institutional adaptability in china local developmental models under changing economic conditions summary distinct patterns of regional development have emerged in china s political economy since the initiation of economic reforms in late 1970s in particular the localities of suzhou wenzhou and dongguan each achieved dramatic economic growth during the first three decades of reform earning them national reputations as developmental models for other cities in china to recognize and emulate however the local states of suzhou wenzhou and dongguan responded differentially to changing conditions in the broader domestic and global economy and the global financial crisis at the end of the 2000s affected the three localities with varying levels of severity this article thus seeks to explain why previously well performing developmental models diverged in their performance and capacity to recover from a major economic shock drawing on national economic census data in depth field interviews and relevant secondary literature we argue that variation in the institutional adaptability of suzhou wenzhou and dongguan throughout the course of their developmental experiences had a defining effect on how these cities fared during the financial crisis the process tracing case studies reveal that a locality s ability to adjust to changing market conditions may be conditioned by structural endowments but ultimately hinges on agent centric factors including motivated and capable local leadership openness to new policy ideas and state capacity for policy implementation ultimately our analysis makes the broader observation that in a dynamic environment factors that promote economic success at one point can become barriers later on hence exploring a region s institutional adaptability and identifying the factors that facilitate or impede such adaptability in local economic governance provides a more nuanced means for understanding a locality s evolving developmental patterns and performance during normal times as well as more challenging periods

a sequential theory of decentralization latin american cases in comparative perspective both advocates and critics of decentralization assume that decentralization invariably increases the power of subnational governments however a closer examination of the consequences of decentralization across countries reveals that the magnitude of such change can range from substantial to insignificant in this article i propose a sequential theory of decentralization that has three main characteristics 1 it defines decentralization as a process 2 it takes into account the territorial interests of bargaining actors and 3 it incorporates policy feedback effects i argue that the sequencing of different types of decentralization fiscal administrative and political is a key determinant of the evolution of intergovernmental balance of power i measure this evolution in the four largest latin american countries and apply the theory to the two extreme cases colombia and argentina i show that contrary to commonly held opinion decentralization does not necessarily increase the power of governors and mayors

the political economy of corporate control and labor rents in a democracy a political majority can influence both the corporate governance structure and the return to human and financial capital we argue that when financial wealth is sufficiently concentrated there is political support for high labor rents and a strong governance role for banks or large investors the model is consistent with the great reversal phenomenon in the first half of the twentieth century we offer evidence that in several financially developed countries a financially weakened middle class became concerned about labor income risk associated with free markets and supported a more corporatist financial system

trade unions and firms product market power a production function model with efficient bargaining between oligopolistic firms and unions is developed to distinguish between product market power and union power in capturing economic rents the model is formalised using the generalized nash bargaining solution and is empirically tested on four belgian manufacturing sectors the conclusions are that product market power is significantly eroded by wage rents but firms retain most of their power during negotiations also the restrictions imposed on the data do not reject the hypothesis that wage erosion arises from efficient bargaining in accordance with other empirical findings for belgian manufacturing

productivity and distribution effects of codetermination in an efficient bargaining model codetermination can be regarded as an extreme regulatory intervention of the legislator in the labor market which might affect the efficiency of production and the bargaining power of labor based on a model that covers both efficient bargaining and employment bargaining a simple equation is derived that is suited to empirical testing the empirical test is based on german data and includes years before and after the extension of german codetermination law in 1976 the estimates determine the productivity of labor and relative bargaining power of capital and labor it turns out that codetermination does not affect productivity but leads to a significant increase in workers bargaining power and the distribution of rents

towards improved policy processes for promoting innovation in renewable electricity technologies in the uk this paper analyses recent current and potential future relations between policy processes and substantive outcomes in uk low carbon innovation policy focussing on policies relating to renewable electricity generation technologies it examines the development of policy processes relating to the adoption and implementation of the renewables obligation and how these may affect the current and likely future success of the obligation in promoting low carbon innovation it examines the new policy and institutional processes put in place in the 2003 energy white paper and argues that these are unlikely to provide the strategic long term framework needed to realise the ambitious goals for uk energy policy set out in the white paper finally it outlines some suggestions for further development of policy processes to facilitate improved delivery of these goals based on guiding principles for sustainable innovation policy processes developed by the authors and their colleagues

a coevolutionary framework for analysing a transition to a sustainable low carbon economy this paper proposes a coevolutionary framework for analysing a transition to a sustainable low carbon economy based on the coevolution of ecosystems technologies institutions business strategies and user practices within a multi level micro meso macro perspective this builds on and develops previous coevolutionary analyses of long term technological and industrial change and recent renewed interest within ecological economics on coevolutionary approaches previous work has analysed how the coevolution of technologies and institutions has led to the lock in of current high carbon energy systems and how the coevolution of physical and social technologies and business strategies has brought significant material and welfare benefits to the minority of the world s population living in industrialised countries the coevolutionary framework proposed here may be used to undertake 1 detailed empirical analyses at a micro meso level of the challenges relating to the innovation and adoption of particularly low carbon technologies 2 as a framework for analysing the multi level interaction of social and technological elements within potential transition pathways to a low carbon energy system 3 to assess the implications for economic growth and prosperity of a transition to a low carbon economy and 4 to assist in the development of more formal multi level evolutionary economic models

converging or diverging a comparative analysis of trends in contingent employment practice in europe over a decade this paper makes a unique contribution to the hrm convergence divergence debate by examining whether organisations operating in europe over the 10 year time period preceding 2000 are converging in their adoption of contingent employment practice the susceptibility of contingent employment practice to both convergent and divergent pressures acts as a useful analytical lens data are drawn from organisations operating in germany spain sweden the netherlands and the uk in 1991 2918 organisations 1995 2048 organisations and 2000 1555 organisations the results suggest that convergence is limited by the institutional embeddedness of organisations

do deployment policies pick technologies by not picking applications a simulation of investment decisions in technologies with multiple applications abstract the role of deployment policies that aim to foster technological change has grown considerably especially in the fields of energy and climate however recent research has shown that the adoption of deployment policies carries the potential of locking in the technology that is most cost effective at the point of policy introduction but may be inefficient in the long term the present paper contributes to the emerging literature on the role of deployment policies in creating path dependency and eventually technology lock in while previous studies focused on the relationship between lock in and the technology specificity of deployment policies this paper introduces a new factor the existence of multiple applications for a technology we argue that this factor is highly relevant for technological lock in and should be considered by policy makers to support our argument we simulate the competition among four stationary battery technologies across energy system applications in an investment simulation model this simulation shows that the degree of competition among technologies differs strongly across applications which corresponds with a highly varying lock in probability hence selecting applications in deployment policies very likely corresponds to selecting technologies we discuss the implications of these results for both policy makers and for the academic debate on deployment policies and technological lock in as well as on technology assessment and governance more generally based on the notion that policies can have different technology specificity levels we develop the idea of the application specificity of policies and provide examples of currently enacted deployment policies that vary in terms of their technology and application specificity

the creation and capture of rents wages and innovation in a panel of u k companies this paper examines the impact of technological innovation on wages using a panel of british firms a head count measure of major innovations between 1945 and 1983 is combined with share price and accounting information innovating firms are found to have higher average wages but rival innovation tends to depress own wages this appears consistent with a model where wages are partly determined by a sharing in the rents generated by innovation in other words innovation may be a good instrument for proxies for rents such as profitability quasi rents or tobin s average q instrumental variable estimates of the elasticity between wages and quasi rents are about 0 29

are nonconvexities important for understanding growth everyday experience and a simple logical argument show that nonconvexities are essential for understanding growth compared to previous statements of this well known argument the presentation here places more emphasis on the distinction between two of the fundamental attributes of any economic good rivalry and excludability it also emphasizes the difference between public goods and the technological advances that are fundamental to economic growth like public goods technological advances are rionrival goods hence they are inextricably linked to nonconvexities but in contrast to public goods which are nonexcludable technological advances generate benefits that are at least partially excludable hence innovations in the technology are for the most part privately provided this means that nonconvexities are relevant for goods that trade in private markets consequently an equilibrium with price taking in all markets cannot be sustained concluding remarks describe some of the recent equilibrium growth models that do not rely on price taking and highlight some of the implications of these models this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the codetermined firm in oligopoly abstract a simple duopoly model is considered where firm owners bargain with employees representatives about employment but not about wages as is the case for codetermined firms in germany it turns out that for some range of the bargaining power a prisoner s dilemma exists bargaining is the dominant strategy although joint profits would be maximized with unrestricted profit maximization

energy paths in the european union a model based clustering approach this paper examines typical energy paths i e the intertemporal development of the energy mixes of the member states of the european union over 1971 2010 we apply model based clustering to detect major energy profiles and their compositional dynamics the seven identified clusters show typical combinations of energy carriers dominating the primary energy consumption of a country we find that countries tend to take a path towards higher quality energy mixes over time however path inertia and dependencies arise from both infrastructure and resource endowments higher energy quality profiles are usually associated with higher national income and energy use per capita providing some evidence of the existence of a national level energy ladder we also find convergence in energy intensity over time and a relationship between a country s own resources and import dependency

evolutionary dynamics in club goods binary games abstract a dynamic adjustment mechanism based on replicator dynamics in discrete time is used to study the time evolution of a population of players facing a binary choice game with social influence characterized by payoff curves that intersect at two interior points also denoted as thresholds so besides the boundary equilibria where all players make the same choice there are two further steady states where agents playing different strategies coexist and get identical payoffs such binary game can be interpreted as a club good game in which players have to choose either joining or not the club in the presence of cost sharing so that they can enjoy a good or a service provided that a participation threshold is reached at the same time congestion occurs beyond a second higher threshold these binary choice models can be used and indeed have been used in the literature to represent several social and economic decisions such as technology adoption joining a commercial club r d investments production delocalization programs for environmental protection existence and stability of equilibrium points are studied as well as the creation of more complex attractors periodic or chaotic related with overshooting effects the study of some local and global dynamic properties of the evolutionary model proposed reveals that the presence of the participation threshold causes the creation of complex topological structures of the basins of coexisting attracting sets so that a strong path dependence is observed the dynamic effects of memory both in the form of convex combination of a finite number of previous observation moving average and in the form of memory with increasing length and exponentially fading weights are investigated as well

varieties of capitalism in an internationalized world domestic institutional change in european telecommunications this article examines how internationalization affects domestic decisions about the reform of market institutions a developing literature argues that nations maintain different varieties of capitalism in the face of economic globalization because of diverse domestic settings however in an internationalized world powerful forces for change applying across border scan affect decision making within domestic arenas the article therefore analyzes how three factors transnational technological and economic developments overseas reforms and european regulation affected institutional reform in a selected case study of telecommunications regulation in britain france germany and italy between the 1960s and 2002 the author argues that when different forms of internationalization are strong and combined they can overwhelm institutional inertia and the effects of different national settings to result in rapid change and cross national convergence in market institutions hence different varieties of capi

the need for policy to address the food system lock in a case study of the finnish context abstract the introduction of synthetic fertilizers transformed the food system into the one we know today in the western world the present paper argues that this transformation has become an irreversible self feeding process referred to as food system lock in which threatens planetary boundaries of nitrogen and phosphorus hence the food security in the future a system in a lock in state can undermine its own existence by deteriorating the capacity to cope with upcoming crises of resource scarcity and environmental instability in this paper the roots of lock in are explored and empirically grounded in the historical narrative of the food system transition in finland in the past 60 years the theoretical framework builds on socio technical studies and the economic theory of increasing returns the aim of the paper is to identify through an evolutionary analysis the processes of increasing returns that have become path inefficient and have reinforced the lock in in the food system three separate but interdependent processes in the production in the policy and institutions and in the supply chain create systematic resistance towards sustainability transition these findings indicate that more attention should be paid at the public policies that are currently too narrow in their scope and do not effectively bridge the entire system from food production to consumption public intervention is critical for the unlocking but individuals in the various parts of the food system are those who create new paths

economic effects of codetermination the success of west german scandinavian and japanese economies particularly when compared with lagging productivity and competitiveness of the u s and the u k have focused attention on comparative institutions in labour markets and corporate control declining unions and increasing reliance on competitive market pressures in the angloamerican countries contrast with more state intervention and regulation of the european social market economies as noted by henzler 1992

panel data estimates of the production function and product and labor market imperfections summary consistent with two models of imperfect competition in the labor market the efficient bargaining model and the monopsony model we provide two extensions of a microeconomic version of hall s framework for estimating price cost margins we show that both product and labor market imperfections generate a wedge between factor elasticities in the production function and their corresponding shares in revenue which can be characterized by a joint market imperfections parameter using an unbalanced panel of 10 646 french firms in 38 manufacturing industries over the period 1978 2001 we can classify these industries into six different regimes depending on the type of competition in the product and the labor market by far the most predominant regime is one of imperfect competition in the product market and efficient bargaining in the labor market ic eb followed by a regime of imperfect competition in the product market and perfect competition or right to manage bargaining in the labor market ic pr and by a regime of perfect competition in the product market and monopsony in the labor market pc mo for each of these three predominant regimes we assess within regime firm differences in the estimated average price cost mark up and rent sharing or labor supply elasticity parameters following the swamy methodology to determine the degree of true firm dispersion to assess the plausibility of our findings in the case of the dominant regime ic eb we also relate our industry and firm level estimates of price cost mark up and extent of rent sharing to industry characteristics and firm specific variables respectively copyright 2011 john wiley sons ltd

employee participation in management bargaining power and wages the paper analyzes the impact of employee participation in management on bargaining power and wages it presents an empirical model which allows for variable bargaining powers of the parties who jointly control the firm and it tests this model with postwar west german data the results suggest that parity codetermination has had a positive effect on earnings in iron and steel but not in coal mining moreover it appears that the positive effect in iron and steel could be due to increased profitability rather than an increase in the bargaining power of labor as defined in this study

increasing returns path dependence and the study of politics it is increasingly common for social scientists to describe political processes as path dependent the concept however is often employed without careful elaboration this article conceptualizes path dependence as a social process grounded in a dynamic of increasing returns reviewing recent literature in economics and suggesting extensions to the world of politics the article demonstrates that increasing returns processes are likely to be prevalent and that good analytical foundations exist for exploring their causes and consequences the investigation of increasing returns can provide a more rigorous framework for developing some of the key claims of recent scholarship in historical institutionalism specific patterns of timing and sequence matter a wide range of social outcomes may be possible large consequences may result from relatively small or contingent events particular courses of action once introduced can be almost impossible to reverse and consequently political development is punctuated by critical moments or junctures that shape the basic contours of social life

the industrial organization of congress or why legislatures like firms are not organized as markets this paper provides a theory of legislative institutions that parallels the theory of the firm and the theory of contractual institutions like market institutions legislative institutions reflect two key components the goals or preferences of individuals here representatives seeking reelection and the relevant transactions costs we present three conclusions first we show how the legislative institutions enforce bargains among legislators second we explain why given the peculiar form of bargaining problems found in legislatures specific forms of nonmarket exchange prove superior to market exchange third our approach shows how the committee system limits the types of coalitions that may form on a particular issue

globalizing carbon lock in this paper extends the arguments surrounding carbon lock in elaborated in unruh energy policy 28 2000 817 30 2002 317 to countries currently undergoing industrialization it argues that for numerous reasons industrializing countries are unlikely to leapfrog carbon intensive energy development on the contrary carbon lock in may be globalizing and could further constrain climate change mitigation options it is then argued that many policy recommendations ignore carbon lock in possibly limiting their potential for successful implementation the paper then discusses four policy approaches that appear to have advantages given lock in conditions it is recognized however that relative ease of implementation does not necessarily equate with superiority instead it is merely a path dependent outcome of past development decisions pursuing policies on the basis of relative implementation ease may help address the issue of climate change but could also result in sub optimal outcomes along other dimensions of sustainable development

setting international standards technological rationality or primacy of power standards have become one of the most important nontariff barriers to trade especially national product standards that specify design or performance characteristics of manufactured goods divergent national standards often inhibit trade whereas regional and international standards increasingly serve as instruments of trade liberalization consequently the setting of international standards seemingly technical and apolitical is rapidly becoming an issue of economic and political salience but who sets international standards who wins who loses this article offers a fresh analytical approach to the study of international standards which the authors call the institutional complementarities approach it builds on insights from realism and the battle of the sexes coordination game but emphasizes complementarities of historically conditioned standardization systems at the national level with the institutional structure of standardization at the international level it posits that after controlling for other factors that influence involvement in international standardization differences in institutional complementarities play a critical though largely accidental role in placing firms from different countries or regions in a first or second mover position when standardization becomes global the authors illustrate the insightfulness of this approach through statistical analyses of the first scientific set of data on standards use and standardization collected by the authors through an international online survey

the new economics of organization over the last ten years or so an important new approach to the study of organizations has emerged within economics it is perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a theoretical focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this paper provides political scientists with an overview of the new economics of organization and explores its implications for the study of public bureaucracy so far positive political theory has not contributed much to our understanding of public bureaucracy in part this is due to the unsympathetic treatment that rational modeling and most other modes of quantitative analysis have long received from students of public administration the other side of the coin however is that positive theorists have not made much of an effort to develop theories of bureaucracy their concerns have centered around two basic mechanisms of social choice voting and markets and they have devoted little systematic attention to a third mechanism that is clearly important for understanding how societies and other aggregates make collective decisions this third and relatively unexplored mechanism is hierarchy movement toward a positive theory of hierarchies would fill a serious gap in the social choice literature while at the same time making a theoretical contribution that strikes to the essence of public bureaucracy indeed of all organizations in fact significant steps toward a positive theory of hierarchies have very recently been taken but by economists not political scientists in small numbers of course economists made contributions to the study of public bureaucracy some time ago with the pioneering works of downs 1967 tullock 1965 and niskanen 1971 but this new wave of theoretical work is different it is already a large complex body of literature that is the focus of innovation and excitement among a growing number of economists and it reflects an unusual degree of theoretical coherence and cumulative effort work in this tradition tends to receive orientation from a distinctive economic approach to the analysis of organizations an approach perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this approach has emerged from recent attempts to move beyond the neoclassical theory of the firm which assumes away all organizational considerations to a theory of economic organizations that can explain why firms corporations and other enterprises behave as they do propo

wages profits and rent sharing the paper suggests a new test for rent sharing in the u s labor market using an unbalanced panel from the manufacturing sector it shows that a rise in a sector s profitability leads after some years to an increase in the long run level of wages in that sector the paper controls for workers characteristics for industry fixed effects and for unionism lester s range of wages is estimated for rent sharing reasons alone at approximately 24 per cent of the mean wage

real wage determination and rent sharing in collective bargaining agreements the microeconomic forces that influence real wages are not fully understood this paper studies pay determination using data on approximately 600 labour contracts it finds that the real wage is an increasing function of past profitability in the employer s industry and a decreasing function of the level of unemployment in the employer s region these results are consistent with rent sharing theories

an analysis of selectivity in the productivity evaluation of biotechnology an application to corn we investigate selectivity bias in the evaluation of biotech hybrid productivity the analysis is applied to experimental data on wisconsin corn yields from 1990 to 2010 relying on a heckman like factor that accounts for selectivity we find evidence of selection bias indicating that some of the observed yield advantage associated with gm hybrids can be attributed to their conventional genes we document how the rising market concentration of biotech firms has contributed to increasing selectivity bias in corn yield the impact however is offset by the negative effect of the rising adoption rate of gm corn on selectivity bias copyright 2013 oxford university press

not by the sword alone soft power mass media and the production of state sovereignty scholars of civil conflict have long recognized the importance of state strength in the suppression of nascent insurgencies however previous empirical investigations have generally focused on the material and coercive dimensions of state power obscuring the critical role played by the generation of widespread voluntary compliance through processes of political communication that is the production of soft power in contrast in this article i focus on a factor mass communication technology that can enhance state capacity only by strengthening the state s ability to broadly and publicly disseminate political messages i argue that the enhanced capacities for large scale normative influence generated by mass communication technologies can be expected to produce substantial barriers to the mobilization of militarized challenges to state rule by strengthening economies of scale in the marketplace of ideas utilizing newly compiled cross national data on mass media accessibility in the post world war ii period i show that densely constituted mass media systems dramatically reduce the probability of large scale civil violence thereby providing new evidence for the fundamental importance of nonmaterial state capacities in the suppression of internal armed conflicts

estimation of price cost margins and union bargaining power for belgian manufacturing abstract this paper extends hall s 1988 hall r e 1988 the relationship between price and marginal cost in us industry journal of political economy 96 921 947 methodology to analyze imperfections in both the product and the labor market for firms in the belgian manufacturing industry over the period 1988 1995 we investigate the heterogeneity in price cost mark up and workers bargaining power parameters among 18 sectors within the manufacturing industry as well as the relationship between both parameters using a sample of more than 7000 firms our gmm results indicate that ignoring imperfection in the labor market leads to an underestimation of the price cost margin evaluated at perfect competition in the labor market these findings are confirmed in the sectoral analysis sectors with higher workers bargaining power typically show higher price cost margins

the politics of trade offs studying the dynamics of welfare state reform with conjoint experiments welfare state reform in times of austerity is notoriously difficult because most citizens oppose retrenchment of social benefits governments thus tend to combine cutbacks with selective benefit

the crisis of german and japanese capitalism stalled on the road to the liberal market model german and japanese opinion leaders demand a decisive move toward the liberal market model yet their governments have been slow to act why can t germany and japan reform to unravel this puzzle we must understand how the german and japanese models of capitalism bind the potential winners from liberal reform such as competitive manufacturing exporters to the potential losers such as workers and protected service industries competitive exporters are reluctant to embrace reforms that might undermine valued relationships with workers financial institutions and other business partners moreover they cannot forge a strong reform coalition because they must work through industry associations and political parties that represent both competitive and protected sectors as a result germany and japan proceed cautiously with reform they package delicate compromises often compensating the potential losers they design reforms to preserve core institutions and they seek novel ways to build on the strengths

explaining institutional change policy areas outside options and the bretton woods institutions i propose and test a theoretical framework that explains institutional change in international relations like firms in markets international institutions are affected by the underlying characteristics of their policy areas some policy areas are prone to produce institutions facing relatively little competition limiting the outside options of member states and impeding redistributive change in comparison institutions facing severe competition will quickly reflect changes in underlying state interests and power to test the theory empirically i exploit common features of the bretton woods institutions the international monetary fund and world bank to isolate the effect of variation in policy area characteristics the empirical tests show that despite having identical membership and internal rules bargaining outcomes in the bretton woods institutions have diverged sharply and in accordance with the theory

historical origins of firm ownership structure the persistent effects of the african slave trade this paper uses evidence from the historical african slave trade to extend prior theory linking modern firm ownership structure to institutions and social capital we argue that institutions and so

monopolistic competition and the effects of aggregate demand how important is monopolistic competition to an understanding of the effects of aggregate demand on output we ask the question at three levels can monopolistic competition by itself explain why aggregate demand movements affect output can it together with other imperfections generate effects of aggregate demand in a way that perfect competition cannot if so can it give an accurate account of the response of the economy to aggregate demand movements the answers are no yes and yes

social policy through labor markets understanding national differences in the provision of economic security to wage earners recent work in comparative political economy has emphasized the existence of functional equivalents to the welfare state in the area of labor market policy in many european countries in australia and in new zealand labor laws minimum wages and collective agreements have traditionally played an important role in guaranteeing a certain level of economic security for workers and their families this article tries to explain why different countries have developed different instruments for providing economic security to wage earners it compares labor legislation and practices across several european countries and focuses on the detailed trajectory of france germany and the united kingdom it finds that state society relationships and ideological influences at key historical moments can help understand the original divergence which is perpetuated through a typical path dependent development

capital labor and the firm a study of german codetermination under the german corporate governance system of codetermination employees are legally allocated control rights over corporate assets through seats on the supervisory board that is the board of nonexecutive directors the supervisory board oversees the management board the board of executive directors approves or rejects its decisions and appoints its members and sets their salaries we empirically investigate the implications of this sort of labor participation in corporate decision making we find that companies with equal representation of employees and shareholders on the supervisory board trade at a 31 stock market discount as compared with companies where employee representatives fill only one third of the supervisory board seats we show that under equal representation management board compensation provides incentives that are not conducive to furthering shareholders interests possibly because labor maximizes a different objective function than shareholders we document that under equal representation companies have longer payrolls than their one third representation peers have finally we provide evidence that shareholders respond to the allocation of control rights to labor by linking supervisory board compensation to firm performance and by leveraging up the firm jel g32 g34

bargaining power fear of disagreement and wage settlements theory and evidence from u s industry the paper develops and estimates a theoretical model of wage determination and union nonunion wage differentials in order to overcome the institutional ctiticisms of the formal bargaining literature the paper generalizes the nash zeuthen harsanyi model by linking the solution to the institutional concepts of bargaining power and fear or cost of disagreement and by making the outcome depend not only on endogenous but also on exogenous factors an operational specification of bargaining power and fear of disagreement allows the model to be estimated with data covering twelve companies and trade unions during the period from mid 1950 s to the late 1970 s while giving limited support to the nashzeuthen harsanyi solution the empirical analysis indicates that the bargaining outcome usually deviates from the nash zeuthen harsanyi point and in accordance with the institutionalist claim that it varies significantly with exogenous factors contrary to the traditional labor economics view the results do not support the general conclusion that the bargaining solution lies on the marginal revenue product curve of labor instead the relevant coefficients suggest that for many firms and unions the outcome might be better characterized by the efficient contract vertical contract curve

wage premia price cost margins and bargaining power in belgian manufacturing abstract an asymmetric nash bargaining model as developed by j svejnar 1986 is empirically tested on industry wage negotiations in belgium union s relative bargaining power emerges from this model as the fraction of firm s profits per worker which the unions are able to capture in excess of the alternative wage the estimates of the bargaining power coefficients for blue as well as white collar workers reject the symmetric split the difference outcome determinants of the cross industry variation of bargaining power are explored as well

searching for good policies policymaking is hard policymakers typically have imperfect information about which policies produce which outcomes and they are left with little choice but to fumble their way through the policy space via a trial and error process this raises a question at the heart of democracy do democratic systems identify good policies to answer this question i introduce a novel model of policymaking in complex environments i show that good policies are often but not always found and i identify the possibility of policymaking getting stuck at outcomes that are arbitrarily bad notably policy stickiness occurs in the model even in the absence of institutional constraints this raises the question of how institutions and the political environment impact experimentation and learning i show how a simple political friction uncertainty over voter preferences interacts with political competition and policy uncertainty in a subtle way that surprisingly improves the quality of policymaking over time

efficiency and internal organization works councils in west german firms efficiency voice theory has not explained why highly competent managers cannot maintain effective communication without formal or mandatory institutions of l abor s voice powerful west german works councils are negatively rela ted to productivity in the sample suggesting that the best managers can do better without councils however excessive pressure on worker s should encourage both unionization and councils to gain compensatin g differentials and the simultaneous wls tobit estimates also suppor t this effect general productivity benefits from formal voice organi zation are strongly rejected but evaluating welfare efficiency and causality directly requires data on job satisfaction and managerial ability copyright 1987 by the review of economic studies limited

market structure and worker quality it is frequently asserted although never directly tested that firms in more monopolistic industries hire better qualified workers this paper presents two new results first worker quality education in particular is a strong determinant of whether a worker is employed in a concentrated industry when using a traditional data source second upon expanding the data to include measures of research and development workers of better quality are actually no more likely to locate in concentrated industries these results fit with theories claiming that industries subject to technological opportunities may be more concentrated and that those opportunities demand higher quality workers i introduction at least a score of articles since the 1960s test the hypothesis that more concentrated industries pay workers higher wages other things equal this investigation has been part of a more general examination of whether or not concentrated structure generates inefficiencies beyond the deviation of price from cost unfortunately this large scale effort has not been rewarded with consistent results separate researchers both confirm and fail to confirm an independent role for industrial concentration in wage determination among those who fail to confirm the concentration earnings hypothesis one explanation is offered most often while concentrated industries pay higher wages they obtain better qualified workers the generally acknowledged simple correlation between wages and concentration becomes an insignificant partial correlation in the presence of a vector of controls while some of the typical controls could be considered measures of worker quality others clearly are not it may be one or more of these non quality controls which frequently include industry characteristics which eliminates the significance of concentration for example plant size and unionization known to be correlated with both wages and concentration are among the more likely non quality variables which could explain the lack of the authors thank william j adams william g shepherd gary solon and frank p stafford their suggestions improved early versions of this paper thanks is also expressed to almarin phillips who suggested the association with technological progress those confirming a positive statistical association between wages and industrial concentration include dalton and ford 119771 mellow 119831 kwoka 119831 long and link 119831 and heywood 119861 those failing to find such an association include weiss 119661 rapping 1967 pugel i9801 and freeman and medoff 119811

the regulation of labor author s botero juan djankov simeon la porta rafael lopez de silanes florencio shleifer andrei abstract we investigate the regulation of labor markets through employment collective relations and social security laws in 85 countries we find that the political power of the left is associated with more stringent labor regulations and more generous social security systems and that socialist french and scandinavian legal origin countries have sharply higher levels of labor regulation than do common law countries however the effects of legal origins are larger and explain more of the variation in regulations than those of politics heavier regulation of labor is associated with lower labor force participation and higher unemployment especially of the young these results are most naturally consistent with legal theories according to which countries have pervasive regulaory styles inherited from the transplantation of legal systems

endogenous scope of firm union bargaining with vertical pay comparisons abstract there is strong evidence that employees motivation and incentives in the workplace are affected by vertical pay comparisons in a stylized cournot duopoly model with firm specific unions that institutionalize workers vertical fairness concerns we show that universal wage employment w e bargaining may arise as the equilibrium scope of bargaining institution we thus propose that intra firm vertical fairness concerns may resolve the mismatch between recent findings in the empirical literature on labor market institutions and the predictions of traditional models that universal w e bargaining will never arise in equilibrium the scope of bargaining puzzle we derive a number of testable hypotheses that address the recent shift towards more decentralized bargaining institutions the decline in unions bargaining power and the prevalence of w e bargaining

a low carbon industrial revolution insights and challenges from past technological and economic transformations recent efforts to promote a transition to a low carbon economy have been influenced by suggestions that a low carbon transition offers challenges and might yield economic benefits comparable to those of the previous industrial revolutions this paper examines these arguments and the challenges facing a low carbon transition by drawing on recent thinking on the technological economic and institutional factors that enabled and sustained the first british industrial revolution and the role of general purpose technologies in stimulating and sustaining this and subsequent industrial transformation processes that have contributed to significant macroeconomic gains these revolutions involved profound long drawn out changes in economy technology and society and although their energy transitions led to long run economic benefits they took many decades to develop to reap significant long run economic benefits from a low carbon transition sooner rather than later would require systemic efforts and incentives for low carbon innovation and substitution of high carbon technologies we conclude that while achieving a low carbon transition may require societal changes on a scale comparable with those of previous industrial revolutions this transition does not yet resemble previous industrial revolutions a successful low carbon transition would however amount to a different kind of industrial revolution

limiting the unintended consequences of institutional change students of institutional change pay insufficient attention to the conditions under which institutional reform produces unintended procedural and policy consequences the authors contend that the b

labour s share market structure and trade unionism abstract using british manufacturing data this paper tests kalecki s degree of monopoly theory of the determination of factor incomes the paper demonstrates how both product market structure captured by the live firm concentration ratio and trade unionism measured by collective bargaining agreements shape production worker wage share we report estimates in which it emerges that there is an important role for seller concentration in influencing wage share but the estimated trade union coverage results are less robust our tests reveal that once idiosyncratic industry effects and accounted for the union effect on wage share disappears

rhetoric and reality in protected area governance institutional change under different conservation discourses in mount elgon national park uganda abstract the approach to governance of protected areas has been in transition over last decades partly driven by evolving policy discourses that shape the ways in which conservation is thought to be delivered the most influential discourses are the fortress approach community conservation and back to the barriers how different discourses translate and are instituted on ground are however complex and disputed inclusive policy strategies in relation to local involvement in developing countries are of particular concern the study analyses how conservation policy discourses have become manifested taking the case of mount elgon national park menp uganda it outlines main conservation policy discourses analyses actor s interests and power relations and further examines how institutions for park governance have evolved and changed according to the different discourses the results indicate that conservation discourses and donor support come and go while menp seems to outlast all the worrying reality is that menp administration strongly influenced by the interplay of path dependent institutional forces rooted in the fortress discourse simply sticks to its guns maintaining the application of law enforcement as key management instruments in its approach to governance especially to local people interactions there is an apparent gap between rhetoric and reality in protected area governance

theorizing path dependence a review of positive feedback mechanisms in technology markets regional clusters and organizations the concept of path dependence has often been criticized as vague and only narrowly applicable although we can find some very refined definitions of the concept we also find a wide range of empirical phenomena being described as path dependent we argue that more detailed accounts of the positive feedback mechanisms that form paths can take path dependence beyond this state of being overdetermined but under specified reviewing three well described cases of path dependent dynamics in technology markets regional clustering and organizations we define a core set of positive feedback mechanisms that constitute path dependence at different analysis levels and clarify the relationship between positive feedback and increasing returns we show that path dependent processes that is processes driven by positive feedback that veer toward rigidity or lock in can be but do not have to be found under many labels including structural inertia coevolution or institutional persistence we conclude that a precise definition of path dependence does not need to be at odds with the concept s widespread use in understanding organizational and industrial development processes copyright 2013 the author 2012 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

saying yes to taxes the politics of tax reform campaigns in three northwestern states 1965 1973 this article analyzes factors shaping popular support for new taxes by examining variation in the outcomes of votes in nine american states during the 1960s and early 1970s new taxes were endorsed in five states but rejected in four using comparative and historical methods focused on the cases of oregon washington and idaho the author argues that the sequence of policy making shapes popular vetoes through three mechanisms the mobilization of interest groups the information available to voters about a policy and how the costs and benefits of a policy appear to voters the findings demonstrate that voter perceptions of the potential gains and losses of a new policy are sociologically mobilized through the policy process controlling when popular veto points appear in a policy process is an understudied strategy that is employed by american state builders to overcome ambivalence toward the fiscal imperatives of the activist state

the strength of a weak agency enforcement of title vii of the 1964 civil rights act and the expansion of state capacity 1965 1971 this article analyzes the anomalous case of early title vii enforcement to challenge the standard political institutional pi account of state capacity title vii prohibited employment discrimination but the equal employment opportunity commission was granted scant enforcement resources yet the early eeoc aggressively enforced and developed title vii to solve the anomaly the authors integrate insights from the literatures on social movements and the sociology of law in the absence of conventional administrative resources apparently weak state agencies can expand their capacity through the legal strategy of broad statutory construction this strategy is more likely with the presence of social movement pressure from below the authors argue that state capacity is a moving target with state and societal actors building on legal as well as administrative resources to construct and transform capacity by reconceptualizing state capacity the authors contribute to nuanced explanations of state policy

american exceptionalism revisited the military industrial complex racial tension and the underdeveloped welfare state we examine democrats decline in the house of representatives from the mid 1930s to the late 1940s debates over american exceptionalism in the realm of social policy pay surprisingly little attention to a profound transformation that occurred during and after world war ii on the international stage the united states emerged as the hegemon at home the pentagon became the largest and most powerful agency in the federal bureaucracy in modeling electoral losses suffered by democrats we show that world war ii mobilization played an important role first democrats lost ground in congressional districts where the nascent military industrial complex was created specifically in aircraft manufacturing centers second the impact of aircraft manufacturing intersected with wartime in migration of non whites democrats suffered significantly greater losses where both non white population and aircraft manufacturing employment increased our findings corroborate accounts of the social welfare state that stress

taking credit redistribution and borrowing in an age of economic polarization several recent studies link rising income inequality in the united states to the global financial crisis arguing that us politicians did not respond to growing inequality with fiscal redistribution instead americans saved less and borrowed more to maintain relative consumption in the face of widening economic disparities this article proposes a theory in which fiscal redistribution dampens the willingness of citizens to borrow to fund current consumption a key implication is that pretax inequality will be more tightly linked with credit in less redistributive countries the long run partisan composition of government is in turn a key determinant of redistributive effort examining a panel of eighteen oecd democracies the authors find that countries with limited histories of left wing participation in government are significantly more likely see credit expansion as prefisc inequality grows compared to those in which the political left has been more influential

welfare policy expansion in botswana and mauritius explaining the causes of different welfare regime paths how come two developing countries with similar economic institutional and democratic attributes have developed vastly different welfare regimes drawing inspiration from the welfare regime literature the author subjects botswana and mauritius to a comparative historical analysis that explores the economic and political trajectories of their welfare policy development the findings offer both support and modifications to the established and mostly western oriented literature first politics affect welfare policy development in developing countries the rural population can promote welfare policy expansion but it is middle class interests that shape the direction of policy development second given the importance of politics conceptualizations of welfare policies need to include both the spending and the financing side finally the causes of different welfare regime paths need to be examined with attention to the particular economic contexts of developing countries and how welfare and economic poli

political competition and renewable energy transitions over long time horizons a dynamic approach abstract climate change mitigation requires sustainable energy transitions but their political dynamics are poorly understood this article presents a general dynamic model of renewable energy policy with long time horizons endogenous electoral competition and techno political path dependence we calibrate the model with data on the economics of contemporary renewable energy technologies in doing so we discover transition dynamics not present in economy energy models which ignore politics or in formal political economy models which ignore long term technological dynamics we show that the largest effects of partisan ideology on policy occur when the competing parties disagree on the importance of energy policy in these cases the less ideological party appeases the more ideological one while the more ideological party attempts to appease the electorate the results demonstrate that political dynamics could have large effects on the development of renewable energy and carbon dioxide emissions over time influencing the ability of countries to reach various climate mitigation trajectories

bargaining efficiency wages and the price cost markup abstract the size of the negative effect of unions on the price cost markup in efficient bargain models depends on the extent to which the union cares about employment rather than wages a negative effect in labour demand models can also arise under efficiency wages

the changing of the boards the impact on firm valuation of mandated female board representation in 2003 a new law required that 40 of norwegian firms directors be women at the time only 9 of directors were women we use the prequota cross sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota we find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in tobin s q over the following years consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value the quota led to younger and less experienced boards increases in leverage and acquisitions and deterioration in operating performance copyright 2012 oxford university press

loss aversion in politics we study how loss aversion affects the political equilibrium in a simple majority voting model first we show a status quo bias which leads to path dependence second loss aversion implies a moderating effect on the most extreme voters third in a dynamic setting the effect of loss aversion diminishes with the length of the planning horizon of voters however in the presence of a projection bias majorities are partially unable to understand how fast they will adapt to a new policy this makes changes less likely and induces time inconsistency policy changes are timid at the beginning while in later periods they are made progressively more radical fourth in a stochastic environment loss aversion yields a significant distaste for risk but also a smaller attachment to the status quo the application of these results to a model of redistribution leads to empirically plausible implications

institutional development through policy making a case study of the brazilian central bank a number of contemporary studies rightly emphasize the notion that policy outcomes result from institutional determinants but as a growing literature on institutional development notes these institutions are themselves impermanent sometimes in crisis moments institutions are replaced wholesale more frequently institutions evolve gradually over time using the brazilian central bank as a case study this article illustrates that the policy making process itself can be a central driver of gradual institutional development with institutions evolving through the accumulation of policy choices made over many years and under different policymakers in response to contemporaneous events and unforeseeable economic and political challenges

codetermination as a strategic advantage abstract a theoretical model of codetermination is considered where consistent with german institutions firm owners bargain with employees representatives about employment but not about wages a duopoly and a more general oligopolistic situation are analyzed for some range of bargaining power a prisoner s dilemma exists codetermination leads to increased profits if the other firm is a traditional profit maximizer bargaining is the dominant strategy although joint profits would be maximized with unrestricted profit maximization the theory is tested with data from 22 german firms who operate in the same markets over 23 years codetermined firms actually show a different behavior than other companies

product oriented climate policy learning from the past to shape the future abstract product oriented climate policies such as labels financial incentives and emission standards for vehicles and buildings have achieved considerable reductions in emissions and triggered innovations that offer very low emissions during the use phase in contrast to other climate policy instruments these policies are successfully applied in an increasing number of regions however a major proportion of global emissions namely those from industry remain outside the scope of most current forms of product oriented climate policies all economic activities could be included by extending product oriented policies to embodied emissions i e emissions resulting from manufacturing products to guide such a development we need a better understanding of the current state and potential future development of this policy approach therefore in this paper we review and evaluate policy evolution over the past decade in terms of both measures implemented and emissions addressed on this basis we synthesize a framework for developing policy towards greater stringency and broader scope the framework describes a step wise process to achieve increasingly stringent standards once established standards can extend their scope to include additional similar products and related embodied emissions our framework and policy review informs the reinforcement and extensions of current product oriented climate policies a relevant implication for international climate policy is that the regional adoption of such policies incentivizes the global diffusion of low ghg products international climate policy can foster this development by supporting the harmonization of carbon footprint norms for products in order to enhance conformity with international trade and facilitate the extension of product oriented climate policy to embodied emissions

institutional emergence in an era of globalization the rise of transnational private regulation of labor and environmental conditions1 why have systems of transnational private regulation recently emerged to certify corporate social and environmental performance different conceptions of institutional emergence underlie different answers to this question many scholars argue that firms create certification systems to solve problems in the market a view rooted in a conception of institutions as solutions to collective action problems the author develops a different account by viewing institutions as the outcome of political contestation and by analyzing conflict and institutional entrepreneurship among a wide array of actors using a comparative case study design the analysis shows how these arguments explain the formation of social and environmental certification associations both theoretical approaches are needed but strong versions of the market based approach overlook an important set of dynamics that the author calls the political construction of market institutions the analysis shows how both problem solving in markets and

equilibrium institutions the federal proportional trade off durable democracies display a huge variety of combinations of basic institutional formulas a quantitative logical model shows that while there are multiple equilibrium sets of institutions each involves some trade off between the size of the country the territorial structure of government and the electoral system specifically the larger the country the more important is federalism in comparison to proportional representation electoral rules for the durability of democratic institutions the explanatory power of the model is positively tested on all current durable democratic countries it is also illustrated with a few both fitting and deviant cases a relevant implication is that the room for manipulation of the choice of institutions is large but not unlimited as the choices for a durable democracy are constrained by bounded trade offs between the values of major institutional variables

seeking the local state gender caste and the pursuit of public services in post tsunami india summary how do ordinary citizens access the state in the world s largest democracy this paper examines a critical case from india exploring the channels formal and informal through which residents of two tsunami affected villages pursued public services following the 2004 disaster external shocks such as the proliferation of aid and ngos created moments in which individuals interacted differently with public agencies different village level groups attempted to access state resources through distinct sets of intermediaries marginalized groups women and caste minorities appeared most willing and likely to utilize formal government channels while men from the locally dominant caste turned to informal non state channels

the transformation of the swedish model economic ideas distributional conflict and institutional change this article examines the transformation of the swedish model of economic regulation from an ideational perspective while the majority of arguments about the decline of the swedish model have focused on the role of structural factors this article looks to illuminate the ideational factors that made possible both the emergence and the transformation of the swedish model the article details how during the 1930s and 1940s economic ideas provided the swedish state and its trade union allies with the means to construct the institutions of the swedish model by the 1970s however swedish business suffered diminishing returns to continued participation within these institutions and responded to labor s challenges by adopting a two pronged strategy of withdrawal from and ideological contestation of labor s supporting institutions the politics of ideas was key in this regard during the 1980s swedish business marshaled alternative economic ideas to contest and thus delegitimate existing institutions and the patterns of distribution they made possible swedish business thus began the process of overturning the swedish model long before capital mobility or domestic inflation was ever a problem by highlighting these factors the article offers an explanation of the transformation of the swedish model that stresses the centrality of ideational contestation for understanding institutional change in general

traps and sustainable development in rural areas a review summary the concept of a poverty trap commonly understood as a self reinforcing situation beneath an asset threshold has been very influential in describing the persistence of poverty and the relationship between poverty and sustainability although traps and the dynamics that lead to traps are defined and used differently in different disciplines the concept of a poverty trap has been most powerfully shaped by work in development economics this perspective is often constraining because as many studies show poverty arises from complex interactions between social and environmental factors that are rarely considered in development economics a more integrated understanding of poverty traps can help to understand the interrelations between persistent poverty and key social and ecological factors facilitating more effective development interventions the aim of this paper is to provide a critical appraisal of existing trap conceptualizations in different disciplines and to assess the characteristics and mechanisms that are used to explain poverty traps in rural contexts thereby broadening the traps concept to better account for social ecological interactions complementarities and tensions among different disciplinary perspectives on traps are identified and our results demonstrate that different definitions of traps share a set of common characteristics persistence undesirability and self reinforcement yet these minimum conditions are not sufficient to understand how trap dynamics arise from complex social ecological interactions to broaden the utility of the concept we propose a more social ecologically integrated definition of traps that includes four additional considerations cross scale interactions path dependencies the role of external drivers and social ecological diversity including these wider dimensions of trap dynamics would help to better account for the diverse social ecological feedbacks that produce and maintain poverty traps and could strengthen strategies to alleviate poverty in a more integrated way

innovative social business of selective waste collection in brazil cleaner production and poverty reduction abstract in brazil municipal solid waste management mswm faces several challenges in its transition from a waste disposal model to another based on selective collection with recycling and reuse each municipality has adopted different institutional arrangements to meet the responsibility shared by the state industries and consumers to operate public policies in this field the consequence has been an inefficient recycling rate high costs and the exclusion of waste collectors from the official system therefore the objectives of this study are as follows i to submit a sustainable institutional arrangement based on cooperation between agents with an intensive use of information technology and logistics and ii to assess the economic financial feasibility of the model the research method was based on a multilevel interdisciplinary and systemic analytical structure for the study of path dependent processes proposed by hoff 2011 associated to critical moment identification approach from collier collier 1991 in addition an economic valuation model based on discounted cash flow was used the path dependence analysis reveals the following determinants of this situation recent legislation the existence of socially excluded collectors contractual formats in public private partnerships and the need to raise citizens awareness of their co responsibility regarding environmental education in this scenario the alternative found by the actors is a social business that is inclusive for those at the bottom of the pyramid bop and decentralised in micro cooperatives with different forms of relationship with public authorities different from what the experiments indicate the economic and financial viability of the model in addition to the environmental social and legal benefits are confirmed

an integrated theory of budgetary politics and some empirical tests the u s national budget 1791 2010 we develop a general theory of budgetary politics and examine its implications on a new data set on u s government expenditures from 1791 to 2010 we draw on three major approaches to budgeting decision making theories primarily incrementalism and serial processing policy process models and path dependency we show that the incrementalist budget model is recursive and that its solution is exponential growth and isolate three periods in which it operates in pure form the equilibrium periods are separated by critical junctures associated with wars or economic collapse we assess policy process dynamics by examining the deviations within equilibrium periods we offer three takeaways 1 exponential incrementalism is fundamental to a theory of budgeting 2 disjoint shifts in the level of exponential incrementalism are caused only by critical moments 3 temporally localized dynamics cause bends in the exponential path longer returns to the path within budgetary eras and annual punctuations in budget changes

innovation policy rationales lessons and challenges innovation policy has emerged as a new field of economic policy during the last few decades this paper explores the rationales for national innovation policies as laid out in the existing literature on the subject and considers what the lessons and challenges for theory and practice in this area are innovation policy attempts to influence innovation activity often with the purpose of increasing economic growth but it can also have more specific aims such as preventing unwarranted climate change improving national health and so on the increasing attention given to innovation policy at the national level from the 1990s onwards went hand in hand with the development of a new systemic understanding of innovation which in a better way than before accounted for the stylised facts of innovation activity as identified by empirical work the system approach as the paper shows came to have a significant influence on the subsequent policy discourse drawing on recent advances in innovation systems theory a synthetic framework for the analysis of innovation policy is developed and used to highlight issues of particular relevance for the conduct of innovation policy and future scholarly work in this area less

saving children controlling families punishment redistribution and child protection this study shows that state efforts at child protection are structured by the policy regimes in which they are enmeshed using administrative data on child protection criminal justice and social welfare interventions i show that children are separated from their families and placed into foster care far more frequently in states with extensive and punitive criminal justice systems than in states with broad and generous welfare programs however large welfare bureaucracies interact with welfare program enrollment to create opportunities for the surveillance of families suggesting that extensive and administratively complex welfare states engage in soft social control through the surveillance and regulation of family behavior the article further shows that institutionalization a particularly restrictive form of foster care placement is least common in states with broad and generous welfare regimes and generally more common under punitive regimes taken together these findings show that policy regi

path shifting of the welfare state electoral competition and the expansion of work family policies in western europe what explains the surprising growth of work family policies in several west european countries much research on the welfare state emphasizes its institutional stickiness and immunity to major change yet over the past two decades governments in germany the netherlands and the united kingdom have introduced important reforms to their welfare regimes enacting paid leave schemes expanded rights to part time work and greater investments in child care a comparison of these countries reveals a similar sequence of political and policy change faced with growing electoral instability and the decline of core constituencies party leaders sought to attract dealigning voter groups such as women this led them to introduce feminizing reforms of their party structures and adopt policies to support mothers employment in all three cases women working within the parties played an important role in hatching or lobbying for these reforms after comparing three countries that moved in a path shifting direction this article engages in a brief traveling exercise examining whether a similar set of dynamics are lacking in two countries austria and italy that have moved more slowly in reforming these policies against the prevailing scholarly literature that emphasizes path dependence and slow moving change this article reveals the continued power of electoral politics in shaping redistributive policies