Dr Tim Vlandas

© 2018 European Consortium for Political Research What is the impact of unemployment on far-right party support? This article develops a framework that links unemployment to far-right party support, while taking into account both the heterogeneity of the workforce and the role of labour market policies. More specifically, we focus on unemployment as a driver of economic insecurity and examine its effect on outsider and insider labour market groups. We identify the extent to which two labour market policies—unemployment benefits and Employment Protection Legislation (EPL)—mediate the effect of unemployment on economic insecurity, thus limiting the impact of unemployment on far-right party support. We carry out a large N analysis on a sample of 14 Western and 10 Eastern European countries between 1991 and 2013. We find that unemployment only leads to higher far-right support when unemployment benefits replacement rates are low. The results with regard to the mediating effect of EPL are more complex as EPL only mediates the impact of unemployment when we take into account the share of foreign-born population in the country.

I examine potential political support for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) – an idea with a long lineage that cuts across ideological lines. I conclude that a UBI could potentially find backing from a coalition between centrist and left-leaning individuals, ideally with additional support from trade unions. <a href=""></a>

What explains the shift from the moderate to high inflation rates of the Golden Age of post -war capitalism to the low inflation regime of monetarism in the 1970s and 1980s? Conventional views emphasise the rise of monetarism as a new economic paradigm that convinced policy makers to delegate monetary policy to conservative and independent central banks – a view that comes in many variants, from constructivist to orthodox economics. In contrast to these arguments, we introduce electoral and party politics into the debate. This paper models and examines the shifts in the inflationary preferences of the median voter and their translation into party politics and economic policies. As the median voter accumulates nominal assets against a background of de facto and de jure increasing job security and rising wages, her preferences on macro-economic policies shift from concerns about employment-friendly to inflation-averse policies. Social democratic parties, who are pivotal players in this regard because of their ‘natural’ preference for high employment over low inflation, are thus forced to adopt anti-inflation policies as well to remain electorally viable. We show that the employment situation of the average worker improved in every respect during the 1960s and 1970s, that most of the population became inflation averse during the 1970s and 1980s, and that social democratic parties were forced to adopt more economically orthodox party manifestos. We then analyse the shift to a low inflation regime in a series of country case studies.

© 2016, Springer Verlag. All rights reserved. Why do different countries exhibit different inflation rates? Most political economy accounts emphasise the role of ideas and institutions: as economic research shows that low inflation is achievable at no economic cost, governments delegate monetary policy to independent central banks. Countries with independent central banks and unions that anticipate the consequences of their actions by coordinating wage bargaining in turn achieve lower inflation. This conventional wisdom downplays the importance of interests, ignoring the significant influence that a growing electoral group – the elderly – has on inflation. Because the elderly are politically powerful and inflation averse, countries with more elderly citizens force political parties to adopt more economically orthodox policies when in power, resulting in lower inflation rates in those countries. Ageing populations may therefore lock in a low inflation regime, even when this is not economically desirable.