Welfare restructuring without partisan cooperation

This is in short the rationale for one of the key arguments made in the literature on the reform of welfare states: since welfare retrenchment and restructuring is mostly about avoiding blame, governments seek to adopt unpopular social cutbacks and structural reforms with the formal consent of the opposition parties, and would not dare to legislate such changes with only the majority of their own [...] The Re-emergence of Party Collusion in German Pension Politics, 1999-2002 The key challenge in the investigation of party collusion is not the study of the phenomenon itself, but the analysis of its emergence. [...] In 2002, the option to refinance the pension system was thus no longer on the voters’ menu of choices, and the two major parties were in agreement that party competition would remain restricted to issues related to the management of the transition to the new pension system. [...] After the SPD came into office in 1998, it immediately halted the implementation of the benefit cuts, that in the previous year the CDU/CSU had enacted, by introducing the so-called “demographic factor” in the pension indexation formula. [...] Despite of the failure to renew a formal cooperation on pensions, which in the German political discourse is known as the “pension consensus”, both the closed-door meetings between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats and these parties’ “coordinative discourse” (Schmidt 2002) led to an informal agreement on the following three issues: the goal of restructuring the pension system, the s