Policy concertation in Europe: Explaining government choice

This paper focuses on the European governments’ decision to involve union and employment representatives in the design and implementation of public policy. It begins by elaborating and plotting over time a measure of the phenomenon at hand (1974-2003), based on coding of textual sources. This reveals no secular growth (or decline) of government willingness to involve or devolve, and consequently no convergence on a pluralist model of interest
representation. The measure is then used to identify the clearest cases of policy change by governments. We analyse the contrasting responses of the British and Irish governments as regards incomes policies, and of the Austrian and Italian governments as to pension reform, against the backdrop of several plausible hypotheses about government choice. We find that only two factors account for both increase and increase in government willingness to involve:
the role of government’s parliamentary strength (the stronger the government the greater its ability to withstand social opposition on its own) and the trade unions’ organisational and mobilisation capacities: strong unions seem to discourage government’s decision to cooperate,
weak(ened) unions to favor it.

Website: International Institute for Labour Studies (IILS) http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/inst/

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