David L. Weakliem
Sociological Science, February 17, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a6
Abstract
This article discusses Nate Breznau’s critique of Brooks and Manza’s “Social Policy Responsiveness in Developed Democracies.” Brooks and Manza found that public opinion influenced welfare state spending, but Breznau argued that this conclusion was an artifact of their model, which included an interaction between opinion and welfare state type but omitted the main effect of welfare state type. Breznau is correct in saying that interactions should not be used without including the main effect, except in rare circumstances which do not apply in this case. However, the classification of welfare state type is made partly on the basis of the dependent variable, welfare spending, so it should not be used as an independent variable. There is, however, a case for including a variable for the type of legal system (common law or civil law), which is correlated with welfare state type. The estimates from a regression including both main and interaction effects support Brooks’s and Manza’s original conclusions about the effect of public opinion. The paper concludes by discussing the strength of the evidence provided by the data.
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- Citation: David L. Weakliem. 2016. “The Missing Main Effect of Welfare State Regimes: A Comment”. Sociological Science 3: 109-115
- Received: November 10, 2015
- Accepted: December 2, 2015.
- Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
- DOI: 10.15195/v3.a6
Two points I want to make in response:
(1) Brooks and Manza in their original paper explicitly made the argument about Japan being liberal due to its social spending levels. Thus, Weakliem makes a key point about the independent variable of regime being selected on the dependent variable of social spending. I have argued from a more general perspective in my replication of Brooks and Manza. I consider post-war, cultural and business ties closely linking Japan to Britain and especially the United States. This institutional or normative argument about Japan predates the measures of social spending and links it more to earlier stages of welfare state formation. Thus, I have selected japan because of its ties with the English-speaking family of nations, as opposed to the European one, a historical institutional argument. This is not committing the same logical error as Brooks and Manza.
(2) My study was a replication of Brooks and Manza. Weakliem’s study is a replication of my work. Except it is not exactly. He does not use robust clustered standard errors in the results he presents. He offers these robust standard errors in his footnote 2. But what he does not mention is that these push the p values above 0.05, which was Brooks and Manza’s originally utilized cut-off. Although in fairness p is below 0.10 for both of his coefficients providing what we could call a weaker version of support. Nonetheless, using Brooks and Manza’s own criteria he has still not provided convincing evidence of their claims. (Problems with the robust clustering approach aside).
I agree with Nate Breznau’s general conclusion that there is not convincing evidence that public opinion makes a difference. Using the common law vs. civil law classification, there’s some evidence, but it’s still in the range in which there’s room for reasonable doubt. As Breznau points out, there is a historical argument for classifying Japan with the Anglo-American nations, and with that classification there’s no evidence. I don’t find it convincing–the American occupation was brief and many distinctive features of Japanese economy and society remained. However, that’s just my impression–I have no special knowledge of Japanese history.
My fundamental objection is not to Breznau’s analysis, which made a valid and important point. It’s to the way that sociologists (including me) usually approach this kind of data. We us the model of a study in which you give the null hypothesis “the benefit of the doubt.” That model is appropriate to an experiment where you can select the design and sample size to give good power to test the hypothesis. But with cross-national studies, we have to use whatever data are available, and often there’s very little power. What we should do is to look outside the study and draw on whatever evidence is relevant. In this case, there is a lot of evidence that public opinion makes a difference to government policy in the United States and several other countries. Why should social welfare spending be an exception? (That’s not a rhetorical question–maybe there is some reason to think it would be, but I haven’t heard one).
Returning to the subject of Japanese history and social policy. Japan essentially imported German civil code and furthermore imported the Bismarckian pension system suggesting it should be grouped with conservative, civil law or European institutions as Weakliem suggested. However, I just re-read Scruggs and Allan’s (2006) replication of Esping-Andersen’s decommodification index. Here they argue that from the perspective of pensions, unemployment insurance and sickness benefits, Japan was extremely liberal already in 1980, very similar to the US. They also propose that US influence starting after WWII was perhaps more instrumental in social policy formation than the institutional arrangements in the early 1900s. We could call this something like Pierson’s path dependency, but with a crucial turning point or ‘branch’ to use the language of Ebbinghaus (2006). The involvement of the UK and US in reconstruction after WWII, and the overwhelmingly positive response of Japanese society and economy adapting to English countries’ economic ways offers argumentation for Japan being in the liberal welfare state group (Dore et al., 1999; Ralston, Holt, Terpstra, & Kai-Cheng, 1997), but of course firm-specificity makes an argument for it being miscategorized in some way or a difficult case (Hall & Soskice 2008).
Regarding Weaklem’s second point. I think there are good reasons to believe that public opinion might not influence social policy. I discuss this in my 2017 paper, but here are some of the basics: In policymaking, a variety of interests come together to develop policy, pass it into law and then carry it to street-level or occupational-level implementations. Patashnik and Zelizer (2013) suggest that the intricacies of this process may lead to “incomplete displacement” and “inadequate state capacity” to sustain the policy’s intended changes – those that the public wanted – at the level of individual recipients (see also Soss and Schram, 2007). Pierson himself discusses that social policy has become so complicated that it is nearly impossible for the public, much less policymakers, to grasp it or understand it Therefore, it is possible that increasing returns (i.e, a clearly predicted impact of public opinion on policy) only applied to the historical rise of welfare state policies, and that the mature and institutionalized polices no longer fit with opinions (Raven et al., 2011) or only do so in subsets of the public (Bendz, 2015).
However, I myself am of the opinion that public opinion certainly does have an influence on social policy and have demonstrated this in some simultaneous feedback modeling exercises (2017). But I think it is important to keep the focus on the replication I conducted and that the main effect was missing statistically and theoretically in Brooks and Manza’s work – which took a strong position on the institutional differences between welfare regime types.
Bendz, Anna. 2015. “Paying Attention to Politics: Public Responsiveness and Welfare Policy Change.” Policy Studies Journal 43 (3): 309–332. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12098.
Breznau, Nate. 2017. “Positive Returns and Equilibrium: Simultaneous Feedback Between Public Opinion and Social Policy.” Policy Studies Journal 45 (4): 583–612. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12171.
Dore, R., Lazonick, W., & O’Sullivan, M. (1999). Varieties of Capitalism in the Twentieth Century. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 15(4), 102–120. doi:10.1093/oxrep/15.4.102
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