According to the ‘new politics of the welfare state’, political parties are not a major factor in the era of welfare state retrenchment characterised by economic crisis and politics of blame avoidance. If this was actually true, it would lend substantial support to Margaret Thatcher's dictum that ‘there is no alternative’. This book challenges the infamous TINA slogan, displayed on its cover, by re-examining the impact of government partisanship on welfare state retrenchment. The author does not question the fiscal and economic pressures which governments are facing since the end of the golden age, but argues that parties perceive those pressures through the lens of their ideology, acting accordingly when holding office.

The book is structured in a comprehensible way. After outlining the general argument in chapter 1, the subsequent chapter provides comprehensive evidence that retrenchment in unemployment insurance is real, with the data showing substantial variation among OECD countries. Chapter 3 offers an excellent state of the art of the research on partisanship and welfare retrenchment, identifying the insufficient conceptualisation of government ideology as the main research problem. This ‘independent variable problem’ is addressed in chapter 4 by developing the cognitive framing argument at the heart of the book. Here, Horn discusses the ideological origins of the left-right divide and then presents different measures to capture those ideological differences by using data from the Manifesto Project. Based on those measures, chapter 5 demonstrates that there is a slight shift to the right in the retrenchment era but that ideological differences between parties prevail. In chapter 6, the main empirical analysis is presented, combining several statistical tests on the impact of government ideology on welfare cuts with illustrative case studies on Germany (under Kohl), the United Kingdom (Thatcher) and Sweden (Carlsson). The final chapter discusses the results’ implications for future research, closing on a plea to take political actors’ beliefs seriously.

Based on the empirical analysis, the author arrives at a number of notable findings. First, government ideology still matters but not in terms of all-encompassing categories of left and right but in terms of more welfare-specific categories. Thus, parties expressing a strong market ideology in their manifestos are more likely to curtail the generosity of unemployment insurance than more market-sceptic parties. Second, concerning the conditionality of unemployment benefits, i.e. eligibility criteria for benefit receipt, parties also matter but in a counterintuitive way. Thus, parties with a strong welfare ideology are more restrictive when it comes to the conditions of benefit receipt than parties more opposed to the welfare state. A potential explanation for this unexpected result is, as Horn argues, that welfare-friendly parties face a trade-off between benefit generosity and conditionality, thus opting for stricter conditionality to preserve the legitimacy of generous welfare programmes. Finally, the framing argument is supported by the finding that ‘economic crises translate into retrenchment only in the absence of welfare ideology and the presence of pronounced market ideology’ among the governing parties (pp. 241).

Apart from these empirical results, the book makes two major contributions to the field. The first contribution concerns the book's case for the use of time-variant measures of party ideology instead of the commonly used time-invariant party labels. This not only allows for capturing parties’ ideological shifts over time but, through laying bare parties’ programmatic intentions, provides us with the means of separating what parties want from what they (can) actually do. The second and more general contribution concerns the author's emphasis on ideational factors. Contemporary research on the politics of the welfare state, and this is especially true for quantitative research, has a materialistic bias in the sense that it emphasises economic constraints as well as socio-economic changes affecting voters’ preferences and thus party competition. The book questions this perspective, which in important respects resembles TINA, by highlighting the influence of political actor's worldviews and demonstrating that ideas matter, even in times of crisis.

This, however, also leads to the book's main limitation, which is illustrated by the diverging results on benefit generosity and conditionality outlined above. Although the author offers a potential explanation for the surprising results on conditionality, he does not provide the reader with supporting evidence. Surely, the short case studies could have been used to provide this evidence but I point this out to make a more general point. While the book deserves unreserved credit for taking party ideology seriously and testing an ideational argument in a quantitative framework, the findings on conditionality illustrate that reducing complex belief systems to mere numbers comes at a price. To give a more general example, it is disputable that ideological transformations, such as the one from traditional social democracy to ‘third way’ social democracy, can be captured by counting and adding up manifesto sentences on items such as ‘social justice’, ‘welfare state expansion’ and ‘free enterprise’. In other words, in order to understand what is really going on at the ideological level in times of TINA, additional comprehensive case studies are indispensible.

Overall, the book has to be hailed for presenting a thorough analysis full of theoretical and methodological details in a vivid way, which altogether makes for a good read. The book is not only an essential contribution to the debate on partisanship and welfare state retrenchment but provides fresh impulses for future research, thus being a must-read for researchers interested in the partisan politics of the welfare state.