2023-2024

Industrial relations in Israel have been characterized by a process of economic professionalization - an enhanced involvement of professional economists in collective bargaining. What are the drivers of this process and what are its consequences? We argue that previous stages of liberalization of industrial relations contribute to such economic professionalization. Specifically, processes of decentralization and marketization have increased the complexity of industrial relations and weakened the power of unions, thereby encouraging trade unions to rely on economists’ expertise and advice. We further contend that economists not only assist unions in achieving their traditional goals but also seek to affect how unions define their preferences and the ways to achieve them. Specifically, professional economists tend to promote the depoliticization of industrial relations and market-friendly adaptations of collective agreements. We corroborate these arguments through an in-depth analysis of the case study of Israel, based on 25 semi-structured interviews with union leaders and economists involved in industrial relations.

Even the most egalitarian education systems employ high stakes tests to regulate the transition from universal secondary education to selective academic programs that open doors to skilled, well-paid professions. This gives parents a strong incentive to invest substantial resources in improving their children’s’ achievement on these tests, perpetuating dynastic socioeconomic advantage through “test-score transmission”. Using longitudinal administrative data to follow Israeli students in Hebrew-language schools from eighth grade to age 29, we provide evidence that despite Israeli schools being publicly financed and tuition-free, test-score transmission is very much prevalent. Second-generation (SG) students with more educated and affluent parents do much better on the screening tests that regulate access to the most selective tertiary academic programs than first-generation (FG) students with similar eighth-grade standardized test scores. Yet this advantage does not manifest itself in earnings differentials at age 29, controlling for eighth grade achievement, which are statistically insignificant or even reversed. Moreover, within the most selective programs, FG students exhibit higher wages compared to SG students, despite entering them with lower scores in screening tests.

Populism’s recent ascent to power in many countries has fueled the discussion of anti-populist responses. This paper investigates anti-populism’s implications for economic policy and policymaking. Anti-populism has been shown to manifest alongside and through both neoliberalism and technocracy; this paper investigates how anti-populism shapes the manifestation of neoliberalism and technocracy, and how they can be in turn employed to strengthen anti-populist logic. I consider the case of Israel’s anti-populist coalition (2021–2022), which replaced the populist former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After reviewing the existing literature on anti-populism, I discuss behavior modification taxation’s role in and importance for anti-populist policy agendas. I analyze the discourse surrounding the implementation of behavior modification taxation and its implications in Israel, showing that anti-populists can use such policies to not only hurt populist voters but also replace “the people” in the political imagination with rational, incentive-driven individuals.

Conditionality was one of the central concerns of the development literature of the 1990s. With the massive expansion of targeted public support to private firms since the Great Financial Crisis, we argue that the question of conditionality should, once again, become central to debates on industrial policy. This article contributes to this conversation by developing a systematic political economy of conditionality. Based on a review of a large number of industrial policies across coun- tries, industries, and historical periods, it argues that the presence of conditionality is not primar- ily a technical matter of policy choice, but rather shaped by political factors. The article maps coalitional, institutional, ideational, and global contextual factors that facilitate conditionality and presents empirical illustrations from a variety of contexts. To demonstrate the conceptual leverage of the analytical scheme, the article offers two vignette studies of recent industrial pol- icy initiatives in the E.U. and the U.S. Linking to larger debates on global regime change and the post-neoliberal order, the article suggests that industrial policy conditionality provides an essen- tial theoretical vantage point for assessing how and where the recent revival of state activism represents a substantive break with the neoliberal order.

How households accumulate savings shapes both social inequalities and the availability of capital for investment in private and public enterprises. Existing literature predominantly views short- and long-term savings as choices made at the individual level. It further assumes that governmental policies aimed at encouraging savings and investments represent a form of welfare state retrenchment. These analyses miss the wide array of ways in which different states form, encourage and manage mass private savings. How savings are collected, protected, and invested carries with it questions of distribution of resources and power between saving individuals, financial institutions, and the state.

I look at how states regulate mass savings – which I define as private individual savings by a large part of the population that are institutionalized and regulated. I wish to explain: how and why do states regulate mass savings, and what explains why these strategies vary across time and place? To this end, I conduct a comparative examination of mass savings regulation across three historical periods where countries faced similar crossroads and responded to them with various choices: (1) debates over the regulation and provision of savings services during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, following the emergence of collective, bottom-up mass savings institutions; (2) state extraction of savings during the world wars and what happened with these programs in the war’s aftermath; (3) covert extraction and provision of savings through pension funds and child development accounts from the 1980s onwards, following the global financial liberalization. Taken together, the project seeks to highlight mass savings as a politically contingent phenomenon, shaped by the power relations between different actors in society, embedded within a historical institutional context.

This paper delves into the impact of entitlement and non-entitlement policy designs on the decision-making processes of front-line workers regarding access to public provisions and client take up. Building on Weaver’s notion of entitlement and insights from public finance, we propose a novel conceptualization. Entitlements dynamically adjust resources based on eligible beneficiaries, while non-entitlements rely on cupped resources, constraining access. Based on a qualitative study of social workers responsible for managing both types of programs, we identified three critical disparities created by these distinctive policy designs: Automatic vs. discretionary adjustment of supply and demand; non-competitive vs. competitive dynamics; and clarity and certainty vs. ambiguity and uncertainty. Entitlement programs adjust supply, reduce competition and provide clear frameworks. In contrast, non-entitlements task front-line workers with managing limited supply, foster competition between them in prioritizing service-users, and create ambiguous frameworks, resulting in high uncertainty regarding program access and potential assistance. We discuss implications for the allocation of decision-making authority among policymakers, implementation agencies and frontline workers, and their consequences for disparities in the scope and quality of service.

What enhances the institutional power of business corporations? Busemeyer and Thelen’s (2020) argue that businesses accumulate institutional power when the state decides to withdraw from the provision of public services (or to remain absent from certain areas in the provision of public services), thus making way for corporations to accumulate policy capacity, know-how, and market share through their provision. Over time, the loss of state capacity to provide these services produces dependency on corporations and creates the conditions for a credible “exit threat” on the corporations’ end. This paper contributes to this argument by suggesting that business institutional power is also affected by the specific architecture of the “acquisition regime” - the set of formal (and informal) rules that govern how the state purchases social welfare services (Pue, 2021), and the extent to which acquisition is marketized. Process tracing the change in the purchasing regime of social services in Israel between 2010 and 2023, through interviews, purchasing data, policy and reform document analysis, coverage of journalistic work and descriptive statistics we demonstrate that a seemingly benign change in one of the regime’s elements - enforcing the formal requirement to issue and manage competitive tenders as a providers’ selection mechanism, produced policy feedback effects that culminated in the accumulation of institutional power among large business corporations. Particularly, we demonstrate micro-level feedback dynamics, in which corporations who entered the provision of social services, exerted their agency and used their resources, expertise and experience - all aligned with a marketized approach to purchasing services - in a manner which further reshaped the formal and informal rules that govern the competitive tendering process. These feedback processes empowered business corporations, disempowered the prevailing actors that were previously entrenched in the provision of these services (mostly Non-For-Profits and small, family-owned businesses), and further enhanced the professionalization and competitive behavior around the tendering process – including on the side of the state.