ways in which the New Zealand, British and Australian Labour parties shifted away from ‘traditional’ social democratic paths. The degree to which each party adopted neoliberal settings varied a good… Click to show full abstract
ways in which the New Zealand, British and Australian Labour parties shifted away from ‘traditional’ social democratic paths. The degree to which each party adopted neoliberal settings varied a good deal, and in Schulman’s account Australian Labor was the least ‘neoliberal’ in character, compared with the other two cases, mostly due to a much stronger union approach (p. 96). The book is pitched at scholars and the general reader interested in the dilemmas facing the centre-left. It is clear, well-written and the case chapters would be good supplemental reading material for relevant politics topics. More broadly, the book is another important contribution to the debates about the state of the centre-left. While Schulman makes a persuasive case, the analysis could have been deepened. Crucially, it is not wholly clear from this book if the trade unions operate as an independent or dependent variable to explain the neoliberal embrace. It could well be that the relative weakness of the union movement is just another indicator of the wider transformation, rather than a driving explanatory factor. For a comparative book, there was scope to compare the cases more closely with available empirical data, something the author has not done. For example, he could have tracked employment and related economic inequality trends across all three cases simultaneously. There is a tension too between claiming the ‘end of labourism’, and then noting that the neoliberal embrace has been only a partial phenomenon (p. 108).
               
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