Social (Investment) Partners?

Abstract

Abstract The chapter develops a framework to study trade unions’ preferences toward social investment policies and their likely impact on social investment policymaking. The framework suggests that unions’ preferences for and impact on social investment policies depend on a set of micro-level features (i.e., the composition of union membership), meso-level characteristics (i.e., unions’ organizational characteristics), and macro-level relationships between unions and governments. Combining these three analytical levels, the chapter proposes four ideal-typical “contexts” characterized by different expected preferences for and impact on social investment policy. Case studies of Austria, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom are employed to illustrate the framework. Altogether the chapter shows that where unions are centralized and encompassing and enjoy institutionalized involvement in policymaking, they are protagonists in the development of social investment policies. Where, on the other hand, these conditions are partly or entirely missing, unions tend to take a more skeptical—or even antagonistic—position.