The Politics of Full Employment in Western Democracies

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Abstract
While the majority of the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have been plagued by mass unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s, rates of unemployment have remained low in Austria, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. The basic question addressed in this article is the extent to which structural-economic and political variables account for the full-employment record of these nations. It will be argued that these countries, due to a variety of political processes, institutions, strategies, and policies, have managed to maintain too much employment, relative to the structural-economic circumstances that have prevailed in their national economies.