Sebastian Hartmann aims at answering the question whether socioeconomic policies implemented by
governments are generally rather similar or whether their content actually varies with the
ideological background of governments. In addition he wants to find out whether government
characteristics such as coalition or minority situations impact the degree of partisan
policy-making. The author employs a new dataset of social and economic policies collected for
several Western European countries. By conducting a wide range of empirical analyses and by
using an innovative approach for analysing the policy output he shows that ideology indeed
matters. However the degree of its influence is contingent upon structural characteristics of
governments.
