The Transformation of Government Intervention in the Economy in Advanced Democracies

全球化、欧洲化、学习和效仿以及社会经济问题能否解释先进民主国家政府在商业税收、政府支出、私有化、补贴和市场监管等领域对经济干预的变化？这个问题将在项目中进行调查。这个问题将分三步解决。首先，将分析变化驱动因素对个别政策的无条件影响。然而，从政治学的角度来看，国内因素似乎很可能会过滤这些变革驱动因素的影响。因此，在第二步中，将测试这些条件效应。我将在这里重点讨论政府、政党竞争和否决权玩家的党派色彩。在第三步中，我将调查在多大程度上有理由谈论“干预主义”国家的变化。这将通过三种截然不同的方式来实现。首先，我将分析各种干预主义政策是否确实表现出类似的动态，即是否相同的因素有助于解释这些政策工具的变化。其次，我将采取分类的观点，分别分析部门层面的监管、补贴和私有化模式以及各种支出项目，以找出相同的变量是否推动了不同部门和支出类别的自由化进程。第三，我会研究干预主义国家本身的发展，即综合层面，并会设法分析政府干预整体发展的主要决定因素。通过回答这些问题，该项目将以多种方式为文献做出贡献，因为现有的研究主要集中在变化驱动因素对个别政策工具变化程度的无条件影响上。因此，关于国内因素是否系统地过滤变革驱动因素的影响的问题，首先可以期待新的见解。其次，对不同干预主义政策工具的比较分析以及分类分析将产生新的结论，这将有助于对这些政策变化过程有更细微的了解。第三，对干预主义国家的综合分析有助于更好地理解自由化的整个进程。第四，我将系统地调查2007年的金融危机是否会结束。中断甚至逆转了过去25年的自由化趋势--到目前为止，文献中也没有这样做。第五，我将通过收集两个私有化指标(私有化收益和国有企业在经济中的重要性)的数据来填补一个重要的空白，这两个指标已经十多年没有更新过了。此外，这些贡献还应该使我至少能够理清目前文献中普遍存在的一些矛盾。

Can globalization, Europeanization, learning and emulation as well as socio-economic problems explain the changes in government intervention in the economy in the areas of business taxation, government spending, privatization, subsidies and market regulation in the advanced democracies? This question will be investigated in the project. This question will be tackled in three steps. First, unconditional effects of the drivers of change on the individual policies will be analyzed. From a political science perspective, however, it seems likely that domestic factors will filter the effects of these drivers of change. Therefore, in a second step these conditional effects will be tested. I will focus on the partisan complexion of government, party competition and veto players here. In the third step, I will investigate in how far it is justified to talk about changes in “the” interventionist state. This will be done in three distinct ways. First, I will analyze if the various interventionist policies indeed display similar dynamics, i.e., if the same factors help explain the changes in these policy instruments. Second, I will take a disaggregated view and analyze patterns of regulation, subsidization and privatization at the sectoral level and various spending items separately, to find out whether the same variables drive the liberalization process across different sectors and spending categories. Third, I will look at the development of the interventionist state as such, i.e. on an aggregated level and will seek to analyze the main determinants of this overall development of government intervention. By answering these questions, the project will contribute to the literature in manifold ways, as extant research mostly focusses on the unconditional effects of the drivers of change on the extent of changes in individual policy instruments. Therefore, new insights can be expected firstly regarding the question whether domestic factors systematically filter the effects of the drivers of change. Secondly, the comparative analysis of the different interventionist policy instruments as well as the disaggregated analysis will generate new findings, which will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of these processes of policy change. Thirdly, the aggregate analysis of the interventionist state allows to better understand the overall process of liberalization. Fourthly, I will systematically investigate if the financial crisis of 2007ff. has interrupted or even reversed the trend of liberalization of the previous 25 years – which has not been done in the literature so far, either. Fifthly, I will fill an important void by collecting data on two privatization indicators (privatization proceeds and the importance of state-owned enterprises in the economy) which have not been updated anymore for a decade or more. Moreover, these contributions should also allow me to sort out at least some of the contradictions that currently prevail in the literature.