In this article, we study how political parties located on the right of the political spectrum adapt to changing electoral and political constraints. Drawing on the concept of policy feedback, we turn to the politics of social policy in the province of Quebec to show that the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), a right-wing party, embraced a more centrist strategy than the preferences of its electoral base would suggest. The CAQ has rejected the austerity policies associated with the previous government and has favoured social policy expansion rather than tax cuts or a quicker return to balanced budgets. We then explore the reasons for this move toward the centre. Our evidence suggests that self-reinforcing feedback effects from existing policies shape public opinion and electoral strategies, which contribute to moderating the actions of this right-wing governing party.

While much has been written about the politics of retrenchment, in a number of advanced industrial societies social policy expansion does occur today, which raises issues about how to study it in a post-retrenchment era. The present article explores the new politics of social policy expansion in Canada. Drawing on the work of Paul Pierson, we use an integrated framework that highlights the interaction of five factors: the availability of fiscal resources; the emergence of new social risks; the intensity and nature of partisan competition; the policy preferences of the main political parties; and the role of political institutions, especially federalism. Empirically, the article studies the politics of federal social policy expansion during the Harper (2006–2015) and Justin Trudeau (2015–) years, with a focus on three policy areas: child benefits (Universal Child Care Benefit and Canada Child Benefit), pensions (Old Age Security and Canada/Quebec Pension Plan) and Employment Insurance.

This article compares social assistance incomes, or minimum income protection, for four household types in the 10 Canadian provinces between 1990 and 2017 and relates these incomes to a number of factors, including partisan dominance over time, trade union density, the presence or absence of poverty reduction strategies, provincial social expenditures, overall redistribution efforts, debt service costs and social assistance recipiency rates. In line with findings for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) welfare states, partisan politics does not play a strong role but, as power resources theory predicts, union density and a province's overall redistribution efforts do. Social assistance recipiency rates, which capture the salience of social assistance incomes in a province, also have a significant, positive impact on welfare incomes, confirming the “welfare paradox” identified by Ivar Lødemel. Poverty reduction strategies, however, do not, and they even have a negative influence on welfare incomes.

This article addresses the question of how ideas and interests can be linked in policy analysis. The juxtaposition of the two concepts is criticized from a sociological point of view. Instead, ideas are a substantial element of interest formation. Cognitive and normative worldviews shape the transformation of objective socio-economic positions into subjective, situational action orientations. Interests can be traced back to the interplay between structural positions, situational problems and their idea-based interpretation.

It is then shown how these conceptual arguments can bring forward a prominent debate in welfare state analysis: the role of business in the emergence of the American welfare state in the New Deal. While struggling with the question whether the supportive role of some business leaders in the Social Security Act of 1935 reveals substantial interest changes or strategical adaption, both sides of the debate suffer from an objectivist concept of interest. This one-sided concept of interest comes at the cost of leaving open the question of why business interests changed in the direction of unemployment insurance and not in the direction of other feasible institutional options such as price regulation or public works. These options would also have provided a solution to the problem American employers were facing. Analysis of social reform discourses between 1911 and 1935 shows that the partial reorientation of business people cannot be sufficiently explained without taking into account the growing legitimacy of liberal- corporatist ideas among employers in the 1920s.