Governments that wish to redistribute through budgetary policy do so mostly on the spending side, not on the taxation side of the budget. The taxation side is nevertheless important, partly because less efficient tax structures seem to be associated with lower taxation and spending levels. Hence...

Esping-Andersen's "Three World of Welfare Capitalism" has been the most influential contribution of recent years to the comparative welfare state research literature. According to Esping-Andersen, the welfare state basically comes in three variants: as a social-democratic, a conservative, or as...

In parliamentary systems, parties compete for votes and offices in the electoral arena but in many systems they also cooperate in the legislative arena. This paper examines the question of whether the government status of parties affects their legislative behaviour and, hence, policy outcomes....

This paper analyzes 'globalization' as the interplay between domestic and 'foreign' economic agents that seek to break up nationally contained and/or institutionally constrained markets with the aim of altering distributive outcomes in their favor. I take as my exemplary cases the recent opening...

Is there a relation between welfare state regimes and national wage setting systems? Peter Swenson in his research on the historical dynamics of the US-American and Swedish welfare state has recently claimed that such a relation does indeed exist. The essay aims to check if this also holds true...

The recently enacted reform of German federalism is supposed to make legislation "faster, more efficient and better." To what extent are these expectations justified? In order to assess the likely effects of the reform, this study uses a research design that was recently applied by the Research...