THE POLITICAL ORGANISATION OF BUSINESS AND WELFARE STATE RESTRUCTURING: HOW ASSOCIATIONAL FACTORS SHAPE EMPLOYERS' COOPERATION FOR SOCIAL POLICY DEVELOPMENT

Given that business interests have assumed ever-growing importance in welfare state restructuring, and that welfare programmes impose significant costs on firms, when and how can employers decide to actively support the development of contemporary social policy? This thesis shows that specific types of business interest organisation can favour the cooperation of employers for the establishment of new social welfare legislation by mediating between their heterogeneous economic interests and the political target structure, and by governing their collective political mobilisation. Drawing on theories of collective action and neo-corporatist models, the thesis elaborates an original typological framework and assesses it through an historical cross-national study of the role of organised business in the Austrian and Italian severance pay reforms (1990s-2000s). Detail process-tracing and systematic cross-case comparison are used to reconstruct and analyse what motivated and enabled the Austrian business community, but not the Italian one, to decisively promote the use of severance payments for the expansion of supplementary pension funds. Empirically, the thesis finds that differences in the institutional set-up of the national organisation of business interests have shaped divergent governance roles of business in the two countries by making for different organisational capacities of interest coordination and unification on the one hand, and of bargained interest accommodation, on the other. In particular, highly inclusive and cohesive organisational forms of interest representation, like the Austrian ones, have allowed employers’ representatives to contain intra-class interest conflicts and deliver unitary, politically manageable and moderate social policy demands. Moreover, rather stable participation in state regulation (in non-wage policy areas) and high sanction leverage vis-à-vis members have enabled organisational leaders to determine collective social policy goals and strategies quite independently from the short-term interests of employers, and to render organisational decisions binding also for members opposing resistance. In closing, the thesis provides evidence that, even in presence of appropriate institutional arrangements, a remarkable responsibility for building business support for social welfare initiatives rests on the government. Since the latter can bias the contingent conditions of political influence, it can dampen organisations’ cooperative efforts whenever it opts for clientelistic dynamics of policy formation instead of backing the construction of cross-class reform coalitions.