Solidarity Reframing and Delegative Turns: How Welfare-State Discourse Predicts Patterns of Backsliding and Deepening

Luypaert and Thijssen (2024) show that party solidarity frames are shaped by both ideology and welfare-regime norms. This project posits that systematic reframing—especially moves toward exclusionary deservingness, conditionality, and anti-pluralist welfare narratives—prefigures delegative turns and backsliding of the sort O’Donnell warned about in Latin America (as highlighted in Bernhard, Mundim, and O’Neill 2023). We would build a longitudinal manifesto corpus across OECD and Latin American democracies, code solidarity frames and deservingness tropes, and link them to later ERT-classified episodes (democratic deepening vs autocratization). The key test is whether frame shifts precede and help predict the direction and intensity of regime transformations, net of economic performance and polarization. To probe mechanism, we contrast systems where coalitions learn and reconcile (as ACF applications to China emphasize; Li et al. 2024) with systems where frames harden and cross-coalition learning collapses—hypothesizing the latter as a pathway to delegative executive dominance. The innovation is to treat welfare discourse as a regime-binding institution in its own right, not just policy rhetoric. If confirmed, this provides an actionable, ideational leading indicator of democratic risk and a lever for parties and civil society seeking to steer toward deepening rather than erosion.

References:

1. The comparative politics of solidarity: Political party discourse across three welfare state regimes. Anouk Luypaert, P. Thijssen (2024). Politics & Policy.
2. Episodes of regime transformation. Seraphine F. Maerz, Amanda B. Edgell, M. Wilson, S. Hellmeier, Staffan I. Lindberg (2023). Journal of Peace Research.
3. The politics of China's policy processes: A comparative review of the Advocacy Coalition Framework's applications to mainland China. Wei Li, Jonathan J. Pierce, Fang Chen, Fuguo Wang (2024). Politics & Policy.
4. Latin America and Comparative Politics. M. Bernhard, Karla Mundim, Daniel I. O’neill (2023). Perspectives on Politics.