Preface

Welfare state retrenchment continues to fascinate social scientists in general and political economists in particular.The intriguing reform of pension schemes which generally constitute the largest single item of social expenditures has no doubt to be the main target of government attempts to reduce spending on welfare.However, the previous expansion of the pension schemes has already produced its own constituency in the form of a number of strong interest groups ready to mobilize resistance against any retreat from the status quo.In other words, it has provoked an enormous amount of internal political conflict, since pension reform has disparate effects on different groups within a welfare regime.

The literature on the political economy of pension reform has developed an unambiguous dichotomy.Many scholars, following in the generational logic, focus on the political role of narrow age groups or special pension interests in the policymaking process.The approach has been prominently adopted by some neoclassical economists and is common to quantitative studies of pension reform inspired by the sociology literature in demography.The generational logic based on demographic factors is not a simple point, but a complex continuum varying from weak propositions to strong propositions.The extreme former can extend the generation structure as one population platform for political economy, and the latter can emphasize the interest cleavage and political conflict among generations.

In contrast, the“class-based power resource theory”has famously examined broad class coalitions in a range of historical contexts, highlighting political conflicts among different income groups, even between labor and capital over the direction of the reform pension scheme.Other analysts, drawing distinctions between public sector and private sector, or between skilled and un-skilled labor, have made similar assumptions about the centrality of class cleavages in pension politics.From this perspective, social policy is the result not only of socio-economic shifts but also of political struggles about distribu-tive decisions.

Since both class and generation approaches have found empirical support in a variety of contexts, it is suggested that there is the need for a way to bridge the gulf between them that would specify the conditions under which one is more appropriate than the other.So this book unveils a potent new approach to the old debate—that whether class conflict or generation competition is more prevalent in the politics of the pension reforms in the EU.It goes further than any study to date by outlining the conditions under which one type of political conflict is more likely than the other.This book focuses on a critical issue affecting support for and opposition to pension reform—intensity of family support for the elderly, or the extent of the redistribution of social welfare between generations by family ties.Both class and generation models examine extreme cases in which family support for the elderly are assumed to be either perfectly existed or completely non-existent.Intensity of family support for the elderly is more appropriately regarded as a continuous variable, affected by a range of social, economic, and political conditions.Allowing that factors can have varying degrees of intensity, the simple prediction is that broad class-based political coalitions are more likely where intensity is high, whereas narrow generation-based coalitions are more likely where intensity is low.The pension reform issue should divide societies along very different lines when substantial variation exists in intensity of family support for the elderly.Class coalitions are more likely where intensity of family support for the elderly is high, whereas narrow generation-based coalitions predominate where it is low.

In order to recognize the differences in coalition patterns, this book analyzes the primary organizational channels through which coalitions of individuals influence policy, i.e., political parties, peak associations, and lobby groups.What's more, these political organizations of interest mediation can either be age homogeneous, that is, restricted to specific age groups（e.g., lobby groups）, or age encompassing（e.g., political parties）.In the first case, interest conflict among age groups is externalized to the political“market”—to the conflict between organizations such as wage earner and pensioners.In the second case, age-encompassing organization, interest mediation a-mong age groups is internalized, and the political market is likely to be struc-tured among traditional cleavages such as classes, religions, or ethnic groups.

What's more, this book continues to discuss the relationship between coalition patterns and resistance to pension reforms.Corresponding to the change of the intensity of family support for the elderly, the forms of social coalition will change from class coalition to non-dominant coalition, then to generation coalition.The resistance to pension reforms in the non-dominant coalition will be the least among the three situations, while the negative effect of generation competition on pension reform is rather severer than that of traditional class conflict.

To test the central hypothesis and its major deductions, this book confirms the variation of family support for the elderly in Europe across time and space through constructing the coefficient of household variation using the method of factor analysis.The coefficient is an indirect measurement for the independent variable of the five selected cases from 1945 to 2000.Through these measurements, the book investigates and compares the three main Bismarckian pension systems of EU—France, Germany, Italy—and the other two control cases—United Kingdom and Sweden.This study indicates most of cases have shown a tendency from class coalition to generation coalition although Italy has been a class-dominant case.Some countries, France and Germany, have entered the generation-dominant coalitions while others, Sweden and U. K.have still stayed in the non-dominant status.

These findings here have important implications for the analysis of the politics of pension reforms and of the retrenchment of welfare state.They suggest that the types of political coalitions that take shape in society and organize to influence welfare state policymaking largely depend on one basic feature of the social environment that may vary over time and across nations: the extent to which the elderly are supported by family relations.Put simply, the stakes that individuals have in policies that affect the pension reforms will vary greatly depending on how easy it is for them to transfer welfare in private family relationship.Thus the welfare mix between the family and the state is crucial for understanding the political-economic origins of a vast range of pension, family care, labor market polices that affect the relative welfares of different adult generations or mediate the effects of other exogenous changes upon them.The extent to which these policy issues generate generation-based rent-seeking, rather than class conflict will hinge critically on intensity of family support for the elderly in society.