Reforming to Survive: The Bolshevik Origins of Social Policies (Elements in Political Economy)

Abstract: This Element details how elites provide policy concessions when they face credible threats of revolution. Specifically, the authors discuss how the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent formation of Comintern enhanced elites’ perceptions of revolutionary threat by affecting the capacity and motivation of labor movements as well as the elites’ interpretation of information signals. These developments incentivized elites to provide policy concessions to urban workers, notably reduced working hours and expanded social transfer programs. The authors assess their argument by using original qualitative and quantitative data. First, they document changes in perceptions of revolutionary threat and strategic policy concessions in early inter-war Norway by using archival and other sources. Second, they code, for example, representatives at the 1919 Comintern meeting to proxy for credibility of domestic revolutionary threat in cross-national analysis. States facing greater threats expanded various social policies to a larger extent than other countries, and some of these differences persisted for decades. Cover 1 Title page 3 Copyright page 4 Reforming to Survive 5 Contents 6 1 Introduction 7 1.1 Roadmap of the Element 11 2 Literature Review 14 2.1 Elites and Early Drivers of Social Policy Expansion 14 2.2 Revolutionary Threats and Political Change 19 3 A Theory of Elites’ Policy Responses to Revolutionary Threats 22 3.1 Elite Preferences, Power Resources, and Information Signals 23 3.2 Elite Responses 26 4 Case Study: Revolutionary Fear and Elite Responses in Norway, 1915–24 29 4.1 Norwegian Labor Goes Revolutionary 31 4.2 Elite Perception of the Likelihood of Revolution and RepressiveResponses 35 4.3 Eight-Hour Workday 39 4.4 Socialization of Means of Production, Worker Participation in Management, and Profit Sharing 44 4.5 Old-Age Pensions 48 4.6 Institutional Change 50 4.6.1 Suffrage Extension 50 4.6.2 Electoral Rule Reform 51 4.5 Summary 55 5 Measuring Social Policies and Revolutionary Threat across Countries 56 5.1 Measuring Revolutionary Threat 56 5.2 Dependent Variables 58 5.3 Benchmark Specification 59 6 Statistical Analysis 60 6.1 Main Cross-Country Analysis on Work Time Regulation 60 6.2 Instrumental Variable Regression Results 71 6.3 Welfare State Coverage 72 7 Mechanism of Persistence: Comintern, the Formation of Communist Parties, and the Long„-Term„ Effects of the Bolshevik Revolution 75 8 Conclusion 78 References 82 This Element details how elites provide policy concessions when they face credible threats of revolution. Specifically, the authors discuss how the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent formation of Comintern enhanced elites' perceptions of revolutionary threat by affecting the capacity and motivation of labor movements as well as the elites' interpretation of information signals. These developments incentivized elites to provide policy concessions to urban workers, notably reduced working hours and expanded social transfer programs. The authors assess their argument by using original qualitative and quantitative data. First, they document changes in perceptions of revolutionary threat and strategic policy concessions in early inter-war Norway by using archival and other sources. Second, they code, for example, representatives at the 1919 Comintern meeting to proxy for credibility of domestic revolutionary threat in cross-national analysis. States facing greater threats expanded various social policies to a larger extent than other countries, and some of these differences persisted for decades.-- Provided by publisher