(iPoster) Boundary Defense: Bottom-Up Backlash against Opportunity Reform in Three Cases

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Economy; Civic Engagement; & Comparative Politics, Political Economy, and Participation
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Comparative Politics, Political Economy, and Participation

Abstract

Political efforts promising to reform institutional boundaries to "Equal Opportunity" are common across time and country context. Despite both their seeming normative appeal and capacity to offer economic benefits by rationalizing skill development, such efforts have often ended in political failure even when introduced as parts of initially popular reform programs. To understand why, this paper applies a comparative institutional theory of opportunity politics to three empirical case studies of opportunity boundary reform failure: Metropolitan-scale desegregation in the 1970s US North, school de-tracking in Germany focusing on a 2010 popular referendum in Hamburg, and attempts at relaxing dismissal rules for regular workers in Japan in 2003 and 2024. Although these episodes are drawn from highly and persistently distinct "skill formation regimes" in the three largest democratic capitalist political economies, mixed-methods analyses combining quantitative studies of public opinion and election results with qualitative process-tracing in each case reveals parallel patterns of mass, materially motivated pressure from the beneficiaries of "dualizing" boundaries preserving status quo institutions through the mechanism of politicians' electoral incentives. Interpreting these results, the paper highlights three implications for existing comparative theories of liberal democratic capitalism: (1) "dualization" theories of insider-outsider politics should be applied beyond employment protection to accommodate distinct but functionally parallel dualizing boundaries in credit, education, and labor market policy (2) public opinion backlash against reform in such policy areas with high stakes for opportunity access can emerge from materially-motivated policy feedback rather than exogeneous or media-driven shocks to issue salience and (3) bottom-up pressure forcing gradual rather than discrete institutional reform in opportunity institutions complements existing scholarship on interest group politics as an explanation for persisting capitalist variety, with ambiguous functional and distributive consequences.

Author

• Daniel T. Roberts, Harvard University