Errata

Extract

There are errors in the data used in the analysis of Hicks and Zorn's “Economic Globalization, the Macro Economy, and Reversals of Welfare Expansion in Affluent Democracies, 1978–94,” which appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of International Organization (Vol. 59, 631–62). New, corrected data are now included in the data appendix for the article available at 〈http://www.sociology.emory.edu/ahicks/IO.html〉 Accompanying the data appendix is a second appendix of text and tables that includes an errata report, new analyses, and revised findings. New analyses do not indicate that pressures from unemployment, societal aging, and globalization stressed in Hicks and Zorn (2005) drive retrenchment. Rather they indicate that strong aggregate economic performance—affluence, economic growth, and low de-industrialization in particular—and institutional centralization of political power inhibit retrenchment, while the reverse fosters it. This at least is the case for the two least restrictive of Hicks and Zorn's three measures of retrenchment. For outcome measures that do not identify a retrenchment unless there is, at least, a 6 percent cut in social spending (a threshold condition of C = −0.06 for the identification of a “retrenchment” on the underlying spending variable PCRS), Hicks and Zorn's hypothesized determinants do not have statistically significant effects. This indicates that their model lacks explanatory power for deep cuts in social spending.