What is the nature of change in advanced welfare states, and how should we characterize their political dynamics? For many years, there have been three dominant analytic frames in welfare state analysis, all of which have tended to sideline questions of partisan politics. The most prominent is Paul Pierson’s “new politics” approach (Dismantling the Welfare State: Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment, 1994), which predicts that, due to the rise of large self-interested welfare constituencies, risk-averse politicians of any partisan persuasion should be unwilling to make cuts to the welfare state. In the early 2000s, we saw the emergence of gradualist theories of welfare change, which acknowledged that welfare states were not entirely stagnant. These accounts focused on largely apolitical and institutionally driven changes to welfare states. More recently, we have seen the popularity of demand-side accounts focusing on the determinants of individual-level preferences over social policy and redistribution. This approach has tended to sideline the role of parties entirely, implicitly assuming that they unproblematically reflect the interests of the median voter.

Two recent books, The Repoliticization of the Welfare State by Ian McManus and Election Campaigns and Welfare State Change by Staffan Kumlin and Achim Goerres, also grapple with questions of welfare state dynamics. In contrast to the “new politics” approach, however, both start from the premise that we need to understand the dynamics of welfare state change. Moreover, their analyses of such change do not rest on gradualist accounts of institutional change or bottom-up voter-driven contestation. Instead, both works represent a welcome return to the study of how political parties and party–society linkages shape welfare politics.

McManus’s monograph advances the argument that, after a period of depoliticization of welfare in the 1990s and early 2000s, the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) fundamentally re-polarized welfare politics. Before the crisis, McManus argues, party positions on welfare policies had converged on a neoliberal model of reduced social spending and liberalized welfare states. This convergence was largely driven by leftist parties shifting to the right on social welfare issues. The financial crisis, however, motivated a schism between mainstream parties on the Left and the Right. Today, governing center-right parties have moved right on welfare to signal their commitment to fiscal austerity. Their mainstream left counterparts, in contrast, have returned to advocating benefit expansion and challenging the logic of market fundamentalism.

McManus brings a diverse array of evidence to assess the changing nature of party competition over welfare policy, including cross-country regressions on social spending from 24 countries, analyses of post-GFC party manifestos, and a series of country case studies. His book is most compelling in the qualitative case chapters, which cover the spectrum of welfare state “worlds”: the liberal United Kingdom, continental Germany, social democratic Sweden, Southern European Spain, and East European Czech Republic. These provide a rich narrative about the emergent domestic consensus on welfare policies as of the 1990s, how European commitments affected welfare budgets, and how the crisis intersected with existing institutional welfare structures to limit or exacerbate polarization in the post-GFC era. The country case studies convincingly elucidate potential mechanisms around voter-driven change, as left parties responded to radicalized crisis-affected constituents.

However, the argument that the GFC drove party polarization across the broader universe of 24 country cases is not quite as persuasive. For example, the general claim that party positions on welfare have become polarized in the postcrisis period is difficult to assess, given the absence of baseline data on differences in party manifestos on welfare issues before the crisis. Similarly, although the regression models suggest that the GFC promoted pronounced partisan differences in social spending post-GFC, there was no sustained engagement clarifying how this modeling strategy related to earlier studies positing programmatic left/right differences for both old and new social risks.

Whereas McManus’s analysis of welfare state politics focuses on the reemergence of broad left/right differences in support for the welfare state in the postcrisis era, Kumlin and Goerres’s Election Campaigns and Welfare State Change offers a textured investigation of how the political messages communicated by parties during election campaigns comport with existing theories of welfare state continuity and change. The authors cast an ambitious theoretical net, forcing a reconsideration of both the politics of welfare and of the effectiveness of representative democracy in an era of fiscal reforms.

Kumlin and Goerres start by presenting a helpful analytic framework for assessing how political elites shape welfare reform. It is organized around the theoretical concepts of blame avoidance, democratic linkage, and democratic leadership. Blame avoidance, of course, stems from Pierson’s classic analysis of the “new politics” of the welfare state, whereby political elites are unlikely to actively discuss the need for unpopular welfare reforms. In contrast, a linkage model of reform exists when elites, understood as parties, present distinct platforms that clearly state their policy priorities. Here, citizens vote for the party platform that most closely approximates their preferences, and governments translate their electoral programs into policy. The linkage model implies that elites will actively discuss (rather than obfuscate) the pressures facing contemporary welfare states and the policy changes they propose to resolve these pressures and that left versus right parties will offer voters clear choices of policy platforms. Finally, the leadership model implies that political elites facilitate welfare state change through persuasion. Using both cognitive and normative arguments, elites may change voters’ views on the necessity and desirability of reform.

Empirically, the book is divided into two sections, one focusing on campaign messages and the other on voter responses. Together, these two lenses are used to reflect on the health of democratic practice in mature welfare states. To analyze the political messaging coming from party elites, the authors code dominant themes across 172 election campaigns in 18 West European countries between 1978 and 2010, using election campaign reports from academic journals. This broad cross-national approach is complemented by the coding of party congress speeches of prime ministerial candidates in Sweden, Norway, and Germany during election years. The resultant datasets are then used to assess the degree to which welfare politics reflects blame avoidance or linkage approaches. The second half of the book uses a series of three survey experiments from the same countries in the 2010s to similarly interrogate the mechanisms of voter responsiveness associated with linkage versus leadership accounts of welfare state change.

In addition to its welcome theoretical focus on the two-way relationship between party messages and voter responses, an additional strength of Kumlin and Goerres’s analysis is the care with which they interpret their findings. For example, in their presentation of election campaign content, they report that the pressures facing European welfare states (such as population aging or immigration) have been discussed more frequently over time, casting doubt on simple “blame avoidance” accounts. And yet, although they find some evidence in favor of democratic choice and linkage (in that parties are at least willing to talk about the reform pressures facing welfare states), they are careful to note that not all observable implications of the theory are borne out by their evidence. The authors are similarly sensitive to nuance in their discussion of the experimental results around public responses to campaign messaging, neither overplaying nor underplaying their findings in favor of a preferred theory.

To tie the book’s disparate theoretical findings together, the conclusion offers a thoughtful assessment of the state of representative democracy. Theirs is a measured but somewhat pessimistic take on the health of both democratic linkage and ideational leadership, driven by the inability of parties to convey clear programmatic differences and their penchant for selectively focusing campaigns on popular dimensions of welfare policy.

Reading these two books together may open interesting avenues for debate. One is about how different conceptualizations may shape our understanding of the nature of welfare politics in recent years. For example, McManus views the 1990–2008 period as one of neoliberal ascendance, in which social policy promoted economic over social goals (pp. 52–53). Much of the cross-country empirical evidence focuses on aggregate levels of spending or party support for overall patterns of benefit expansions versus cuts. Kumlin and Goerres take a different approach. They define neoliberalism more narrowly and make a sharp distinction between the neoliberal benefit cuts of the 1980s and what they view as the qualitatively distinct activation/social investment policies of the 1990s. This conceptual approach, as well as their analysis of party communication around welfare “sub-issues,” promotes an emphasis on how parties trade off different types of messages. Consider the two books’ discussion of the German case in the pre-GFC era. McManus in chapter 4 argues that Germany’s pre-GFC dynamic was one of “widespread acceptance of neoliberal-inspired welfare reforms and social spending cuts” (p. 71). In contrast, even though in chapter 7 Kumlin and Goerres acknowledge the cuts in social rights associated with the Hartz reforms, they also highlight how at the same time the SPD and CDU competed to expand “social democratic” policies enabling women to better balance family obligations and employment.

Despite their different evidentiary bases, both books agree that prior to the GFC, partisan differences over policy (however we may characterize them) were relatively small. Had Kumlin and Goerres been able to extend their analysis of campaign speeches forward in time, beyond 2010, one wonders whether their campaign analyses would have indicated a polarization of left versus right party positions a la McManus’s claims. Intuitively, this seems plausible. But it also brings us full circle to Election Campaigns and Welfare State Change’s concluding discussion linking political communication to the robustness of representative democracy. If the global financial crisis did indeed motivate parties to once again convey clear programmatic differences to voters while also promoting the rise of often xenophobic radical political formations, what conclusions should we draw about the quality of democratic representation?

Future work on how party–citizen relations affect both the welfare state and the health of democracy will have much to gain from grappling with the concepts and questions explored by McManus, Kumlin, and Goerres.