The New Politics of the welfare state suggests that periods of welfare retrenchment present
policy-makers with a qualitatively different set of challenges and electoral incentives
compared to periods of welfare expansion. An unresolved puzzle for this literature is the
relative electoral success of retrenching governments in recent decades, as evidenced by
various studies on fiscal consolidations. This article points to the importance of partisan
biases as the main explanatory factor. I argue that partisan biases in the electorate create
incentives for incumbent governments to depart from their representative function and push
the burden of retrenchment on the very constituencies that they owe their electoral mandate
to (”Nixon-goes-to-China”). After offering a simple model on the logic of partisan biases, the
article proceeds by testing the unexpected partisan hypotheses that the model generates. My
findings from a cross-section-time-series analysis in a set of 25 OECD countries provide
corrobarative evidence on this Nixon-goes-to-China logic of welfare retrenchment:
governments systematically inflict pain on their core constituencies. Some of the losses that
the core constituencies suffer during austerity, however, are recouped during fiscal
expansions when traditional partisan patterns take hold