Inequality after the transition : political parties, party systems, and social policy in southern and postcommunist Europe /
This book provides empirical evidence showing that most new democracies either maintain the level of income inequality they inherited or even increase it over time. It then asks why new democracies do not generate income equality. Unlike previous studies, it directly analyzes the relationship betwee...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford :
Oxford University Press,
[2018]
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| Series: | Comparative politics (Oxford University Press)
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | This book provides empirical evidence showing that most new democracies either maintain the level of income inequality they inherited or even increase it over time. It then asks why new democracies do not generate income equality. Unlike previous studies, it directly analyzes the relationship between inequality and democracy by focusing on the trajectory of inequality after the transition to democracy. It challenges basic premises in existing democratization-inequality studies and offers a new theory. It investigates the roots of change in social policy programs in Poland and the Czech Republic in post-communist Europe and Turkey and Spain in Southern Europe. It traces the origins and development of social policy, from the formation of nation-states to the present, and considers how different political regimes, whether totalitarian, post-totalitarian, or authoritarian, designed welfare policies to prioritize civil servants and the working classes in formal sectors at the expense of the majority poor, including the working poor in informal sectors. It then demonstrates how these legacies perpetuate and widen disparities in access to welfare policies, and thus income inequality in countries where low mobilization by the poor and unstable party systems prevail. It adopts a multimethod approach in which it uses large-N multivariate analysis, paired case studies, and process-tracing method. It employs interviews with Polish, Czech, Turkish, and Spanish union leaders; bureaucrats and business people while also conducting an original survey in Turkey to dissect the linkage between organized groups and parties. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xviii, [333] pages) : illustrations |
| Bibliography: | Includes chapter notes and bibliographical references at chapter ends, and index. |
| ISBN: | 0191865834 9780191865831 9780192561657 0192561650 |