high employment levels, rather than price stability.^33 In doing so,
these parties were consistent with their basic ideological positions
regarding equality. They also appealed to their core constituencies,
unemployment being more threatening to income earners, more likely
to be on the left, and inflation more disturbing for asset owners,
usually closer to the political right.
In the long run, these partisan choices made a difference. Douglas
A. Hibbs, who has studied the question extensively, noted that in
countries where social-democratic parties governed most of the time
between 1945 and 1969, average unemployment rates remained low
and average inflation rates high, whereas a dominance of the right
over the same period engendered higher unemployment and lower
inflation rates.^34 In the end, however, the “structural unemployment”
that increasingly characterized the labor market in countries where
the left was weak did not even assure price stability. By the beginning
of the 1980s, the nations with the worst employment records had also
become the most inflation-prone.^35 This was the case because con-
servative governments were unable to build working compromises
with organized labor.
By conviction and often through explicit alliances, parties of the left
were favorable to trade unions, which represented workers and sought
a more egalitarian distribution of income. They also supported col-
lective bargaining, understood as a key social mechanism in a mixed
economy. Parties of the right, on the contrary, remained suspicious of
trade unions and saw collective bargaining as an impediment to the
free functioning of the labor market, and as a source of unwarranted
privileges and rents. Over time, these ideological preferences found
their way into labor laws and shaped the regulation of industrial
relations. In countries where the left dominated, a legislative and
political framework conducive to unionization was put in place, and
union membership rose; where the right was stronger, laws offered
fewer opportunities, and in fact often raised obstacles, and union
membership declined. In social-democratic Sweden, for instance,
78 percent of the workforce was unionized in 1973, and 94 percent in
(^33) Tufte,Political Control of the Economy, p. 71.
(^34) Douglas A. Hibbs, Jr.,The Political Economy of Industrial Democracies,
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 299–301.
(^35) David R. Cameron, “The Politics and Economics of the Business Cycle,” in
Ferguson and Rogers (eds.),The Political Economy, pp. 237–62.
116 Left and Right in Global Politics