Sharing the rewards, dividing the costs? The electoral consequences of social pacts and legislative reform in western Europe

Do electoral pressures provide an explanation for why governments offer pacts to unions and employers rather than acting through legislation when faced with the need to pass potentially unpopular reforms to welfare policies, wages, and labour markets? This article addresses that question by analysing whether governments’ pursuit of pacts affects their vote share and increases the probability that they gain re-election for 16 West European countries between 1980 and 2012. It is found that the presence of social pacts has a significant and positive effect on incumbents’ vote shares at the next election and also results in a higher probability of re-election. These results are conditioned by government type: While all types of governments benefit electorally from pacts, the electoral penalties from the pursuit of unilateral legislation on policy reforms harm single-party majorities the most, minority governments moderately, and coalition majorities the least

Social tipping processes towards climate action: A conceptual framework

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record Societal transformations are necessary to address critical global challenges, such as mitigation of anthropogenic climate change and reaching UN sustainable development goals. Recently, social tipping processes have received increased attention, as they present a form of social change whereby a small change can shift a sensitive social system into a qualitatively different state due to strongly self-amplifying (mathematically positive) feedback mechanisms. Social tipping processes with respect to technological and energy systems, political mobilization, financial markets and sociocultural norms and behaviors have been suggested as potential key drivers towards climate action. Drawing from expert insights and comprehensive literature review, we develop a framework to identify and characterize social tipping processes critical to facilitating rapid social transformations. We find that social tipping processes are distinguishable from those of already more widely studied climate and ecological tipping dynamics. In particular, we identify human agency, social-institutional network structures, different spatial and temporal scales and increased complexity as key distinctive features underlying social tipping processes. Building on these characteristics, we propose a formal definition for social tipping processes and filtering criteria for those processes that could be decisive for future trajectories towards climate action. We illustrate this definition with the European political system as an example of potential social tipping processes, highlighting the prospective role of the FridaysForFuture movement. Accordingly, this conceptual framework for social tipping processes can be utilized to illuminate mechanisms for necessary transformative climate change mitigation policies and actions.Leverhulme TrustEarth LeagueEuropean Research CouncilDeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)European Union’s Horizon 2020Leibniz AssociationStordalen Foundatio

Social Europe : A New Integration-Demarcation Conflict?

The European Union has gradually assumed increasing authority in the domain of social policy. This increasing importance of Social Europe fundamentally redraws the boundaries of existing solidarity arrangements. This chapter investigates whether the Europeanisation of social policy creates new structural conflicts between winners (benefiting from the expansion of individual mobility options) and losers (having far less exit options while being exposed to international competition) of European integration. Using data of the Belgian National Election Survey 2014, we investigate citizens’ preferences regarding various dimensions of the role of the European Union in social policy. Our results show that attitudes towards Social Europe are not strongly embedded in social structural characteristics. Rather than objective positions, subjective experiences and social dispositions shape one’s stance on Social Europe.publishe

Hierarchies, civilization, and the Eurozone crisis: the Greek financial crisis

This final chapter contends that accounting education is strongly related to the recent financial crisis in Greece, since some of the main root causes of the crisis were accounting omissions and manipulations in financial statements all embraced by unethical actions. The global financial crisis in Greece, epitomized by the recession of 2009, raised the question of whether and how should accounting educators respond. The purpose of this chapter is to understand the role of accounting education in the efforts made to prevent another financial crisis in Greece