3.4.1 Aspects of IL and Empirical Indicators
As Chapter 2 has outlined in some detail, IL draws upon a host of concepts belonging to the literatures on political ideas and leadership, indicating that it contains more than just one “functional” aspect. In a nutshell, IL implies that key policy-makers display a small number of communicative and behavioural characteristics. The guiding proposition states that ideational leaders leave a significant imprint on political outcomes by transforming resistance of reform opponents into acceptance or neutrality towards reform initiatives, resulting in structural reforms.102 Figure 3.1 below reiterates the aspects of IL as presented in Chapter 2:
Figure 3.1: Conceptualization of IL
The process of operationalization is about translating abstract concepts and their components into more concrete and therefore measurable (but not necessarily numerical) indicators. Typically, in order to measure or otherwise identify abstract ideas and concepts one needs to develop indicators that will function as “proxies” for the original concepts. I will propose indicators for aspects 1
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That such acceptance may not come ‘for free’ is of no concern here; possibly policy-makers may be forced to make concessions to reform opponents in other matters than the reform issue at hand.
Aspects of IL
Communicative/behavioural aspects
1) Exposing the drawbacks of the policy status quo
2) Making consistent efforts to legitimize (the principles of) new policy 3) Engaging with reform opponents by framing their resistance as “problematic” 4) Making efforts at political consensus-building to muster support for a particular reform
Orientation/motivation aspect
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through to 4 in the following sub-sections below, where I make a distinction between the two main sources of collected data, documents and interviews (the two groups of sources will be discussed in more detail in Section 3.5). Following on from this, it needs to be verified whether this operationalization will suffice by confronting the indicators with empirical data. This can only be established after pre-screening the data with the help of the defined categories and indicators and, more importantly, performing a preliminary analysis by using them (Egle, Ostheim et al. 2003). I will address these latter issues in Section 3.4.2.
3.4.2 Indicators for Analysing Textual Data from Documents
In order to guide the search for aspects of IL in textual material, each aspect has been turned into an analytical category with one corresponding guiding question about the key policy-maker and one or several indicators.
Exposing the Drawbacks of the Policy Status Quo
The guiding question for this aspect of IL was: “did a key politician clearly reject the pension policy status quo (and its old policy principles)?” To answer this question, documents were examined in search for certain indicators, i.e. lines of argument that express one of the following (note that indicators may consist of one or several connected sentences rather than single words or groups of words):
• identifying pressing problems and associating them with the status quo of existing policies and institutions and/or underlying policy ideas;
• linking these problems to policy failure, crisis, inefficiency, loss of welfare etc.. To give some examples, arguments that fit this analytical category may stress that ‘old policies (and/or their principles) are no longer viable/effective because of…’ One genuine example of this is a statement like ‘(…) the statutory scheme has to respond to societal changes if it is supposed to still exist in the future’ or ‘what will be decisive is a fundamental turnaround: we no longer pay for unemployment but place people into jobs instead’. With this category, I am interested in whether such arguments are used at all, that is, whether key policy-makers evoke policy failure. A negative instance in this category (instance of non-occurrence) exists if a politician’s call for reform is legitimized without reference to the status quo or using arguments stressing arguments that ‘existing policy arrangements must be maintained’.
Making Consistent Efforts to Legitimize New Policy
For this analytical category, the guiding question was: “did a key politician clearly express and legitimize new policy principles, using cognitive arguments (related to problem-solving) and/or normative arguments (related to societal norms and values)?” In order to identify this aspect of IL empirically, I sought to identify lines of arguments that
• link suggested policy solutions and/or new policy principles with aforementioned problems (cognitive argument), for instance, ‘this measure will address the problem of contributions linked to work’; or
• link suggested policy solutions to norms and values present in society (normative arguments), for instance, ‘this measure is in congruence with our current understanding of social justice’.
Research Design and Methodology
To cite some examples from politicians statements, arguments in this category may read like ‘this concept was designed to provide not only a suitable but also a just answer to many future questions in old-age provision’, or ‘our maxim “Fördern und Fordern” is a guiding idea behind the new basic benefit for the unemployed: by implementing it, every unemployed person receives the support she or he needs’.
Here, we are interested in whether cognitive and normative arguments are used by policy- makers and whether they tend to occur closely together in a text. The latter may be assessed by recording instances of close re-occurrence. This second category can be considered as absent when policy-makers do not make an explicit link between problems and solutions, or when they do not refer to underlying values/policy principles while discussing a policy proposal.
Engaging with Reform Opponents by Framing Resistance as “Problematic”
The third aspect of IL translated into a corresponding analytical category, for which the guiding question read: “did the key politician appeal to critics to give up their reform resistance?” In other words, the search concentrated on arguments that point to the negative effects of opponents’ views by labelling their behaviour as irresponsible in view of the common interest or society as a whole.103 Possible examples of this category are statements like ‘blocking this law is contrary to pursuing the common interest’ or ‘such a position is socially irresponsible’. Genuine examples from policy-makers’ statements read as follows: ‘the parliamentary opposition would have a severe credibility problem if it dared to veto the tax credits to citizens for private pension provision’, or ‘it is important to give a warning to those who make for pessimism in Germany (…) they must not and they will not stop our reforms’. In order to assess this aspect of IL, it is necessary to check whether such arguments appear in documents at all or whether politicians use other rhetorical means to deal with the resistance they encounter, or do not address it with at all in communicative terms. Correspondingly, we can refer to a negative instance for this category if politicians do not raise the issue of resisting or blocking behaviour by other political actors. Making Efforts at Political Consensus-Building to Muster Support for a Particular Reform Initiative
The fourth aspect of IL, which the analysis of the first case (designed as a pilot) brought to the fore, relates to political consensus-building. It is perhaps the most troublesome aspect of the concept in terms of its measurement or identification. The question to be asked in order to find evidence for this category reads: “did a key politician engage in political consensus-building in order to push through reform, based on an interest in reform contents or does he engage in tactical games in order to keep his power?” Generally speaking, little information on consensus-building activities of policy-makers is available in publicly accessible documents on reform, which explains why I do not define specific analytical categories such as lines of argument that express consensus-seeking behaviour. Instead, evidence on consensus-seeking needs to be inferred from background information about reform processes, including press coverage and, most importantly, interview accounts.
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A second and distinct category of arguments, ‘point to the inconsistencies in opponents’ behaviour by confronting them with the consequences of non-cooperation for their interests (or those of their constituents)’ was dropped after the analysis of the pilot study (see Section 3.2.2)
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Policy-Orientation of Key Policy-Makers
This last aspect of the IL framework relates to the orientation or motivation of policymakers. As with the consensus-building aspect of IL, it is not easy to specify indicators for it; in addition, documents tend to contain sparse evidence of policy-makers’ attitude towards their role in office. Again, it is most likely to derive evidence about policy-makers’ orientations from background information contained by press articles and interviews. For instance, one may try to find remarks by different observers about a minister’s motivations and attitude towards his office, concerning a particular reform project, or about his general political style. Taken together, such pieces of evidence enable us to come to judgements about whether an official is more led by policy concerns, or is, conversely, more office- and power-oriented.
3.4.3 Analysing Interview Data
In contrast to the analysis conducted on texts, the analysis of interview protocols did not rely on an explicit operationalization of IL in terms of its underlying aspects. It would be tedious and unproductive to ask different experts and observers very detailed questions on whether key politicians used particular arguments in presenting and defending the reform.104
More specifically, the aim of the interviews was to collect substantive information about the whole of the reform process rather than to focus exclusively on the question of leadership as seen from within the reformist political camp. The range of topics covered included, of course, the leadership style of central political actors, as well as (the perception of) their strategies, but also other aspects of the process including other relevant actors, and the development of the process. All of these elements cannot be captured as easily by the study of a combination of documents. As regards identifying evidence for certain aspects of IL, such as political consensus-building and the political orientation of supposed ideational leaders, questions were asked about whether political actors were result-oriented and tried to use their political network to engineer enough support to push through their policy proposal, and whether this was done for reasons of maintaining power or making sensible policy choices (although this proved difficult to disentangle empirically). In order to organize and analyze interview data in a systematic manner, and to enable a comparison of different accounts, I employed an analytic grid based on the interview schedule that captured the gist of the answers based on interviewee-approved protocols.
3.4.4 Dimensions of Structural Reform and Empirical Indicators
In Chapter 1, I defined the dependent variable in this study, structural reform. To reiterate briefly, it concerns reforms that involve structural shifts, i.e. changes in the distribution of either competences or responsibilities in the financing structure, the benefit structure, or the management of regulatory structure of a social policy programme. The nature of a structural shift depends on the particular dimension in question. The financing structure indicates how a programme is financed, and financing may be comprised of general taxation, payroll contributions, or insurance premiums. For instance, a clear shift from reliance on one source of financing to another source, or creating a new combination of sources can be seen as a structural shift. Concerning the benefit
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Moreover, this strategy is problematic and little rewarding for the analyst due to the time elapsed between the reform processes and the interviews: interviewees tend to have difficulties remembering arguments in detail.
Research Design and Methodology
structure, benefits can be either means-tested, flat-rate, based on earnings, or based on payroll contributions, reflecting different rules of eligibility and ways of calculating them. I consider the reforms that stipulate shifts from one form of benefit to another form to be structural. Finally, the management or regulatory structure of a scheme specifies which actors take the decisions concerning its day-to-day management and/or implementation. Typically, this task rests with the state (or public agencies), the social partners or private actors. A structural shift in this dimension involves a change in the composition of managing actors, for instance, if the state decided to replace a managing body operating under public law with several private actors.
The analytical distinction of different structural dimensions of policy programmes forms the basis for operationalizing the concept of structural reforms, that is, to identify them among the large number of reforms that are passed in social policy programmes. In other words, identifying a reform as structural involves scrutinizing the provisions contained in social policy legislation for shifts in the three structural dimensions of financing, benefits, and management, as outlined above. These shifts constitute at the same time the empirical indicators for structural reform, if the provisions of a piece of social policy legislation imply a shift in at least one of the dimensions. In this study, I have resorted to a combination of secondary sources so as to avoid the time- consuming task of checking pieces of social policy legislation for these indicators. More specifically, these sources included a summary database of changes in German social policy legislation (Gohr and Seeleib-Kaiser 2003), analyses of German social policy developments that include the evaluation of reforms ( e.g. Alber 2001; Schmid 2002; Schmidt 2005), as well as newspaper-based compilations of social policy reforms (Süddeutsche Zeitung; Die Zeit). On the basis of these sources, I identified two clear examples of structural reforms, the Riester pension reform and the Hartz IV reform, which provided the context for the first and second case studies. As far as the third case on health care is concerned, indicators of structural shifts in the three policy dimensions were applied to the different pieces of reform legislation as part of the analysis in order to establish their character.
While this part of Section 3 has elaborated on the operationalization of the independent (IL) and dependent variables (structural reform) of this study, the next part will address the usefulness of conducting a pilot study and discuss its results.
3.4.5 Refining the Theoretical Framework Through a Dialogue Between Theory and Evidence: the Pilot Case
3.4.5.1 The Rationale of a Pilot Case Study
Before elaborating on the results of the pilot study, some general comments about their sense and utility are in place. Although more frequently used in large-scale quantitative studies involving surveys, pilot studies can also be fruitful in more qualitatively oriented case-study designs involving no more than just a handful of cases. In his well-known work on the purposes of case studies, Eckstein used the term plausibility probe to refer to what I call a pilot study. According to his reasoning, ‘plausibility probes involve attempts at determining whether potential validity may reasonably be considered great enough to warrant the pains and costs of testing’ (Opielka 2004: 108). In this study, a pilot study was required to evaluate the validity of the initial theoretical framework. Regarding such evaluations, Eckstein argued that ‘at a minimum, a plausibility probe [...] may simply attempt to establish that a theoretical construct is worth considering at all, i.e. that
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an apparent empirical instance of it can be found’ (Esping-Andersen 1990: 109 ; Bonoli and Palier 2000b).105 Similarly, the authors of a much-acclaimed work on social science methodology state that
Pilot projects are often very useful, especially in research where data must be gathered by interviewing or other particularly costly means. Preliminary data gathering may lead us to alter the research questions or modify the theory. The new data can be gathered to test the new theory, and the problem of using the same data to generate and test a theory can be avoided (Palier 2002: 22-23).
In addition to these more general goals of pilot studies, the one carried out in this project had three specific goals, being of a practical, theoretical, and methodological nature:
• improving upon the initial operationalization of IL, starting from some initial dimensions;
• getting familiar with relevant sources; this applies mostly to documents but also to knowledgeable interviewees;
• designing and presenting methods of analysis that combine the informational value of both documents and interview data
From these goals, the first one (improving the initial operationalization of the IL concept) was the most important one theoretically-speaking, as the insights gained by focusing on the German 2001 pension reform were to be used to refine its dimensions. The ultimate purpose was, eventually, to come up with a hypothesis that is more useful to work with than the initial one (not to be confused with exploring the validity of the hypothesis). This process is in line with a conception of social research where data and/or evidence on the one hand, and analytic frames, derived from ideas and theory on the other, inform each other (see Chapter 3 in Siegel 2002). More specifically, it was believed that the IL concept could gain if confronted with empirical data about a recent reform process. By comparing the theoretically-derived dimensions of ideational leadership with the actions of the key politician in the case, Minister Riester, the analytic frame was to be refined and attuned in line with the complexity of real-world data and the analyst’s understanding of IL, which developed in the process of data collection and analysis. At any rate, the goal was to come up with a workable theoretical framework that could be readily used in the second stage of the research design.
3.4.5.2 Results of the Pilot Study and Amendments to the IL Framework
This summary focuses on the implications of the pilot study’s findings with relevance to the theoretical framework. Next to the empirical research question on the form and the effects of IL, the question was what the analysis of the case would suggest in terms of the plausibility of the operationalized theoretical framework and the methodology used. The exercise in textual analysis showed that it was possible to detect and record pre-defined instances of text reflecting dimensions of the rather abstract concept of IL. The method proved suitable to detect general patterns of justification in documents such as opinion articles, speeches and interviews. Regarding the usefulness of the analytical categories defined earlier, the results suggest that the indicators of the
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Conversely, a plausibility probe may reveal that empirical instances or a theoretical concept cannot be found and thus needs to be refuted. To allow for this possibility, I also formulated negative instances of IL aspects in my operationalization of IL.
Research Design and Methodology
first and second aspects of IL (giving arguments that de-legitimize the status-quo and legitimize reform proposals) may be used in the second stage of the research design with minor changes.106 Judging the plausibility of the third aspect (framing reform resistance as problematic) is somewhat more difficult since statements about the behaviour of reform opponents occurred much less frequently than statements concerning the first two aspects. Moreover, they occurred in the context of direct confrontation of reformists with the parliamentary opposition, with the former denouncing the latter for playing tactical games so as to obstruct reform adoption. This casts doubt on the need for the distinction to be made in the operationalization of the third aspect (between societal welfare in general and the interests of certain societal groups). The reasons for this may lie