Welfare Spending in OECD Countries Revisited: Has the Salience of Partisanship Really Declined?

Although the decline-of-partisanship thesis has become a dominant perspective in the existing comparative welfare state literature, we argue that the salience of the partisan composition of government for social policy outcomes has increased. Using an innovative approach to measure welfare effort, we explore the effects of government partisanship on social spending growth in 17 OECD countries in 1963-94 period. A robust regression analysis of a pooled time-series cross section data and a moving-windows analysis of fixed-length data points unambiguously support our expectations that Left governments became more distinctively "pro-welfare" in the course of the 1970s and 1980s. We also find that the positive effect of union strength on welfare effort rose through the 1980s. Evidence shows that levels of welfare spending have been consistently associated with lower rates of spending growth throughout the period, suggesting cross-national convergence of welfare states. Our analysis rejects the notion of welfare state expansion as a self-perpetuating process and finds no evidence that supports the decline-of-partisanship thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]