"Beyond Left and Right": the New Partisan Politics of Welfare.

The "new politics of the welfare state", the term coined by Pierson (1996) to differentiate between the popular politics of welfare expansion and the unpopular politics of retrenchment, emphasizes a number of factors that distinguish countries in their capacity to pursue contentious measures and avoid electoral blame. Policy structures, vested interests, and insitutions play a prominant role in accounting for cross-national differences in leaders ability to diffuse responsability for divisive initiatives. This paper contends that parties are relevant to "new politics" and that, under specified insitutional conditions, their impact is counterintuitive.