Determinants of active labor market policy: A spatial and multilevel analysis of ALMP expenditures in 29 OECD countries between 1985 and 2010

i Acknowledgements ii Table of contents iii List of tables v List of figures vi 1.0 Introduction 1 2.0 Active labor market policies 6 3.0 Theory and hypotheses 8 3.1 Policy diffusion and Galton’s problem 8 Mechanisms of policy diffusion 10 Defining the structure of dependence 15 3.2 Domestic explanations for ALMP efforts 16 Left-wing government 17 Corporatism 17 Social democratic welfare regime 19 3.3 International explanations for ALMP efforts 19 Political integration: The European Union 20 Economic globalization 20 3.4 Control variables 23 3.5 Summary 25 4.0 Methodology 26 4.1 Spatial analysis 26 Weight matrices 28 Moran’s I 28 Policy variable: International ALMP efforts 29 4.2 Panel data as multilevel: Years nested within countries 29 Building the multilevel model 31 Goodness-of-fit and model comparison 32 Modeling interactive hypotheses 33 4.3 Summary 34