Comparative public policy is a blooming research area. It also suffers from some curious blind spots. In this paper we discuss four of these: (1) the obsession with covariance, which means that important phenomena are ignored; (2) the lack of agency, which leads to underwhelming explanatory...

The Right and the Welfare State studies the welfare state policies of conservative and liberal governments. These parties have been assumed to be nothing but the welfare-sceptical flip-side of the Left, but the book presents a new theory arguing that the conventional wisdom is wrong. The policy...

This paper focuses on behavioural reasons underlying stated attribute non-attendance in choice experiments. In order to identify and incorporate procedures for dealing with heterogeneous attribute processing strategies, we ask respondents follow-up questions regarding their reasons for ignoring...

Measuring citizens’ political knowledge is important for understanding public opinion formation. In view of the increasing popularity of Web surveys, this paper examines the limitations of this interviewing facility when measuring factual political knowledge. We show that Web surveys contain a...

De-industrialization constitutes one of the main structural transformations of Western economies since the end of World War II. It has been argued that de-industrialization leads to expanding welfare programs as a means to generate social protection against the risk of skills redundancy when...

Cover -- Title Page -- Colophon -- Contents -- Foreword -- Chapter 1 -- Modernization, human biology, and a tale of two domains -- Chapter 2 -- The labor market bias of the welfare state literature -- Modernization and the origins of thewelfare state literature -- Power resources and political...

We argue that the decline of Social Democratic parties is partly caused by the emergence of a 'second generation of new right-wing parties'. While the existing literature on new right parties has primarily seen these parties as anti-immigrant and anti-establishment, we suggest that this only...