Laying Down The Principles: How Local Socialist Achievements Spurred National Bourgeois Support for Noncontributory Pensions

Abstract

abstract: The authors develop a perspective of locally embedded welfare state development to explain how relatively weak national political actors can, nonetheless, shape national policy over time by pursuing local reforms. Empirically, the authors assess their argument by using municipality-level representative shares, data on noncontributory pension reforms, roll-call votes from parliament, and archival material from early twentieth-century Norway, in which several local governments introduced noncontributory old-age pensions before Norway adopted a national scheme. The authors show, first, how nationally underrepresented but highly institutionalized socialist parties with geographically concentrated support introduced local pensions. Over time, these parties thus shaped the possibility space for national reform, effectively locking the national policy agenda into a pension system preferred by the socialists—namely, noncontributory pensions. Citing high municipality-debt pressures in their constituencies, bourgeois politicians from districts with local pensions eventually supported and promoted national-level pension reform. This support, in turn, spurred the cross-class alliance required to establish a national noncontributory pension system.