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An Asset Theory of Social Policy Preferences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2017

Torben Iversen  and
David Soskice
Torben Iversen
Affiliation:
Harvard University
David Soskice
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Abstract

We present a theory of social policy preferences that emphasizes the composition of people's skills. The key to our argument is that individuals who have made risky investments in skills will demand insurance against the possible future loss of income from those investments. Because the transferability of skills is inversely related to their specificity, workers with specific skills face a potentially long spell of unemployment or a significant decline in income in the event of job loss. Workers deriving most of their income from specific skills therefore have strong incentives to support social policies that protect them against such uncertainty. This is not the case for general skills workers, for whom the costs of social protection weigh more prominently. We test the theory on public opinion data for eleven advanced democracies and suggest how differences in educational systems can help explain cross-national differences in the level of social protection.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 95 , Issue 4 , December 2001 , pp. 875 - 893
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2001

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