Divide and Pacify
Strategic Social Policies and Political Protests
in Post-Communist Democracies
Pieter Vanhuysse, School of Political Sciences
and Faculty of Education, University of Haifa
Despite dramatic
increases in poverty, unemployment, and social inequalities,
the Central and Eastern European transitions from communism
to market democracy in the 1990s have been remarkably
peaceful. This book proposes a new explanation for this
unexpected political quiescence. It shows how reforming
governments in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic
have been able to prevent massive waves of strikes and
protests by the strategic use of welfare state programs
such as pensions and unemployment benefits. Divide and
Pacify explains how social policies were used to prevent
massive job losses with softening labor market policies,
or to split up highly aggrieved groups of workers in
precarious jobs by sending some of them onto unemployment
benefits and many others onto early retirement and disability
pensions. From a narrow economic viewpoint, these policies
often appeared to be immensely costly or irresponsibly
populist. Yet a more inclusive social-scientific perspective
can shed new light on these seemingly irrational policies
by pointing to deeper political motives and wider sociological
consequences.
"Pieter
Vanhuysse…is a political scientist, an economist
and a sociologist in one person. Through his original
synthesis of insights from these various disciplines,
he shows how an interdisciplinary perspective can help
to make better sense of phenomena that appear to be
puzzling, or that remain unaddressed, from the point
of view of any one discipline. …Divide and
Pacify…suggests that extensive social policies
can be politically efficacious strategies, while never
forgetting that such measures are needed to alleviate
people’s suffering in the midst of traumatic social
changes. …the core message of this book is important,
and it has a larger relevance across many settings in
which democratic governments face the task of implementing
costly reforms in complex and uncertain policy environments."
–János
Kornai
"Divide and Pacify contains a provocative thesis
about the manner in which political strategy was used
to consolidate democracy in post-communist Hungary,
Poland, and the Czech Republic. Pieter Vanhuysse develops
a tight argument emphasizing the strategic use of welfare
and unemployment compensation policies by a government
to nip potential collective action against it in the
bud. By breaking up social networks that might otherwise
facilitate protest, through unemployment and induced
early retirement, governments were able to survive otherwise
difficult economic circumstances. This novel argument
linking economics, politics, sociology, and demography
should stimulate wide-ranging debate about the strategic
uses of social policy." - Kenneth Shepsle, Professor,
Harvard University and Fellow, American Academy of Sciences
"In
post-communist Europe, international advice—for
example from the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank—to reforming governments focused heavily
on economic policy. The political imperative, in contrast,
was a set of policies generous enough to maintain continuing
support for the overall reforms. The great value of
this book is that it addresses both strategic policy
directions simultaneously. Specifically, it analyzes
how policies that are sub-optimal in economic terms
(work in the grey economy, easy access to unemployment
benefits, fiscally expensive early retirement) can be
argued to be optimal (or at least roughly so) when considering
economics and politics together. As such, the book offers
a rich political economy perspective on post-communist
reforms." – Nicholas Barr, Professor of
Public Economics, London School of Economics and Political
Science
Contents
Foreword by Janos Kornai;
Acknowledgements; Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2
The Unexpected Peacefulness of Transitions; Chapter
3 Political Quiescence despite Conditions for Conflict;
Chapter 4 Preventing Protests: Divide and Pacify
as Political Strategy; Chapter 5 The Great Abnormal
Pensioner Booms: Strategic Social Policies in Practice;
Chapter 6 Peaceful Pathways: The Political Economy
of Post-communist Welfare; Chapter 7 Conclusions;
References; Index
This book has been nominated
for the American
Sociological Association's Award for Distinguished
Contribution to Scholarship 2006, Section on Political
Sociology.
"Vanhuysse explores the reasons for the low level
of labor strikes and reform protests in postcommunist
Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. His time frame
is 1989-96, and he utilizes quantitative data in a useful
way in generating his conclusions. Summing up: Recommended."
- Choice
"Vanhuysse is clearly on to something
with his main argument - that 'strategic social policies'
explain the relative weakness of protest politics in
Eastern Europe. He identifies a governing strategy of
'divide and pacify', by which the workers who were most
likely to unite in protest were instead turned against
one another in a contest for limited economic resources.
He shows how policies promoting early retirement enabled
post-communist governments to remove older workers with
with more protest experience and more social ties from
the traditional arenas of state-labor contestation.
The book makes an important connection between the strategic
allocation of welfare benefits and political consolidation
of liberal market democracy - something you do not hear
much about from the neo-liberals, who like to take credit
for east-central Europe's historic transformation".
- Political Science Quarterly
"A fine first book by a young scholar
who has entered forcefully into the conversation about
dual transitions and comparative welfare states. It
can profitably be read by specialists on the region
as well as on labor and welfare politics, sociologists,
political scientists, and economists and will be accessible
and interesting to students of these topics at all levels."
- Slavic Review
2006
190 pages
ISBN 978-963-7326-79-0 cloth $41.95 / €32.95 /
£21.95
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