Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Shifting the Employment Burden: The Social and Economic Foundations of Employment Policy Reform

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This project examines the transformation of employment policies in developed democracies. As a result of recent policy reforms, developed democracies now vary markedly in a crucial yet often overlooked feature: who bears responsibility for seeking employment. Some governments have devoted substantial resources to directly assisting workers with job placement through policies that maintain or expand the state's responsibility and society's responsibility for employment outcomes. In contrast, other governments have reduced policy costs by scaling back such employment assistance and at the same time increasing the number of requirements that the unemployed must meet in the job search process. The latter reforms not only transfer to individuals a greater share of the cost and responsibility for finding employment, but fundamentally change the broader nature of social policies. This project seeks to explain shifts in responsibility for finding employment by identifying divisions in workers'' policy preferences based on the different employment risks facing workers, particularly within the unionized workforce. The researcher collects original survey data in order to track the types of employment risk experienced by workers, and demonstrates the role that this risk plays in shaping workers' social policy preferences. The analysis focuses on the labor force in Germany, where important reforms affecting the distribution of employment responsibility have been enacted. Two types of employment risks are examined: those relating to job security and those tied to the prospect of re-employability. The researcher will evaluate the effect of employment risk on workers' preferences about the degree to which the government or the unemployed should bear responsibility for finding employment. Building on prior research, the project will also assess the impact of divisions within the labor movement on public support for policy reform. This project makes several broader contributions. By identifying new divisions in policy preferences based on employment risk, this research will advance understanding of how distributional conflicts affect policy outcomes. Specifically, it will show how variation in two kinds of employment risk, job security and re-employability, shape the social policy preferences of unionized workers, making way for governments to adopt difficult and loss-imposing reforms in social policies. In additional, the original dataset generated by the project will allow other scholars to study employment policy preferences and to examine the political influence of labor unions in post-industrial economies. By focusing on changes in the purpose of social policies and how program benefits are allocated across society, this research enhances understanding of trends in social insurance reform and of determinants of the degree of social protection that governments provide citizens in advanced industrial democracies.