Ideas of Order: Institutional Dynamics and the Shifting Politics of Pension Reform in France and Germany.

Through an analysis of recent pension reforms in France and Germany, this paper argues that the advent of a climate of economic austerity has driven shifts in both the character of political bargaining and the substance of policies in the two countries. Not only have France and Germany continued to reform their pension systems, in contrast to popular conceptions of "frozen" continental European welfare states, the very political arrangements that many scholars have blamed for policy sclerosis in the two countries—dysfunctional statism in France and moribund neocorporatism in Germany—have likewise continued to evolve. More generally, the paper calls into question the common claim that pension reform tends to take place through negotiation and consensus. It argues instead that successful pension reform has followed an approach of "strategic unilateralism," which involves government imposition of reform but in ways that account for the political assets and liabilities created by the institutional and political contexts in question. The paper concludes that formal distributions of political authority may provide very misleading guidelines for both understanding political dynamics and predicting policy outcomes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]