While the descriptive account in the previous chapter on the developments in eighteen OECD countries regarding the generosity and conditionality of unemployment insurance may be interesting in its own right for political observers and scholars alike, it first and foremost prompts and bolsters the causal question raised in the introduction: What is the relative explanatory weight to be assigned to political actors’ structural forces and institutions, if any? Asked more skeptically: Is there a discernible impact of genuinely political characteristics on social policy legislation at all, or are the OECD democracies simply on autopilot, merely following economic exigencies?

As for the institutions, we know that they provide an important context for politics and that institutional variation is often vital for understanding the incidence – and particularly the absence – of reforms. But we also know that the institutions of the welfare state and the political system alike are among the more stationary macrovariables, and thus only of limited help if we are interested in the determinants of changes within countries, whether they be abrupt or incremental. As for the impact of structural forces, understood as external and internal pressures on actors, the retrenchment era has witnessed a renaissance of the functional approaches that loomed large in the early days of research on welfare state expansion as epitomized by Wilensky (1975), though its modern revenants build on more sophisticated arguments. And then, of course, there are those scholars who defend the role of political actors – particularly as advocates for distinct socio-economic groups – as engines of change and/or sources of resilience.

In the next two chapters I disentangle, elicit, and criticize the theoretical vantage points from which the role of politics has been questioned and defended. I identify related problems of conceptualization (understood as definition and operationalization) and causation and, on this basis, introduce a cognitive framing argument that clarifies why the proponents of the enduring relevance of the partisan complexion of government may be right, but for the wrong (theoretical) reasons. The more specific aim of this chapter is twofold: First, I discuss the three competing approaches and the respective hypothesized effects of party ideology in the era of retrenchment: the persistence of partisan effects, the marginalization of party politics, and the inversion of traditional ideological frontiers.