Who gets the goods? Disentangling the effects of parliamentary representation and collective action on social spending

Abstract

A century of activist and academic analysis of the welfare state can be sorted into insider and outsider theories of social change. One perspective argues that working-class and poor people can achieve income redistribution through insider strategies, primarily through the legislative efforts of left-wing political parties. A competing perspective argues that political parties themselves have no inner motor and merely channel the outside pressure from disruptive collective action. This article makes a substantive and methodological contribution to the debate over the generosity of the welfare state. We analyse the extent to which collective action confounds, moderates, or operates independently of left-wing parliamentary power to explain the history of social spending in 22 countries. Our results support a strong version of the insider intuition that the parliamentary road is crucial to winning gains for poor and working people. It does so without channelling the power of mass mobilization: accounting for various forms of collective action does not reduce the impact of left parliamentary representation on public social expenditures. Nonetheless, we do find that strikes, in particular, have independent effects on social spending. These results together provide some support for what can be called a Marxist–social democratic alliance. We also find evidence for the outsider view that protests and riots matter when combined; these mobilizations, like strikes, operate independently of the role of left-wing parliamentary power.