The interplay of actor-related strategies and political context: a fuzzy-set QCA analysis of structural reforms in continental welfare states

Abstract:

European welfare states face numerous challenges which often necessitate risky policy choices. This article focuses on the role of key political actors, asking which actor-related strategies, under certain conditions, lead to structural reforms. These strategies are ideational leadership or reform-enhancing blame-avoidance strategies, combined with two political-contextual conditions. Four set-theoretic hypotheses about combinations of the latter and structural reforms are examined, using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. The data include 16 reform cases in four continental welfare states that are notoriously hard to reform: Germany; Austria; the Netherlands; and France.

The findings show that the two actor-related strategies matter for structural reform in combination, while contextual conditions function as their complements. Distant elections are indeed conducive to such reforms, while governments with a positive or negative welfare image achieve them along different paths: either combined with two strategies; or, when elections are distant, combined with ideational leadership or concession-making.

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