Congratulations!

Recently Daria Salnikova (LCSR research assistant) took the 3rd place in a research competition among students of Higher School of Economics.

Recently Daria Salnikova (LCSR research assistant) took the 3rd place in a research competition among students of Higher School of Economics. Her paper "Determinants of social spending in the European Union-member countries: «governance matters» VS «politics matter»" was acknowledged in the nomination “The best work of mater students and graduates of 2014 in the field of political science”.

In her paper Daria Salnikova contributes to testing the alternative approaches to explaining variation in the generosity of the welfare state across countries. To test the hypothesis positing that in comparison with the alignment of political forces institutions have a stronger effect on social spending, we use panel data from the European Union - member countries over the period 1990 - 2011. Regression analysis, including mixed-effects modeling, evidences that there is a positive relationship between institutional and welfare performance. However, division of the dataset into subsamples shows that the effect of quality of government on welfare generosity varies across countries: the strong positive effect holds only for postcommunist countries. At the same time the effect produced by the alignment of political forces on social spending turns out to be insignificant, and this result remains robust to subsampling, changes in specifications and methods.