Unified Leftist party politics are key to reduce inequality – empirics prove

The prevalence of left-wing governments is thus linked to more inclusive policies only for the Nordic and Continental models. This is reflected in the level of inequality, measured here by the Gini index of household disposable income after taxes and transfers (Figure 7.8).16 Inclusive growth countries are grouped in the left-hand quadrant, characterised by low inequality and a high incidence of left-wing parties in government positions. Overall, the non-inclusive growth countries are on the opposite side, with low incidence of left-wing parties in government and high inequality, with the exception of Ireland. The non-inclusive low-growth countries, on the other hand, show higher levels of inequality with the same overall presence of the left in government. The prevalence over the period 1980–2015 of left-wing parties in government in non-inclusive low-growth models thus seems to contradict the hypothesis that a greater left-wing presence would be associated with greater redistributive measures and higher levels of equality. On the other hand, the downsizing of the influence of the left in the Nordic countries does not seem to have had a proportional influence on expenditure levels and welfare characteristics. Obviously, in order to analyse the different outcomes of similar amounts of presence of left-wing political forces, other variables need to be taken into account. These may concern the state of the economy in terms of available resources that may or may not favour redistributive interventions (see Chapter 2). Here we shall refer in particular to the parties’ margins of action. It can first be assumed that the historical legacies of different development paths influenced more recent changes (Mahoney & Thelen, 2015). As we have seen in the previous section, the strength of the left in government is exercised with different results depending on whether it appeared in the phase of the great post-war development and welfare construction, as for the Nordic and continental countries, or rather in the subsequent phase, more difficult overall due to economic growth and the problems of reorganising welfare with respect to its growing costs. If we situate the transition between the 1970s and the 1980s as the beginning of the transition to post-Fordism, in the model of inclusive egalitarian growth the left-wing parties have a stronger prominence in configuring the original traits of the development paths and the related social protection approaches matured, precisely, above all in the years of the so-called “Glorious Thirty Years”. We can therefore glimpse a variable that we could consider “pathdependency” in welfare systems, which conditions the possibilities of manoeuvre of left and centre-left parties with the same presence in government, and that influences the development paths seen in recent decades, the focus of our research. The original institutional framework can be conditioned in different forms. Among these, particular attention will be given in the following part of our historical-comparative study to the interests that are constituted in relation to certain choices in the original construction of welfare, and therefore to the costs that may involve decisions involving more or less radical change in relation to the resulting social stratification. A final key to interpretation concerns the areas of competition between parties and coalition spaces within the left, associated with the level of fragmentation of consensus. We have therefore tried to measure the degree of division of the left by calculating the weight of the main parties of the “reformist” left (excluding communists and post-communists) in relation to the overall consensus obtained by left-wing parties (electoral strength), in each country and for all electoral rounds from 1960 to 2015, in order to maintain uniformity in the analysis carried out so far.17 The data point to a general downward trend in the electoral strength of the left as a whole. This trend would be even more pronounced if we had used more recent, post-2015 data. But here we are interested in trying to measure the degree of division as a long-term structural phenomenon. As can be seen from Figure 7.9, the non-inclusive growth countries show lower values of consensus fragmentation in both periods considered, a result that can be related to the effects of the majoritarian electoral system. For the countries with inclusive egalitarian growth, in the period 1960–1979, while the average support obtained by left-wing parties was 47.1%, there was relatively low internal fragmentation, with the main reformist party obtaining almost 80% of the votes. This does not change in the subsequent period, even though there was a significant reduction in the overall support of the left (from 47.1% to 41.3%). In the countries with dualistic inclusive growth, fragmentation appears even lower and decreases between the two periods (between 1980 and 2015 the main party obtained on average almost 90% of the votes), but one must also consider the overall lower electoral strength of the left and the decrease in the two periods considered. In contrast, the non-inclusive low-growth countries have the highest fragmentation of all the other models. The main reformist party reached on average about 60% of the votes on the left (40.3%) in the constitutive phase of welfare (1960–1979). In the subsequent period, the average figure rose to around 70%, in the context of a 5 percentage point growth in the leftwing vote. The division of left-wing forces in the various phases is therefore an element to be considered carefully when assessing the impact of the left-wing’s strength on the welfare model. Particular attention should be given to this factor, especially in relation to the constitutive phase of welfare systems which, as we have seen, also exerted an influence that in terms of path-dependency should not be disregarded. A more united and stronger left certainly contributed, together with the presence of minor parties – first agrarian and then liberal – to building the “red-green” coalition that laid the foundations for the extended and universalistic welfare, financed by general taxation, which characterises the Nordic countries. It was on this basis that the most egalitarian response to the challenges of post-Fordism evolved.