Chapter 2 concluded that a reprivatization of labor-related risks has taken place. But to what extent is retrenchment, understood as risk privatization, actually accompanied by a change in the ideological climate at the government level? Assessing the patterns in government ideology is of integral importance for a comprehensive answer to the “does politics (still) matter?” question. This is necessary to avoid the risk of exaggerating the effects of ideological stances of government that differ only within an ever narrower corridor of programmatic variation. After briefly summarizing the scholarly arguments in favor of the convergence position found at three different levels of abstraction, I map developments in cabinet ideology for the eighteen OECD countries under investigation from the 1970s on. The empirical evidence suggests partial convergence regarding the programmatic positions of governments, but clearly no “end of ideology” is in sight.

The Debate on Ideological Change and Ideological Convergence

In order for partisanship to matter there must be product differentiation in terms of the ideological offerings of parties. This assumption is at the heart of the Responsible Party Model and its group-based modifications that underlie the Partisanship Hypothesis and the Power Resources Approach. Notable social scientists such as Lipset, Bell, Giddens, Kirchheimer, Mair, and Fukuyama have all rejected this idea. The discussion is mainly led at three different levels of abstraction: concerning grand design, actual party positions, and policy beliefs. The daringness of hypotheses increases with the level of abstraction and conclusions are less sweeping where amenable to instant empirical verification.

The “end of ideology” literature is located at the upper end of the ladder of abstraction. In the postwar context of historically singular prosperity increases paralleled by the wage compression economists refer to as “the great compression,” its proponents noticed a broad ideological consensus in favor of welfare capitalism (or: managed capitalism, social democracy, or pragmatic liberalism) in the Western hemisphere. This contrasted sharply with the (violent) struggle between conservative, liberal, and socialist ideologists in the first half of the twentieth century. For Lipset, this deeper consensus was possible because the functional need for political ideologies as reactions and responses to modernization phenomena, such as the industrial revolution, and the problems caused by them eroded with the salience of these problems, such as stark class divisions.