André Walter

University of Zurich | UZH · Institut für Politikwissenschaft

Previous research on welfare state development in federal states has claimed that interstate competition induces a race to the bottom with regard to social expenditure. While existing research has focused on the impact of migration inflows of poor households on states with high provision of social expenditure, it has remained silent with regard to...

Despite the importance of Christian democracy for economic and social policies throughout the 20th century, we know very little about the incorporation of labor interests into Catholic parties. Existing accounts claim that the formation of Catholic worker organizations is rooted in the process of industrialization and reforms of Catholic social tea...

Scholars increasingly use Swiss cantons to examine the effect of democratic processes and institutions on political, economic and social outcomes. However, the availability of political indicators at the cantonal level is limited, in particular for longer periods of time. We introduce a novel data set on the ideological and partisan composition of...

The adoption of proportional representation (PR) has attracted considerable scholarly attention in recent years. Taking Stein Rokkan’s two roads to PR as starting point, previous research has evolved around the question whether the adoption of PR was consensual (minority protection) or conflict-ridden (socialist threat). In this article, we argue t...

As the first country to introduce proportional representation (PR), Belgium has attracted considerable attention. Yet, we find the existing explanations for the 1899 breakthrough lacking. At the time of reform, the Catholic Party was politically dominant, advantaged by the electoral system, and facing reformist Socialists. Nevertheless, they single...

Existing research argues that malapportionment primarily favors rural areas, resulting in conservative biases of electoral systems. In this paper, we provide a radically different perspective on the study of geographical overrepresentation by identifying the institutional design under which urban and left-leaning areas benefit from malapportionment...

Does the relationship between the government ideology and the welfare state vary over time? While a burgeoning research field that have proposed important insights, we argue that existing research has largely failed to accurately study temporal heterogeneity in partisan social policy making. In this paper, we lay out problems of approaches commonly...

Do ethnic majorities and minorities have diverging preferences for fiscal capacity? Do these preferences converge during national emergencies such as interstate war? In this paper, we provide evidence from a natural experiment to demonstrate that politically salient minority-majority divisions undermine the development of fiscal capacity. In additi...

The First World War was a watershed moment for the development of the modern tax state. Yet, whereas the tax yield strongly increased in this period, little is known about how the tax mix changed, in particular regarding the turn to direct taxation. Examining the two ‘Sister Republics’ Switzerland and the USA, this paper demonstrates that tax refor...

Despite decades of growing engagement, there are still questions about the effectiveness of transnational private regulation in labour standards to improve employee welfare in global production networks. The literature shows that some improvement may be expected in outcome standards, such as benefits, working time, health and safety issues, but not...

The process of adapting electoral districts under majoritarian rules (MR) matters for parties' preferences for the introduction of proportional representation (PR). Using the case of Switzerland, we demonstrate that gerrymandering , that is, the manipulation of electoral districts for partisan gain, was both substantial and effective in protecting...

Diese Blogserie bietet einen Ausschnitt aus dem „Handbook on the Politics of Taxation“, das die aktuelle Forschung zur Analyse der Steuerpolitik zusammenfasst. Die Beiträge diskutieren wichtige Handelnde, die Rolle von Ideen und Institutionen und wie diese die Steuerpolitik beeinflussen, sowie welchen Einfluss die Steuerpolitik auf wichtige gesells...

There is wide agreement that war affects taxation. Yet, scholars disagree as to how exactly and under what conditions war matters. This chapter reviews the literature on war and taxation. We first discuss the causal mechanisms linking war to taxation: cost pressure, administrative capacity, and calls for redistribution. Second, we examine concerns...

Does war exposure increase popular support for state penetration or are changes in taxation and economic intervention primarily elite-driven? Existing research rests mainly at the macro level and is therefore unable to distinguish between the two mechanisms. In this paper, we employ a natural experiment to investigate whether direct war exposure af...

A substantial body of research shows that the entry of socialist parties to the electoral arena is linked to major political and economic reforms at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, how socialist parties have affected electoral competition and coordination has never been investigated in detail. Drawing on the debate of the adoption...

There is a vast literature on direct democracy and public spending. Yet, the empirical findings are surprisingly mixed. We contribute to this literature in two ways. First, we emphasize that direct democratic institutions vary, as some create proposal power, while others add a veto player. Second, we take into account that direct democratic institu...

What was the effect of the First World War on taxation? With the lower social classes providing most of the soldiers in military conflicts, some accounts emphasize how citizens demanded more progressive taxes to create some equality of sacrifice. Others observe the expansion of regressive taxation and point to popular resistance to further state ce...

The 19th century marked the founding period of modern public finance. We examine the domestic and non-war related determinants of direct taxation in this early democratic period and in a state building context. We argue that the reasons for the expansion of direct taxation can be found in the political competition between different elite groups in...

Analyzing the voting behavior of Swiss members of parliament (MP) using newly collected individual, district, and cantonal level data, we show that both electoral disproportionalities and the insurgent parties’ electoral potential are important determinants of MP voting behavior on the adoption of proportional representation (PR). However, in contr...

Direct democratic rights are increasingly adopted around the world. However, what are the consequences of the introduction of initiative and referendum rights for welfare state development? The existing literature holds a pessimistic view on the role of direct democracy for welfare state development and generosity. While referenda are argued to con...

We present a new dataset with 15 indicators for the political, economic and social impact of colonialism. This dataset and our four indices for the impact of colonialism create for the first time the opportunity to compare directly the levels of colonial transformation for a sample of 83 African and Asian countries. Some of our exploratory findings...