IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fbk/wpaper/2018-02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Was Pierson right? A synthetic control analysis of Reagan and Thatcher’s welfare state retrenchments

Author

Listed:
  • Federico Podestà

Abstract

Pierson’s highly-regarded book, Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment suffers from a serious methodological drawback. The author draws his conclusions about welfare state resilience by scrutinizing what happened to social policy structure during and at the end of the two governments selected, ending up by falling into the well-known ‘post hoc ergo propter hoc’ fallacy. The present paper sets out to replicate Pierson’s analysis in a counterfactual framework of causal inference. Adopting the synthetic control method, the trajectories of several UK and US welfare-state measures, observed in the presence of Thatcher and Reagan’s administration, were contrasted with corresponding trajectories reconstructed in the absence of neo-conservative governments. This exercise confirmed Pierson’s substantive conclusion: the neo-conservative revolution of the 1980s did not significantly alter the UK or USA welfare state.

Suggested Citation

  • Federico Podestà, 2018. "Was Pierson right? A synthetic control analysis of Reagan and Thatcher’s welfare state retrenchments," FBK-IRVAPP Working Papers 2018-02, Research Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies (IRVAPP), Bruno Kessler Foundation.
    • Handle: RePEc:fbk:wpaper:2018-02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://irvapp.fbk.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/WP_IRVAPP_2018-02.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Stearns, Jenna, 2015. "The effects of paid maternity leave: Evidence from Temporary Disability Insurance," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 85-102.
    2. Eduardo Cavallo & Sebastian Galiani & Ilan Noy & Juan Pantano, 2013. "Catastrophic Natural Disasters and Economic Growth," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(5), pages 1549-1561, December.
    3. Alberto Abadie & Alexis Diamond & Jens Hainmueller, 2015. "Comparative Politics and the Synthetic Control Method," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 59(2), pages 495-510, February.
    4. Alberto Abadie & Javier Gardeazabal, 2003. "The Economic Costs of Conflict: A Case Study of the Basque Country," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(1), pages 113-132, March.
    5. Andreas Billmeier & Tommaso Nannicini, 2013. "Assessing Economic Liberalization Episodes: A Synthetic Control Approach," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 95(3), pages 983-1001, July.
    6. Duane Swank, 1998. "Funding the Welfare State: Globalization and the Taxation of Business in Advanced Market Economies," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 46(4), pages 671-692, September.
    7. Abadie, Alberto & Diamond, Alexis & Hainmueller, Jens, 2010. "Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California’s Tobacco Control Program," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 105(490), pages 493-505.
    8. Kaul, Ashok & Klößner, Stefan & Pfeifer, Gregor & Schieler, Manuel, 2015. "Synthetic Control Methods: Never Use All Pre-Intervention Outcomes Together With Covariates," MPRA Paper 83790, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. Bernhard Ebbinghaus & Jelle Visser, 1998. "When Institutions Matter: Union Growth and Decline in Western Europe, 1950-95," MZES Working Papers 30, MZES.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bruno Ferman & Cristine Pinto & Vitor Possebom, 2020. "Cherry Picking with Synthetic Controls," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 39(2), pages 510-532, March.
    2. Irene Botosaru & Bruno Ferman, 2019. "On the role of covariates in the synthetic control method," The Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 22(2), pages 117-130.
    3. Maïmouna Diakite & Jean-François Brun & Souleymane Diarra & Nasser Ary Tanimoune, 2017. "The effects of tax coordination on the tax revenue mobilization in West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU)," CERDI Working papers halshs-01535104, HAL.
    4. Kaul, Ashok & Klößner, Stefan & Pfeifer, Gregor & Schieler, Manuel, 2015. "Synthetic Control Methods: Never Use All Pre-Intervention Outcomes Together With Covariates," MPRA Paper 83790, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Pier Basaglia & Sophie M. Behr & Moritz A. Drupp, 2023. "De-Fueling Externalities: How Tax Salience and Fuel Substitution Mediate Climate and Health Benefits," Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin 2041, DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research.
    6. Bibek Adhikari, 2022. "A Guide to Using the Synthetic Control Method to Quantify the Effects of Shocks, Policies, and Shocking Policies," The American Economist, Sage Publications, vol. 67(1), pages 46-63, March.
    7. Daniel Albalate & Germà Bel & Ferran A. Mazaira-Font, 2021. "Decoupling synthetic control methods to ensure stability, accuracy and meaningfulness," SERIEs: Journal of the Spanish Economic Association, Springer;Spanish Economic Association, vol. 12(4), pages 549-584, December.
    8. Klößner, Stefan & Pfeifer, Gregor, 2015. "Synthesizing Cash for Clunkers: Stabilizing the Car Market, Hurting the Environment," VfS Annual Conference 2015 (Muenster): Economic Development - Theory and Policy 113207, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    9. Kleis, Mischa & Moessinger, Marc-Daniel, 2016. "The long-run effect of fiscal consolidation on economic growth: Evidence from quantitative case studies," ZEW Discussion Papers 16-047, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, revised 2016.
    10. Pier Basaglia & Sophie M. Behr & Moritz A. Drupp, 2023. "De-Fueling Externalities: Causal Effects of Fuel Taxation and Mediating Mechanisms for Reducing Climate and Pollution Costs," CESifo Working Paper Series 10508, CESifo.
    11. Daniel Albalate & Germà Bel & Ferran A. Mazaira-Font, 2020. "Ensuring Stability, Accuracy and Meaningfulness in Synthetic Control Methods: The Regularized SHAP-Distance Method," IREA Working Papers 202005, University of Barcelona, Research Institute of Applied Economics, revised Apr 2020.
    12. Maximiliano Marzetti & Rok Spruk, 2023. "Long-Term Economic Effects of Populist Legal Reforms: Evidence from Argentina," Comparative Economic Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Association for Comparative Economic Studies, vol. 65(1), pages 60-95, March.
    13. Bibek Adhikari & Romain Duval & Bingjie Hu & Prakash Loungani, 2018. "Can Reform Waves Turn the Tide? Some Case Studies using the Synthetic Control Method," Open Economies Review, Springer, vol. 29(4), pages 879-910, September.
    14. Samer Matta & Michael Bleaney & Simon Appleton, 2022. "The economic impact of political instability and mass civil protest," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(1), pages 253-270, March.
    15. Dennis Essers & Stefaan Ide, 2017. "The IMF and precautionary lending : An empirical evaluation of the selectivity and effectiveness of the flexible credit line," Working Paper Research 323, National Bank of Belgium.
    16. Barseghyan, Gayane, 2019. "Sanctions and counter-sanctions : What did they do?," BOFIT Discussion Papers 24/2019, Bank of Finland, Institute for Economies in Transition.
    17. Flamini, Alessandro & Jahanshahi, Babak & Mohaddes, Kamiar, 2021. "Illegal drugs and public corruption: Crack based evidence from California," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 69(C).
    18. Freund, Caroline & Mulabdic, Alen & Ruta, Michele, 2022. "Is 3D printing a threat to global trade? The trade effects you didn't hear about," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 138(C).
    19. Cummins Joseph & Miller Douglas L. & Smith Brock & Simon David, 2024. "Matching on Noise: Finite Sample Bias in the Synthetic Control Estimator," Journal of Econometric Methods, De Gruyter, vol. 13(1), pages 67-95, January.
    20. Kuosmanen, Timo & Zhou, Xun & Eskelinen, Juha & Malo, Pekka, 2021. "Design Flaw of the Synthetic Control Method," MPRA Paper 106328, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Welfare state retrenchment; Synthetic control analysis; Neo-conservative politics; Reagan and Thatcher’s administration; Pierson’s book;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C54 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Quantitative Policy Modeling
    • D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation
    • H53 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Welfare Programs
    • H55 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Social Security and Public Pensions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fbk:wpaper:2018-02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Alessio Tomelleri or Daniela Anesi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/irvapit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.