Power Resources and Employer-Centered Approaches in Explanations of Welfare States and Varieties of Capitalism: Protagonists, Consenters, and Antagonists

Abstract

The power resources approach, underlining the relevance of socioeconomic class and partisan politics in distributive conflict within capitalist economies, is challenged by employer-centered approaches claiming employers and cross-class alliances to have been crucial in advancing the development of welfare states and varieties of capitalism. Theoretically and empirically these claims are problematic. In welfare state expansion, employers have often been antagonists, under specific conditions consenters, but very rarely protagonists. Well-developed welfare states and coordinated market economies have emerged in countries with strong left parties in long-term cabinet participation or in countries with state corporatist institutional traditions and confessional parties in intensive competition with left parties.