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It's one of the of long standing questions in political theory: Do parties matter? What effects, if any, do politics have on society? The authors of this careful and articulate book approach these questions by looking at one social group -- public sector employees -- and examine the hypothesis that parties and governments of the left are more generous toward these employees than those of the right. This far-reaching study encompasses the central governments of four countries -- Canada, United States, Britain, and France -- from the 1950s to the end of the 1980s. Public sector employees, being both part of society and part of government, offer an excellent case study to test the autonomy of politics from society. After rigorous research, Blais, Blake, and Dion confirm that in the great majority of cases, the left is indeed more generous than the right, with some unusual and provocative exceptions. There is an alliance, they affirm, albeit a loose one, between public sector employees and the left, an alliance that is consistent over time in Europe and in North America. Governments, Parties, and Public Sector Employees also shows that when the left has to choose between more employment and higher wages for public employees, it tends to choose the former, suggesting that ideology is more important than supporters' pressures in inducing party divergence.

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CHOICE Review

This book explores the issue of whether parties and governments of the left tend to treat public sector employees more generously than parties and governments of the right, and finds that they do. The Canadian authors (two political scientists from the universities of Montreal and British Columbia plus the Minister for Intergovernmental Affairs) examine a wide range of data--policies, legislative votes, size of public sector, party positions--for the period 1950 to 1990 from Britain, Canada, France, and the US. Specific issues examined systematically for each nation include the magnitude of public employment; public employee wages; bargaining rights, including the right to strike; and political rights, especially the right to engage in political activity. The book is well documented and has an extensive bibliography. It should be of interest to those in public administration as well as comparative politics. Upper-division undergraduates and graduate students. A. T. Johnson University of Maryland Baltimore County

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Andre Blais (Author)
Andre Blais is professor of political science and fellow with the Centre de recherche et developpement en economique at the Universite de Montreal. He has published twelve books and more than one hundred articles in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies , and Public Choice . He was a member of the editorial board of the International Encyclopedia of Elections, and he is the principal co-investigator of the Canadian Election Study.

Stephane Dion (Author)
Stéphane Dion has been a member of the Canadian Parliament since 1996; he served as cabinet minister for the environment from 2004 to 2006 and as leader of the Liberal Party from 2006 until December 2008.