Abstract: This Element details how elites provide policy concessions
when they face credible threats of revolution. Specifically, the authors
discuss how the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent
formation of Comintern enhanced elites’ perceptions of revolutionary
threat by affecting the capacity and motivation of labor movements as
well as the elites’ interpretation of information signals. These
developments incentivized elites to provide policy concessions to
urban workers, notably reduced working hours and expanded social
transfer programs. The authors assess their argument by using original
qualitative and quantitative data. First, they document changes in
perceptions of revolutionary threat and strategic policy concessions in
early inter-war Norway by using archival and other sources. Second,
they code, for example, representatives at the 1919 Comintern meeting
to proxy for credibility of domestic revolutionary threat in
cross-national analysis. States facing greater threats expanded various
social policies to a larger extent than other countries, and some of these
differences persisted for decades.
Author(s): Magnus B. Rasmussen, Carl Henrik Knutsen
Edition: 1
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 94
City: Cambridge
Tags: Political Economy
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Reforming to Survive
Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 Roadmap of the Element
2 Literature Review
2.1 Elites and Early Drivers of Social Policy Expansion
2.2 Revolutionary Threats and Political Change
3 A Theory of Elites’ Policy Responses to Revolutionary Threats
3.1 Elite Preferences, Power Resources, and Information Signals
3.2 Elite Responses
4 Case Study: Revolutionary Fear and Elite Responses in Norway, 1915–24
4.1 Norwegian Labor Goes Revolutionary
4.2 Elite Perception of the Likelihood of Revolution and RepressiveResponses
4.3 Eight-Hour Workday
4.4 Socialization of Means of Production, Worker Participation in Management, and Profit Sharing
4.5 Old-Age Pensions
4.6 Institutional Change
4.6.1 Suffrage Extension
4.6.2 Electoral Rule Reform
4.5 Summary
5 Measuring Social Policies and Revolutionary Threat across Countries
5.1 Measuring Revolutionary Threat
5.2 Dependent Variables
5.3 Benchmark Specification
6 Statistical Analysis
6.1 Main Cross-Country Analysis on Work Time Regulation
6.2 Instrumental Variable Regression Results
6.3 Welfare State Coverage
7 Mechanism of Persistence: Comintern, the Formation of Communist Parties, and the Long-Term Effects of the Bolshevik Revolution
8 Conclusion
References
