Social Concertation in Times of Austerity, by Alexandre Afonso. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2013, 258 pp., ISBN: 978 9 08964 3957, $43.95, paperback.

Published date01 September 2014
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12074
Date01 September 2014
AuthorDamian Raess
Social Concertation in Times of Austerity, by Alexandre Afonso. Amsterdam
University Press, Amsterdam, 2013, 258 pp., ISBN: 978 9 08964 3957, $43.95,
paperback.
When and why do governments co-operate and strike agreements with trade unions
and employers in policy reforms? This book explores the changing politics of social
concertation surrounding labour market reforms in Austria and Switzerland. The stage
(or ‘puzzle’) is the surprising survival of concertation in Western Europe in spite of a
hostile political-economic environment. The study focuses on two ‘destabilizing’
factors, namely the impact of European integration and changes in party competition
(p. 18). Whereas much of the recent scholarship has sought to explain the emergence
and institutionalization of social pacts in countries that lack the institutional prereq-
uisites for corporatist policy making, such as Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain,
reading about concertation in countries with an institutionalized tradition of corpo-
ratist policy making — two ‘most likely’ cases for the persistence of concertation — is
refreshing.
Against accounts that emphasize structural (e.g. weakening social partners) or
institutional (e.g. the degree of institutionalization of corporatist policy making or
of centralization of trade unions) factors, employer interests, political-economic
duress (i.e. weak governments facing high ‘problem load’), and the informational
logic of negotiated reform (i.e. government’s cognitive/informational dependence on
social partners), the author proposes a government-centred approach to
concertation that highlights the party-political interests and (electoral) motivations
that underpin government strategy. Specifically, governments seek extra-
parliamentary sources of support when they are internally divided and face electoral
risks.
Two main arguments are put forward. First, centre-right parties play a pivotal role
in the context of competition emanating from right-wing populist parties: where
centre-right parties coalesce with social democratic parties, concertation is used to
build political consent among ideologically divided coalition partners. Conversely,
when centre-right parties coalesce with right-wing national populist parties to form an
ideologically cohesive majority coalition, concertation is sidelined. Second, irrespec-
tive of government partisanship, governments fall back on social concertation when
issues become politically salient as a way to pre-empt politicization by trade unions,
and hence increased risks of a failed reform.
Four reforms form the backbone of the empirical analysis. They capture varia-
tion in the degree of Europeanization of the policy domain to which they
belong. The strongly Europeanized cases pertain to the opening of the domestic
labour market to workers from the new EU member-states. Both countries
concluded agreements in 2004. The weakly Europeanized ‘domestic’ cases
pertain to labour market policy: the active labour market policy reform of 2004 in
Austria and the third revision of the unemployment insurance law of 2002 in
Switzerland.
The study shows that coalition politics has the greatest explanatory power to
account for why governments resort to concertation (p. 198). The Austrian EU
enlargement adaptation law and the Swiss reform of unemployment insurance follow
a similar pattern where an ideologically cohesive majority coalition between centre-
right and national populist parties hampered concertation. Conversely, an ideologi-
cally fragmented coalition of centre-right and left parties resorted to concertation to
broaden the base of support for the extension of free movement of workers to Eastern
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Book Reviews 611
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics.

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