieux comprendre la vague actuelle de changement politique.
La première partie traite du comportement du vote. La conclusion principale du chapitre deux est que le nouveau choix politique de la classe ouvrière est l'abstention, bien que, comparée à d'autres groupes de classe, elle est plus susceptible d'opter pour l'extrême droite. De manière significative, les deux tendances sont devenues comparativement plus intenses après 2008. À l’heure de préciser les facteurs derrière ces décisions, les données montrent que les électeurs économiquement inquiets de la classe ouvrière sont poussés vers l'abstention et pas vers l'extrême droite, tandis que les électeurs anti-immigration de classe ouvrière choisissent l'extrême droite. Dans les deux cas, la classe ouvrière européenne post-2008 est beaucoup plus influencée par ces facteurs.
Le chapitre trois analyse la classe ouvrière en fonction du poste occupé. On constate que les travailleurs sont plus enclins à choisir des partis de droite exclusifs (PRR, ou partis de droite radicalement populiste) chaque fois qu’ils jouissent d’un statut acquis qui pourrait être attaqué, c’est-à- dire s’ils sont devenus des travailleurs permanents (initiés). Ces segments sont plus susceptibles de voter pour le PRR d'exclusion par rapport aux outsiders. On considère que la plate-forme entièrement protectionniste de PRR présente un intérêt particulier pour la protection de son statut économique.
Ainsi, les initiés confrontés à une concurrence accrue au sein de son segment du marché du travail et ceux dont la situation matérielle serait la plus touchée en cas de perte de leur statut auraient encore plus de chances de choisir une plate-forme entièrement protectionniste. Au même temps, la tendance est plus marquée dans les pays où les systèmes de protection sociale sont fondés sur le statut (par exemple, les États-providence bismarckiens) et offrent donc une protection plus large aux initiés par rapport aux étrangers.
L'idée à retenir jusqu’ici c’est que, dans certains pays, la structure de la demande politique ainsi que la répartition des risques économiques et du marché du travail conditionnent l'émergence d'une nouvelle offre de partis hors du centre politique. Il y a toutefois une conclusion plus simple: les politiques spécifiques sont importantes.
La flexicurité, définie comme une manière de « liquide en échange flexibilité » a été présentée comme une solution politique visant à réduire les divisions grandissantes au sein de la classe ouvrière. Il s’agit toutefois d’une proposition qu’on voit rarement promulguée. Quelle est la raison ? Répondre à cette énigme est pertinent pour comprendre les déterminants des réformes sous-optimales du marché du travail. Il est aussi potentiellement significatif dans un sens plus large: il présente un micro-cosmos
expliquant pourquoi et comment les électeurs sont désenchantés des partis traditionnels dans les situations de crise. La deuxième partie de la thèse est consacrée à cette question. Le chapitre quatre mène une analyse préliminaire concluant que les différences de postes (employés / chômeurs) donnent des indices vérifiables sur l’idée de savoir pourquoi et comment une coalition pro-flexicurité pourrait être créée, mais les différences de classe confèrent un pouvoir explicatif similaire, voire supérieur. Les chômeurs sont plus susceptibles que les employés de préférer des réductions de la protection de l'emploi, un investissement accru des politiques actives du marché du travail et le maintien du niveau des allocations de chômage. Ainsi, ils ont tendance à préférer la flexicurité à son alternative opposée. Mais ils ne préfèrent pas une libéralisation complète (réduisant les trois systèmes de protection) à une protection complète (maintien de la protection de l'emploi, des avantages non liés à l'emploi et des politiques actives du marché du travail à des niveaux élevés). Au même temps, les employeurs et les professionnels montrent des préférences plus fortes que les travailleurs manuels peu ou moyennement qualifiés en ce qui concerne la flexicurité et la libéralisation. Bien que ce soit une approche exploratoire qui évite de tirer des conclusions solides, le cadre professionnel offre des perspectives un peu plus prometteuses, mais la perspective du poste reste clairement pertinente pour expliquer le soutien variable apporté aux différentes options de réforme du travail.
Le chapitre cinq, cherche à comprendre pourquoi certains pays démocratiques poursuivent réformes du marché du travail alors que d’autres ne le font pas. Cette vaste question est au cœur de l’économie politique comparée. Il est bien établi que les parties prenantes forment et consolident les préférences politiques en fonction de quatre facteurs: coalitions disponibles, incitations générées par des mesures antérieures, idées disponibles et conditions structurelles actuelles qui déterminent à la fois leurs possibilités de croissance et leur répartition.
Les gouvernants sont en tout état de cause des acteurs essentiels dans l’élaboration des politiques. Si la path dependence et les déterminants structurels restent constantes, on pourrait alors soutenir que la composition idéologique du gouvernement devient la clé pour comprendre la variation des réformes du marché du travail. Si bien on attend généralement que les partis de droite produisent des réformes de libéralisation, il peut être plus difficile de prédire les résultats lorsque les réformes sont entre les mains de partis de gauche constitués d'un noyau constitué de travailleurs. Les cas de l'Italie et de l'Espagne pendant la grande récession (2008-2013) sont un bon exemple. Les deux pays ont des structures de marché du travail profondément dualisées, avec différents niveaux de protection efficace contre le risque de chômage accordés à différents travailleurs en fonction de leurs positions contractuelles, divisant la population active entre les personnes protégées (c.-à-d. insiders) et les non protégées (c.-à-d. outsiders). Les deux pays ont porsuivi les mêmes solutions politiques à plusieurs reprises pour résoudre la dualisation, par la réduction de l’écart de protection entre types de contrats.
Au cours de la Récession, les deux pays ont été soumis à des pressions structurelles étrangères similaires pour libéraliser leurs lois du travail. Dans les deux cas, un parti de centre-gauche était en charge. Malgré toutes ces coïncidences, l’Italie a poursuivi une réforme beaucoup plus ambitieuse. Le but de ce chapitre est d’examiner pourquoi elle a choisi de la faire.
Je soutiens que, bien que le parti italien Partito Democratico (PD) et l’espagnol Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) aient une aile réformiste et une autre favorable au statu quo, le front réformiste ne parvient qu'à gagner la bataille interne dans le PD. Les deux ailes mènent la même bataille depuis des décennies dans les deux pays, et chaque chef de parti est arrivé au pouvoir avec un compromis entre les deux ailes. À l'exception du Premier Ministre italien Matteo Renzi, qui a accédé au pouvoir en 2013 avec un discours clairement réformiste et pro-changement qui décrivait les syndicats et ses représentants comme des bloqueurs intéressés. Sa victoire au sein du parti a été obtenue grâce à une stratégie «confrontationiste» soutenue par les réformistes, qui jouissent d'une présence assez importante au sein du PD depuis que le parti a été conçu dès le début comme une alliance entre centristes et socialistes. Lorsque Renzi a associé sa victoire interne aux élections primaires de 2013 au résultat favorable du parti aux élections européennes de 2014, il a affirmé qu'il avait reçu un mandat de changement. Ceci (avec la charge de problèmes, la pression externe) était la fenêtre d'opportunité des réformistes pour faire pression en faveur d'une réforme à grande échelle. En Espagne, les réformistes ont utilisé le même argument, mais l'absence d'un chef de parti capable d'utiliser un mandat politique pour faire pression en faveur de la réforme a entravé leurs tentatives.
Dans son ensemble, ces quatre chapitres offrent une vue en mosaïque de la reconfiguration de la politique de la classe ouvrière.
Abstract
For many people in Western countries, having a job for life cannot be taken for granted any more. In the last two decades there has been a steep and steady increase in job insecurity. Unions, disenfranchised workers, experts and politicians, all highlight precarious work as a major problem that is intimately related to certain legal provisions that allow and even foster its existence. Within this context, the 2008-2013 European recession had enormous consequences.
The economic and institutional crisis that ensued from these structural factors brought democracy to what is understood now as a defining political and institutional moment. The mainstream parties that traditionally sustained policymaking in Europe are rapidly losing ground in favour of a very heterogeneous group of new anti-establishment formations. The crisis is particularly acute for social democratic parties: They are losing their space as a political dealmaker between class groups.
I consider that the demise of mainstream parties, as chief architects of the trend registered in labour market regulation (and other fields) since 1973, cannot be understood in isolation from policymaking.
The changing political preferences of voters given their positions within the economic structure, and how does it relate to policy supply, constitutes the common thread of the present dissertation. Given such a broad scope, going from broad regulatory and socio-political preferences to specific choices and outcomes, I follow a four-paper structure grouped in two parts, which allows me to test four separate arguments. The combined results help us better understand the current tide of political change.
The first part deals with voting behavior. Chapter two's main finding is that the new political home of the working class is abstention, although, when compared to other class groups, it is also more likely to opt for the far-right. Significantly, both trends have become comparatively more intense after 2008.
When it comes to further pin down the factors behind these decisions, data shows that economically anxious working class voters are being driven towards abstention and not towards the far-right, while anti-immigration working class voters are choosing the far-right. In both cases, the post-2008 European working class is much more determined by these factors.
Chapter three breaks down the working class depending on job position. It is found that workers are more prone to choosing exclusionary right wing parties (PRR, or Populist Radical Right parties) whenever they have a gained status that might be attacked, i.e. when they have become permanent workers (insiders). These segments are more likely to vote for the exclusionary PRR when compared to outsiders. It is considered that PRR's all-protectionist platform is of special interest for protecting their economic status. Thus, insiders facing more competition within its segment of the labour market, and those whose material situation would be most affected in case of losing their status, would be even more likely to choose an all-protectionist platform. At the same time, the trend is steeper in countries where welfare systems are status-based (i.e. Bismarckian welfare states), and therefore offer a larger protection to insiders compared to outsiders.
The takeaway idea of the first and second paper is that, in some countries, the structure of political demand plus the distribution of economic and labour market risks conditions the emergence of new party supply away from the political centre. There is a simpler bottom line, however: Policies matter.
Flexicurity, defined as some form of “cash in exchange for flexibility”, has been portrayed as a policy solution to reduce the growing divisions within the working class. It is, however, a proposal that you rarely see enacted. Why is that so? Answering to this puzzle is relevant for understanding the determinants behind suboptimal labour market reforms. It is also potentially significant in a broader sense: It presents a micro-cosmos on why and how do voters become disenchanted with traditional parties in crisis situations. The second part of the dissertation is devoted to it.
Chapter four conducts a preliminary analysis finding that differences in job position (employed/unemployed) give testable clues to the idea of why and how a pro-flexicurity coalition might be crafted, but class differences convey similar, if not superior, explanatory power. The unemployed are more likely than the employed to prefer employment protection reductions, increased investment in active labour market policies and maintaining levels of unemployment benefits. Thus, they tend to prefer flexicurity over its opposite alternative. But they do not prefer complete liberalisation (reducing all three protection systems) over full-scale protection (keeping employment protection, non- employment benefits and active labour market policies at high levels). At the same time, employers and professionals do display more intense preferences than mid- and low-skilled manual workers towards both flexicurity and liberalisation. If anything, and although this is only an exploratory
approach that refrains from establishing strong conclusions, the occupational framework delivers somewhat more promising insights, but the job position perspective remains clearly relevant to explain varying support for different options of labour reform.
Chapter five, finally, aims to explore why some democratic countries pursue such labour market reforms while others do not. This admittedly broad question lies at the heart of comparative political economy. It is well established that stakeholders form and consolidate political preferences based on four factors: Available coalitions, incentives generated by past measures, available ideas, and present structural conditions which determine both the opportunities for growth and distributing it.
Governing parties are in any case pivotal actors in policymaking. If path dependency and structural determinants are left as constants, then it could be argued that the government’s ideological composition becomes the key to understanding variation in labour market reforms. While it is generally expected for right-leaning parties to produce liberalizing reforms, it can be more difficult to predict the results when reforms are in hands of left-leaning parties with a core constituency formed by workers. A good instance is provided by the cases of Italy and Spain during the Great Recession (2008-2013).
Both countries have deeply dualised labour market structures, with different levels of effective protection against the risk of unemployment given to different workers depending on their contractual positions, dividing working population between the protected (i.e. insiders) and the unprotected (i.e.
outsiders). Both countries have had the same policy solutions repeatedly floated to solve dualisation through the reduction of the breach of protection between contractual types. During the Recession, both countries faced similar structural pressures from abroad to liberalise their labour laws. In both cases there was a centre-left party in charge. Yet, in spite of all these coincidences, Italy pursued a much more ambitious reform. The aim of this chapter is to examine why it elected to do so.
I argue that, while in both the Italian Partito Democratico (PD) and the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) there is a reformist wing and a pro-status quo wing, the reformist front only manages to win the internal battle in the PD. Both sides have been fighting this same battle for decades in both countries, and every single party leader has come to power with a compromise between both wings. Except for Italian PM Matteo Renzi, who in 2013, came to power with a clear reformist, pro-change discourse that portrayed unions and its representatives as self-interested blockers. His victory within the party was achieved thanks to a 'confrontationalist' strategy supported on reformists, who enjoy a somewhat prominent presence within the PD since the party was conceived from the beginning as an alliance between centrists and socialists. When Renzi coupled his internal victory in the 2013 primary election with the party's favourable result in the 2014 European election, he argued that he had received a mandate for change. This (together with problem load, external pressure) was the reformists' window of opportunity to push for a full-scale reform. In Spain, reformists used the same argument set but the lack of a party leader who was able to use a mandate for change to push for reform hampered their attempts.
Put together, these four chapters offer a mosaic view on the reconfiguration of undergoing dynamics within working class politics.
Remerciements - Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to express my deep appreciation towards my supervisor, Professor Lucio Baccaro, for his strong support and good advice, as well as for his patience, during all the stages of the present dissertation.
I would also like to thank the members of my jury for their disinterested commitment and for their valuable feedback and fruitful criticism, opening my eyes to previously unconsidered angles.
At the same time, I must send a thank you to the Swiss National Science Foundation. The SNF gave me essential funding and the initial opportunity to develop the project that culminates in this dissertation.
Beyond that, I hold a very important intellectual and personal debt with Professor Pepe Fernández- Albertos, who opened the door for this project. He was the one who made me aware of the SNF's opening, and kindly supported my candidacy. Also, I consider Gonzalo Rivero to be my informal academic mentor. Without his experienced support I would have never been able to navigate the academic world. A huge thanks goes for him as well.
The list of people whose comments, debates and points of view have greatly enriched my perspectives is quite long. But I must include at the very least those who have accompanied me as members or collaborators of Politikon during all these years. Aside from Gonzalo himself, that list includes Luis Abenza, Berta Barbet, Sílvia Clavería, Elena Costas, Juan Font, Lucas Gortázar, Kantor, Kiko Llaneras, Ramón Mateo, María Ramos, Octavio Medina, Jorge San Miguel, Roger Senserrich, and Pablo Simón. I could have never dreamt of a better group of people to debate with for eight years now (and counting).
Guillem Vidal, a person who is not only my co-author in one of the papers presented here, but also a brilliant political scientist who never studied political science, deserves all recognition for any good thing springing from chapter three.
I reserve a special place in this list to my closest family. My parents, Geles and Andrés, my uncles and my cousin (Aurora, Toni and Andrea). If I have any love and respect for knowledge, I owe it to them. If I have been able to come this far without getting crazy in the process, I owe it to them as well.
But, most of all, I am infinitely thankful for having come to Geneva following your path, Catalina, and for the relentless, unconditional support that you have given me since that moment, almost six years ago. Wife, friend, partner, companion... I don't care that much about the word. What I care about is our common life project. I hope this dissertation enables and enhances it in the same way you empower the best part of me every single day. I hope, and I promise, that the culmination of this long trip will impulse us to further discover the world together.
Chapter 1. Introduction
The mainstream parties that used to sustain policy-making in Europe are now losing ground to a heterogeneous group of new formations with their common trait (if they share any) of being self- proclaimed anti-establishment platforms. They appear on the left (e.g. Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece), on the right (e.g. Front National in France, Jobbik in Hungary), but also on the political centre (e.g. En Marche in France, Ciudadanos in Spain, M5S in Italy). Political scientists have given a great deal of attention to both new right-wing (e.g. Kitschelt 2007; Rydgren 2007 among many others) and new left-wing (Lavelle 2008; March and Rommerskirchen 2015) parties, as well as to the most affected among traditional political families. On the demand side, the working class is accumulating most of the attention in the search for who is responsible of the unravelling of Post-war Western party systems. This crisis has been particularly acute for social democratic parties, which seem to have lost their space as deal-makers between the different groups involved in political conflict within Western capitalist democracies, losing the favour of the working class.
Thus, both researchers and the public are wondering what happened with the voting coalitions that sustained traditional parties and, most importantly, the key policies they brokered (e.g. Pierson 1996;
Bonoli 2005; Gringich and Häusermann 2015). As existing welfare systems come under strain and pressure to reform while party constituencies are being reconfigured, a peremptory question emerges:
who are the people pushing for reform in either one direction or another, and who are the ones resisting changes? More specifically, where do preferences of workers lie regarding new policy packages to confront the rising of new risks?
These two questions are best considered together for a simple reason: parties (regardless of whether they choose to call themselves “parties”, “platforms, “movements” or some variation) remain the ultimate decision makers, and sooner or later voters hold them accountable. The vote-party- government-policy continuum is of course not entirely straightforward, and has been challenged by functionalist approaches that treat conflict as a sub-optimal outcome. However, the revival of dissent in Western politics arguably demonstrates that the ‘civilised conflict’ remains the basic channel for decision making.
Within this (admittedly broad) framework, I tackle four separate, more specific questions: (1) where are working class voters' party preferences right now?; (2) how do new divisions across workers affect voting decisions, particularly regarding the most distinctly new platform (i.e. far-right parties)?; (3) where is the support for new policy packages that aim to tackle rising risks, and how does this support distribute itself according to class and job status divisions?; (4) why do these packages get themselves enacted into law in some places while not in others, and how does that relate to old and new party platforms with underlying supporting coalitions? The resulting four-paper structure allows me to test different arguments and explore various fronts that will hopefully help us better understand the current tide of political change. I believe these four (admittedly distinct) chapters are best when divided into two separate parts (questions 1 and 2; questions 3 and 4).
1.1 Part I. New trajectories and determinants of working class vote
Social democracy used to be a political home open to almost everyone. It was a home built by the working class, for the working class, but access was not restricted to them. That is no longer the case, however. The demise of social democratic parties has ranged from significant to dramatic across Western European countries, where the centre-left used to dominate. British Political Scientist Chris Hanretty wrote that “[e]lectorally, West European social democrats are at their lowest point for forty years” (Hanretty 2015): using 1970 as a base year, he shows how Western European social democratic parties have lost enough vote to reach 1960s levels, with the mid-2000s being a crucial turning point.
Most significantly, working-class vote, once the force behind all-inclusive reforming coalitions, is no longer captivated by social democrats. According to ESS data, 2002 and 2016, social democratic voting intention among manual workers in Europe went down from 24.5% to 15.8% (see Table 2.1 in Chapter 2). Such a drop raises the question of why it decreased so dramatically and what took these two (parties and constituencies) away from each other.
For many observers, especially those positioned furthest to the left of the ideological spectrum, social democracy had been losing touch with its traditional voting base. As Jeremy Corbyn put it during his campaign to become the new Labour Party leader: "I think our problem as a party is we weren't
offering a clear enough alternative to the Conservatives” (Beattie 2015), referencing the ‘third way’
centrist strategy put forward by Tony Blair during the 1990s. He is, of course, not alone in this belief.
Nichi Vendola, a notable leftist politician from Southern Italy, accused centrist Matteo Renzi of “killing”
the centre-left when he took control of the Partito Democratico (Vendola 2015). Pablo Iglesias, co- founder and head of the emerging leftist party Podemos in Spain, has built all his strategy around the idea that the traditional centre-left party PSOE prefers to reach agreements with the conservative PP (“Iglesias acusa al PSOE de preferir a Rajoy [Iglesias Accuses PSOE of Preferring Rajoy], 2018, February 5).
Class affiliation has been part of these accusations as well. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the leftist platform La France Insoumise (roughly translating to Unsubordinated France), has accused Emmanuel Macron of being a “a bourgeoise who knows nothing about life” ("Un grand bourgeois qui ne connaît rien à la vie”, 2017, January 4). Macron, having a socialist origin, won the 2017 French presidential election with a centrist platform that was heavily criticized by more left-leaning politicians.
These debates have their academic correlates. The idea of party convergence traces back to the very foundations of contemporary political science. Early spatial models of party competition (Downs 1957;
Stokes 1963) suggested that agents competing for maximizing vote support had incentives to converge towards the median voter’s political preferences. Such equilibrium opened up the space for new competitive strategies. For instance: if the population remaining in one of the political extremes is numerous enough, a political entrepreneur might have incentives to create a corresponding platform.
Say, social democracy moving to the centre in several Western democracies during the 1990s under the ‘third way’ strategic proposition commanded by Tony Blair and US President Bill Clinton, and therefore leaving enough room for more leftist proposals to thrive. If, also, the working class is over- represented in that ideological extreme, the appeal would be specifically directed to them.
Structural, conflict-based understandings of the demise of social democracy might be broadly read under the light of this (very schematic) model: a vacuum left by traditional centre-left platform on economic policy that becomes filled by someone else (e.g. Patton 2006 focusing on the German case).
There has not been, however, a corresponding rise of far-left or new-left vote among European workers, something that could be expected from such line of argumentation. In consequence, other authors have seen a different ‘vacuum’ opening up, now in the identity-cultural axis. Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory was regarded by many as the answer given by a different kind of convergence: that of ‘identity liberalism’ (Lilla 2016) or ‘cultural globalization’ (Croucher 2018). Under this perspective, the growing consensus among mainstream parties on multiculturalism and open border policies left a space to be filled by proponents of closed borders and homogenous national identities. Moreover, the demand of these ‘nationalist’ policies would mostly come from manual workers, and would have a particular focus on anti-immigration positions (Oesch 2008; Kriesi 2012).
A multi-spatial view of political competition that joins economic and cultural dimensions was then proposed by some authors (Kitschelt 2012). As a matter of fact, some centrist politicians such as Emmanuel Macron (France), Albert Rivera (Spain), Matteo Renzi (Italy) and Guy Verhofstadt (leader at the European Parliament of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) have argued that the new divide defining Western politics prioritises pro-openness platforms (open borders, open markets and open identities) versus pro-closedness proposals. Pro-closedness would mean left- authoritarian, or ‘welfare chauvinist’, policy packages, something several researchers have already explored (Schumacher and van Kebergsen 2016; Afonso and Rennwald 2018).
Whether for economic or for cultural reasons, all these perspectives highlight a growing distance between the working class and social-democratic parties, and the subsequent search of new options.
However, there is no clear-cut conclusion, neither on the direction nor on the determinants for the search. Since my goal in this first two chapters is to contribute to this debate, I believe I should begin by questioning the core concept of “working class” itself as it is classically understood.
1.1.1 A new notion of the working class?
Until now, I have not problematized the concept of “working class”, implicitly identifying it (or leaving the reader to identify it) with workers in the industrial sector, or workers whose tasks mostly comprise manual actions. More specifically, the most common, unstructured consideration of the concept still traces itself back to the original Marxian notion: anyone who does not possess capital, and therefore must sell her labour power to survive, is part of the working class.
It has been suggested, however, that such a notion, albeit structurally relevant even nowadays, is insufficient to explain complex multi-platform political choices in pluralist democracies. Moreover, the decoupling of management and capital ownership and the tertiarisation of the economy during the second half of the 20th century demands that we reconsider the notion of class.
Summarising a very prolix and complex subgenre of the sociological literature, John Goldthorpe and his co-authors came up with what became the most widely used class classification in the last quarter of the century (Goldthorpe et al 1980). It was based upon two variables: the difficulty of monitorisation of tasks performed by the individual, and the level of human asset specificity required to develop them.
Goldthorpe et al advanced a crucial idea: in a post-industrial economy, considering the task composition of occupations and, consequently, the amount and the type of human capital needed to develop them becomes a crucial variable to distinguish among workers, and particularly among their exposition to situations of economic adversity. Oesch (2006) built upon these ideas to propose his now ubiquitous occupation-based class division. Its main traits are (1) the combination of sector-based and skill-based aspects of work life; (2) the distinction between types of tasks (and the kind human capital required to execute them) within both the industrial and within the service sectors, with particular importance given to the latter. In the last decade, Oesch has widely demonstrated the relevance of his approach to define political behaviour (e.g. Oesch 2008a, Oesch 2008b, Oesch 2012).
Therefore, departing from Oesch's work, it might be worth assuming a broader and, at the same time, more nuanced idea of the working class. More specifically, as the share of manual work diminishes in Western economies, it makes sense to consider semi- and non-qualified service workers whose tasks fall outside the desk/office area, along with non-supervisor manual workers as part of the working class. These segments share key traits that link them with the more classical notions of the working class, namely the relative lower reliability on human asset specificity, a comparatively high possibility of monitorisation by supervisors, and, as a consequence of both, a higher exposition to economic risks due to labour market woes. In Marxian terms, it could be said as well that these workers are further away from the possession of capital, particularly if we accept a definition of capital that goes beyond its physical/monetary notion and includes social, cultural, educational and relational dimensions (Bourdieu 1986). Such is the approach I take in the two first chapters of the present dissertation.
My goal with the two first chapters that comprise the present dissertation is to contribute to these debates by focusing on the following specific questions: (1) if the working class is no longer a social democratic monopoly, where is it heading now? (2) is the working class making a united or a divided trajectory? (3) what are the determinants of workers’ voting choice? I don’t expect to find a single answer to these questions, such as “the working class is heading in bloc to the far-left due to identity issues”, or “manual workers now prefer the far-left because of economic grievances”, or even “workers are completely de-aligned and there is no clear voting pattern”. Instead, I foresee a complex map of multiple realignment that is defined along new lines of political competition.
Studying voting choices is arguably best done through survey analysis, thanks to its capacity to aggregate individual moves in an efficient, representative manner. In this regard, I find the European Social Survey (ESS) to be the best possible source thanks to its broad regional scope (covering most European countries), its coherence across waves, and its long-time reach (2002-2016). I apply logistic and multinomial logistic regression models over ESS data to find out voting patterns and determinants, restricting my analysis to the aforementined definition of the working class.
This explains why I find in Chapter 2 that while manual workers seem to be indeed more likely than other class groups to vote for the far-right (and having disappeared any significant link between them and social democrats once several control variables are thrown in), this does not imply that it manages to keep a statistically significant differentiated majority of manual workers: instead, they tend to distribute across party groups mirroring other class segments, with the notable exception of a substantial overrepresentation in abstention. Moreover, the drivers of working class vote are multiple:
mistrust in existing institutions and economic anxiety particularly after the Great Recession move voters towards abstention, while the link between anti-immigration preferences and far-right vote has become even more intense than it already was after 2008. The onset of the crisis marks therefore an interesting juncture that might be linked to the greater prevalence of economic insecurity.
1.1.2 Rising working class divisions
Any consideration of the reshaping of the working class after the advent of tertiarisation is however incomplete without taking into account the idea of dualisation. It was the relatively unexpected rise of
structural unemployment after the supply shocks of the 1970s that suggested to labour economists the growing importance of job status, i.e. being employed or unemployed, to define political preferences.
Insiders (those sheltered against the consequences of unemployment) and outsiders (those who were not) became commonplace notions in the field of labour economics during the 1980s (e.g. Lindbeck and Snower 1985), and then made their entrance into the world of political economy by the 1990s under the basic idea of insiders being more interested in institutions that keep their status, such as employment protection legislation, than outsiders (Saint-Paul 1993).
It was David Rueda who took this to the arena of party politics, suggesting that insiders (now not only the employed, but also, or more particularly, those who enjoyed a lower exposition to the risk of unemployment) and outsiders (not only the unemployed, but those at a higher risk of becoming so, e.g. temporary workers with lower severance payments attached to their contracts) had different political preferences, which in turn might create a dilemma to traditional parties, and particularly to social democrats: if there are emerging divisions within their natural constituency, does this mean they have to choose which constituents they will cater to? (Rueda 2005, 2007).
From this point of view, the insider-outsider division is particularly problematic for social democratic parties, since they would face a dilemma between defending existing institutions and regulations, and the emerging demand for reform.
Note that there is a three-stage incremental consideration implied in the stream of the dualisation literature. The basis of everything is the notion of differentiated risk exposure, a socio-economic finding that seems to be relatively well-established (although with important cross-country differences).
From there, different preferences on policy packages are derived. The last step is the choice of political platforms, which is based on policy preferences and, in turn, on different exposures to risk. In Chapters 3 and 4 of the present dissertation I tackle the two last stages of this continuum.
These assertions are, however, debated within the literature. Beginning with the latter, while the weakening of the link between outsiders and social democracy is not particularly disputed, its destination has recently sparked some interesting, yet preliminary findings. While, for instance, Marx and Picot (2013) have identified a link between temporary workers and the new left, Rovny and Rovny (2017) complement this with the connection between insiders and the far-right. There remains, however, work to be done, particularly regarding the better identification of specific mechanisms. This is why, in the third chapter, studying the labour market dimension as a possible determinant of radical- right voting shows that insiders tend to prefer the far-right, while outsiders have a negative relationship with them. Moreover, working-class (manual and service), mid- and low-skilled insiders display a particularly pronounced move in this direction. The exclusionary nature of these parties seems to appeal to insiders, building an equivalence between their particular interest and that of ‘the people’ (in populist terms).
Most crucially, when looking for more specific mechanisms, such tendency can be at least taken closer to the dimension of perceived risk exposure: it looks like it is the combined presence of higher unemployment rates and migrant workers' rates within occupation-country clusters which determines insiders' choice for the far-right. Using again European Social Survey data in order to model far-right voting across Western European countries where the platform has an established presence, insider over-representation among the Populist Radical Right (PRR) seems well-proven, particularly within Bismarckian welfare states where existing conditions might reinforce protectionist perspectives among insiders. Also, insider voters who belong to working class segments or whose position is otherwise more vulnerable (e.g. mid- and low- skill levels) have a stronger association with PRR parties, thus suggesting that the combination of having something to lose and the idea of an alternative world on which the imagined protection or status quo is actually lost is a strong determinant for workers choosing the far-right. Last but not least, union strength at the country level seems to deter insiders to join PRR parties, underlining the importance of organizing the working class to stop the advancement of the far-right across Europe.
The combination of both chapters and its mixed conclusions serve as a reminder of the fact that vote is among the most complex political phenomena to be explained, since it summarises in a single, easily measurable variable all the possible factors that define a person’s political position. Applied to the problem at hand, it means that the divorce between social democracy and the working class cannot be attributed to a single culprit, and that it is a phenomenon composed by several complementary dynamics.
1.2 Part II. The new fight for labour market policies among workers
Moving on now to the second half of my dissertation, it is a well-established fact that policies matter to define the relationship between the voters and the elected. Among them, labour market policies might matter with particular intensity from the point of view of class voting patterns. Or, at least, these seem to be at the core of both lines of argumentation. For the insider/outsider framework, the key difference between the former and the latter group comes with the choice of preferred policies to protect them against the risk of unemployment: while insiders choose EPL, outsiders have a bias towards unemployment benefits (NEB) and active labour market policies (ALMP) (Rueda 2005). On the other hand, labour market liberalisation constitutes a cornerstone of party convergence arguments (McBride
& Williams 2001; Palier 2010). Also, it seems logical to expect that the change in support for the chief architects of the trend registered in labour market (de)regulation since 1973 cannot be understood in isolation from their policy-making. Therefore, the second common thread of the present dissertation is the policy preferences of voters given their positions within the economic structure, and how this relates to the actual policy supply.
As a matter of fact, one of the most frequent critiques to the insider/outsider framework departs from what could be seen as a party convergence basis, in the sense that it focuses on the coherence and completeness protectionist policy packages (Emmennegger 2009), thus forcing outsiders to look for alternatives to the left of social democracy (Marx and Picot 2013). From this point of view, the classical left-right opposition (translated into protection-deregulation for labour market policies) would still be very much the way to interpret policy fights underlying coalition change among workers. Dualisation, i.e. the selective deregulation of EPL (but also cuts in NEB and ALMP) that mostly affect non- permanent workers and that has been particularly widespread among European countries since the 1980s (Emmennegger and Häusermann 2012; Häusermann and Schwander 2012), should be therefore regarded as a form of partial liberalisation.
In that respect, flexicurity reforms that advocate for an even decrease in EPL in exchange for increasing spending and resources for NEB and ALMP could be portrayed as a way of achieving a compromise between employers and (different types of) workers in advanced capitalist economies.
Or, at the very least, it should be the preferred option for those who are unprotected by existing policy arrangements, especially where EPL is prevalent. Proponents of the insider/outsider framework imply as much.
Maintaining our position within this perspective for the sake of the argument, it should be therefore somewhat surprising for the proponents how uncommon flexicurity reforms are. In the last two decades, since the rise of the concept during the 1990s, only a few European countries are considered as having fallen under this paradigm, most notably Denmark (Viebrock and Clasen 2009) and the Netherlands (Van Oorschot 2004).
The insider/outsider perspective would correspond to this mentioning of the blocking action of those who benefit from current protectionist/dual regulations (i.e. insiders), who in turn are at the core of centre-left party coalitions. It is also possible to fit the role of employers within this framework, who in principle should prefer full-scale liberalisation but whose situation in segmented labour markets might be seen as a second-best, since it gives to them access to ‘cheap labour’ (King and Rueda 2008).
Alternatively, flexicurity proposals might constitute an incoherent, incomplete policy package that does not correspond with voters’ fault lines since preferences organise along the single protection- liberalisation line, which in turn would find more correspondence with a classic occupational division.
High-skilled occupations, or occupations that accumulate more (financial, social, cultural, human) capital would favour liberalisation more than low-skill occupations whose occupants gather less resources to confront labour market risks on their own. Flexicurity would here fit better with the former group (Boeri et al. 2012).
This is an empirical question at heart, one that could be solved if the appropriate data on individuals’
preferences were available. Unfortunately, there is no readily accessible source that perfectly fits this objective. There is, however, a good-enough source: Eurobarometer special surveys in all EU countries conducted in 2006, 2009 and 2011 that feature three key questions on preferences on whether or not EPL, ALMP and NEB ought to be reformed. I use logistic models based on these data sources to approximate an answer to the question of who supports deregulation, and in particular, who supports flexicurity (decreasing EPL, but not NEB and increasing ALMP). My findings indicate that flexicurity, indeed, has very little support across all types of labour market participants. Moreover, while the insider/outsider framework helps to explain the varying preferences for EPL reduction and for
flexicurity over dualisation, it does not seem to apply well to divisions over NEB/ALMP, or over liberalisation vs protection. Instead, the occupational class division conveys explanatory power all across the policy spectrum, and particularly in the latter group.
All in all, the emerging picture gives some partial support to both the insider/outsider perspective and its critiques, producing a combined result that politicians (particularly social democratic politicians) should take into account. Indeed, there seems to be some potential tensions within broad voting coalitions that have traditionally sustained centre-left parties. Which in turn gives way to the last stage of the vote-party-government-policy link: the moment of decision making, and thus the moment on which the need of reform should be faced by ruling parties.
The Great Recession that began in 2008, and that turned into a European Monetary Union (EMU) debt-focused crisis by 2010, offers a perfect context for analysing the possible answers to this question. In its second phase, the crisis exerted considerable pressure over a selected group of European economies. Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain (and even Belgium and France to a lesser extent) all came under the scrutiny and pressure of its creditors given its apparent incapacity to generate enough growth to repay its public and private debts. International organisations such as the IMF, the OECD and the European Commission itself recommended, or directly agreed on, deep structural reforms. Labour markets were one of the key areas under consideration, particularly for Southern European countries. All of them were considered to be plagued by productivity problems, hampered by stringent and segmented EPL. The recommendation of EPL streamlining then became general.
Structural and external factors are widely regarded as forces pushing for reform (Carlin and Soskice 2008; Lodovici 2000; Meardi 2012), especially those coming from the EMU institutional setup (Alesina et al. 2008; Calmfors 2001; Duvel and Elmeskov 2006). However, existing institutions are considered by many authors as fundamental determinants of future policy paths (Ebbinghaus 2005; Thelen 2009;
Thelen 2014). This would make a comparison between countries sharing both a common past and present structural pressures particularly informative for my goal of understanding how parties facing similar conditions and have similar ideological backgrounds, approach labour market reform.
In the 2010-2015 crisis cycle, both Spain and Italy were debtor countries within the EMU featuring strained labour markets and facing strong demands to streamline regulations. Also, both countries have a history of segmented labour markets (Mingione 1995). Therefore, history, context and derived constraints were shared to a large extent. Most crucially for my analytical goals, in both countries there was a mainstream centre-left party in charge when key decisions to improve labour market performance were demanded both from abroad and from within. In other words, comparing the Italian and the Spanish approach to the EMU crisis with regards of labour market reform makes a good ‘most similar cases’ approach, in which all but one key determinant variable match between cases, while the outcomes differ.
The differing outcomes reflect the distinct reform paths taken by the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE by its Spanish name) in 2010 and by the Democratic Party (PD by its Italian name) in 2014-2015. While the PSOE enacted what could be seen as a partial, rather timid reform that went somewhat in the direction of segmented liberalisation, the PD went forward to implement a full-scale de-dualising reform much more in line with external and internal demands for streamlining EPL.
Through a qualitative comparative analysis that takes into account (1) the countries’ recent history of labour market reforms under social democratic rule; (2) the constraints faced during the EMU crisis;
(3) the different political strategies pursued by the key centre-left parties, this chapter emphasises the last factor. Without being able to make a fully-generalisable argument (qualitative analysis provides nuance in exchange of generalisation capacity), I propose that the key difference between PD’s and PSOE’s reform choices come, at least partially, from the different resolution of long-standing internal debates among party elites on how to tackle labour market inefficiencies. In both cases there was a more reformist wing (mostly composed by members with a background in Economics) of pro-flexible agents within the platform. The PD's reformist wing enjoyed a window of opportunity that was not there for the PSOE's, and managed to take advantage of it.
1.3 Outline of the dissertation
As explained above, the present dissertation is divided into two parts, each of them comprising two different chapters. In the first part, chapter two deals with the changing relations between new and old parties and different segments of voters, considered under an occupational/class perspective. It
tackles the diverse competition for the working class vote making dichotomy analyses that compare voting patterns among workers when choosing between social democrats and the far-left, social democrats and the far-right, and most significantly, abstention. Chapter three focuses on the three- way relationship between dualism, Welfare State, and the Populist Radical Right (PRR), and pins down the voting preferences of insiders and outsiders towards PRR parties, depending on their labour market conditions and the structural, regulatory context. Both chapters together offer a nuanced, complex view on where working class voters are heading, and why.
The second part takes on the diverging preferences for different labour market policies among workers, and how these translate into actual reforming patterns. Chapter four explores the question of who wants flexicurity, using Eurobarometer data to define insider, outsider, high- and low-skilled workers’ preferences on labour market change. Finally, chapter five puts the results into a real-world reform process, conducting a qualitative comparative case study between Spain and Italy to discover under what conditions social democracy finds a way out of dualisation. Employment protection reforms in Spain and Italy during the EMU crisis are carefully considered to offer a possible answer.
Behind the Italy-Spain comparison lies the simple yet powerful notion that social democracy does not have a fixed path. Instead, in line with Rueda (2007), it should be emphasised that mainstream parties can actually choose their path. Which, in turn, should put into perspective the insights obtained from all other chapters. Since (as self-contained research projects) these are rather lousily related to each other, I devote chapter six to defining common threats, inserting some more general concluding remarks that aim to align the partial conclusions of each chapter while also defining possible avenues for further research that mostly (but not solely) relate to the idea of dynamic supply-sided actors.
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