Abstract
If political sociology as a sub-discipline is about studying the relation between state and society, in practice it has tended to split itself between the two. On the one hand, a vast array of scholarship has picked apart the “black box” of the state, analyzing how state bureaucrats, executives, and, to a lesser extent, legislators have negotiated and interpreted opportunities, crises, and constraints. On the other hand, an equally vast literature has examined the many ways that social movements and civic associations have lobbied, mobilized, and negotiated to pressure state actors. In the process, both sets of scholarship show, these groups have shaped politics, protest, and policy in different and often unexpected ways.
Largely left out of these literatures has been the study of entities that straddle the boundaries between state and society, particularly political parties and labor unions. While not ignored, they tend to get collapsed into one side or the other of the state-society equation. Parties are either analyzed as actors within the state, organizing state legislatures and supplying political appointees, or as groups reflecting underlying social cleavages. For their part, unions get lumped together with civic associations, interest groups, or social movement organizations, depending on the analysis at hand.
But the reality is that parties and unions are awkward fits for the analytical categories that the state-centered and society-centered literatures use. They are too structured to be social movements, too broad-based and a bit too contentious to be interest groups; they are not exactly voluntary associations and definitely not legislatures or government agencies. Rather, they encompass structural features of all of these, while playing key roles in mediating between different types of groups. For example, unions may provide policy advice to government agencies and material support to protest movements. Parties staff state legislatures and bureaucracies, while stitching together coalitions of civic associations, interest groups, and unions to deliver votes. Moreover, parties and unions do not simply reflect underlying social cleavages. Rather, they play active roles in shaping cleavages and articulating political coalitions. Ignoring the distinctive character of parties and unions, and their independent role in shaping politics and policy, leaves political sociology ill-equipped to answer many core questions at the heart of the discipline.
Recent scholarship in political sociology has taken a renewed interest in the study of parties and unions. One example is Cheol-Sung Lee’s book, When Solidarity Works: Labor-Civic Networks and Welfare States in the Market Reform Era. It shows why this new research matters. Lee seeks to explain varying trajectories of welfare-state development and contraction not in the global North, where most welfare state research has focused, but on newly industrialized countries in Asia and Latin America. Unlike countries in the global North, which established their welfare states at a time of global economic expansion, these countries built theirs in a context of global economic crisis. And unlike in the global North, where countries established welfare states after politically democratizing, these late industrializers implemented initial social welfare reforms under authoritarian regimes, then expanded those programs as they democratized.
Focusing on dual paired case comparisons, one Asian (South Korea and Taiwan) and one Latin American (Argentina and Brazil), Lee finds variations that cause problems for existing theories of welfare-state development. Contra power resources theory, these countries’ welfare states were not always the result of pressure from unions and left parties. Indeed, in some cases, ostensibly left parties played key roles in welfare-state retrenchment. Moreover, the same left parties behaved differently toward their labor partners at different points in time, sometimes working with unions to expand social benefits, other times fighting unions to claw them back, and still other times getting unions to accede to demands for neoliberal “reforms.” At the same time, the employer-driven narrative of the “varieties of capitalism” school is also a poor fit for these newly industrialized countries. Unlike in some early industrializing countries, firms in late-industrializing countries did not turn to state policies as a means of coordinating production and developing specific workforce skills. To the contrary, employers bitterly resisted welfare-state expansion and actively supported neoliberal retrenchment.
What then explains these variations in welfare-state development and retrenchment? Lee’s answer centers on labor unions’ unique ability to connect state and civil society. More specifically, his analysis focuses on unions’ relationships to left or ruling political parties—what he calls their degree of cohesiveness —and their relationships to civic or social movement organizations—what he calls their degree of embeddedness. Using careful cross-national comparison, along with key informant interviews, game theoretic modeling, and network analysis, Lee shows that states’ ability to expand or contract welfare-state policy depends on unions’ degree of embeddedness and cohesiveness at a given point in time.
In short, welfare states expanded when, as the title says, solidarity worked: when unions built and maintained cohesive ties to parties committed to reform, while also remaining embedded in dense networks of civic and social movement organizations. Lee refers to this as “embedded cohesiveness.” His positive cases are Brazil and South Korea in the 1990s and 2000s. Brazil was able to implement its “Bolsa Familia” conditional cash transfers for families in this time period, along with expanding benefits for the elderly and disabled, while South Korea was able to implement a universal national health program and old-age assistance, among other reforms—even amid deep economic crisis. They were also able to protect existing welfare benefits from erosion over time.
Where unions maintained ties to parties without also anchoring themselves within civic and social movement networks—what Lee refers to as “disarticulated cohesiveness”—the result was more likely to be selective (as opposed to universal) government benefits, which in turn remained more vulnerable to retrenchment over time. Here Lee’s paradigmatic case is Argentina, where the Peronist Justicialist Party (PJ) implemented massive neoliberal cutbacks in the 1990s after previously expanding benefits. Unions supported the earlier expansions but were unable to resist retrenchments, due to their lack of deeper social ties. Then, in the 2000s, unions forged deeper social ties while realigning with a revitalized PJ led by the Kirchners, leading to renewed social welfare expansion. Taiwan presents an odd in-between case: following an initial welfare-state expansion in the 1980s, a labor movement with weak ties both to the ruling KMT party and civil society gave the KMT leeway to develop social transfer welfare policies as a means of obtaining electoral advantage.
Ultimately, what Lee’s cross-national evidence shows is that a strong labor movement with deep ties to social movements and civic associations is decisive for expanding and protecting the welfare state. Union-party cohesiveness can help, but without embeddedness, gains are much more likely to be particularistic and more vulnerable to erosion over time.
The argument is convincing and important. Where the book falls short is in the presentation and organization of the argument. In an effort to validate his argument’s causal claims and generalizability, Lee spends an inordinate amount of time delving into abstract theoretical considerations and model constructions. Indeed, it is only in Chapter Four, 75 pages into the book, that the author substantively addresses his concrete cases. Even then, much of the presentation of the cases involves recapitulating the abstract theoretical models and showing how they apply, rather than crafting a historical narrative comparing his cases using his rich, detailed knowledge of politics and policy in each country. As a result, much of the evidence, including 143 in-depth interviews with labor and civic activists, gets buried under the book’s theoretical apparatus.
Related to this, Lee seeks to bolster his already convincing comparative and historical analysis with use of game theoretical models and network analysis. However, it is unclear what “gaming out” the universe of possible outcomes adds to the analysis beyond what could be obtained with a simple two-by-two table cross-tabulating degrees of embeddedness and cohesiveness. Similarly, the network analysis adds little to the argument, especially since the figures showing the results of the network analysis are presented with virtually no context, interpretation, or description of how exactly they were generated.
Fortunately, this in no way detracts from what is a masterful comparative analysis of welfare-state development in late-industrializing countries. The book clearly shows why more serious engagement with the study of parties and unions as organizational vehicles linking states and civil society is warranted. It is a thoughtful, carefully researched, and most welcome addition to a new generation of scholarship in political sociology.