Welfare State Retrenchment, Redistribution Strategies, and Credible Commitments
It is common for political scientists to investigate the degree to which partisanship affects public policy. Less common is consideration of the effect of parties maximising policy preferences through time. In this paper, I propose a correction to the ``new politics of the welfare state'' thesis (Pierson 1996) in which the mode of redistribution has implications for the degree to which it can be `rolled back' by a future government. Left-wing parties are seen as acting strategically to maximise the present value of a stream of future policy pay-offs. Ultimately, they are influenced by the probability of a future government reversing their policies. Data from 20 OECD countries for the period 1990--2003 supports the claim that left-wing parties spend on cash transfers when they expect to hold veto power in the future, but welfare services otherwise.
