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2018 | Supplement | Chapter

2.  Barriers to Reform

Author : Nils Karlson

Published in: Statecraft and Liberal Reform in Advanced Democracies

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The chapter explains why welfare-enhancing institutional change is a difficult task in advanced democracies due to a strong bias in favor of the status quo, which conserves undesirable, inefficient social states and creates barriers to reform, some of which are especially severe in modern welfare states.
 This status quo bias has rational, cognitive, and social reasons that can be summarized into:
  • Special interests and public goods traps
  • Negativity biases and ideational traps
  • Public opinion and preference falsification
 Hence, both existing institutions and media logic work against reforms even though the status quo is highly inefficient and undesirable from most perspectives.

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Footnotes
1
Formally this can strictly be studied as an n-person, multilateral Prisoners’ Dilemma game (Schelling 1979; Taylor 1987). See Karlson (1993, pp. 54, 159–169).
 
2
Compare Kuhn’s (1962) famous analysis of “paradigmatic shifts” in scientific revolutions.
 
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Metadata
Title
Barriers to Reformbarriers to reform reform reform barriers to reform
Author
Nils Karlson
Copyright Year
2018
Book
Statecraft and Liberal Reform in Advanced Democracies

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-64232-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-64233-8

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64233-8_2