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This is the first in-depth comparison of the UK and Germany as two large, but highly distinct, European welfare states. This analysis provides a systematic comparison of policy change across each country in three core areas: unemployment support, pensions, and family policy.
The new welfare settlement in Europe involves a re-direction of policy in the context of a unified market and currency system and of more stringent economic competition. Realignment of the policy assumptions and goals of the key actors is central to this process. This book reviews the main policy paradigms and analyzes the processes whereby they have changed in the most salient policy areas, and is based on recent interviews with more than two hundred and fifty senior policy actors in seven West European countries.
Welfare state reform has been a focus of domestic policy making in many European countries in recent years. Representing almost a third of the EU population and two distinctive models of European welfare states, this book compares development in British and German social policy over the past 25 years. During this time four periods of conservative governments were followed by centre-left administrations in both countries. Moreover, the respective economic and social positions of the two countries have been reversed. Adverse socio-economic developments have contributed to the waning of the erstwhile appeal of Germany as a role model of welfare capitalism. By contrast, the UK is seen by some as being on its way to gaining such a position. These trends provide an analytically intriguing background for a systematic contextualized comparison of reform processes in the two welfare states. Concentrating on three core domains of social policy, the book argues that unemployment support and public pension programmes have been subjected to retrenchment, as well as to restructuring. By contrast, family policies have been extended in both countries. However, patterns of retrenchment and restructuring differ across countries and programmes. In order to explain similarities and variations, the book emphasizes the relevance of three sets of factors: shifts in party policy preferences and power relations, three institutional variables, and contingent factors impinging on policy direction and profiles. Within pension policy, the relevance of different institutional characteristics and the respective balance between private and public forms of retirement suggest that the concept of 'path dependence' is particularly instructive. By contrast, differences in programme structures and their role within national political economies prove to be most relevant for the understanding of changes in unemployment support policy. Less institutionally embedded and expanding, the trajectories of family policies have to be seen in the context of dynamic party policy preferences.
Changing Welfare States is is a major new examination of the wave of social reform that has swept across Europe over the past two decades. In a comparative fashion, it analyses reform trajectories and political destinations in an era of rapid socioeconomic restructuring, including the critical impact of the global financial crisis on welfare state futures. The book argues that the overall scope of social reform across the member states of the European Union varies widely. In some cases welfare state change has been accompanied by deep social conflicts, while in other instances unpopular social reforms received broad consent from opposition parties, trade unions and employer organizations. The analysis reveals trajectories of welfare reform in many countries that are more proactive and reconstructive than is often argued in academic research and the media. Alongside retrenchments, there have been deliberate attempts - often given impetus by intensified European (economic) integration - to rebuild social programs and institutions and thereby accommodate welfare policy repertoires to the new economic and social realities of the 21st century. Welfare state change is work in progress, leading to patchwork mixes of old and new policies and institutions, on the lookout, perhaps, for greater coherence. Unsurprisingly, that search process remains incomplete, resulting from the institutionally bounded and contingent adaptation to the challenges of economic globalization, fiscal austerity, family and gender change, adverse demography, and changing political cleavages.
'Crisis'. 'Breakdown'. 'Dismantlement.' Since the 1970's, these have become the catchphrases used to describe the condition of the welfare states in Europe, in academic and media analyses alike. This book provides an alternative, more optimistic interpretation. It aims to increase both theoretical understanding and empirical knowledge of recent welfare reforms in areas including Spain, Denmark, the UK, Germany and the EU as a whole. An essential resource for students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in the welfare state.
In this first analytical monograph on the subject, George Katrougalos and Gabriella Lazaridis examine the social welfare state of the main four Southern European countries, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece. They conduct an overall system analysis of the welfare state in Southern Europe which challenges the prevalent Ferrera model. Additionally, they present a detailed outlook of policies adopted in the fields of employment, migration, health, social security, pensions and gender-family issues.
European welfare states are currently under stress and the 'social contracts' that underpin them are being challenged. First, welfare spending has arguably 'grown to limits' in a number of countries while expanding everywhere in the 1990s in line with higher unemployment. Second, demographic change and the emergence of new patterns of family and working life are transforming the nature of 'needs'. Third, the economic context and the policy autonomy of nation states has been transformed by 'globalization'. This book considers the implications of these challenges for European welfare states at the end of the twentieth century with interdisciplinary contributions from first-rate political scientists, economists and sociologists including Paul Ormerod.
Bruno Palier is CNRS Researcher at Sciences Po Paris. --
In the Trente Glorieuses era of economic prosperity that followed World War II, Italy grew into one of Europe's--and, indeed, the world's--largest economies. While the more tumultuous decades since have resulted in the rise of the Italian welfare state, Italy remains a globally important economic player and important social policy indicator, but as of yet it has received little academic research attention. This is the first English-language book to explore the evolution of the Italian welfare state, with a particular emphasis on how it has changed since the 2008 economic crisis. Drawing on a variety of social policies--including pension, schooling, higher education, healthcare, and taxation policies--this collection both offers a broad overview of the Italian situation, featuring detailed analysis of the connections between particular policies and their outcomes, and a comparative approach that frames the Italian case within a larger European context.
This book focuses on developments in the welfare states of the ten Central and Eastern European EU member states in the transformation process some 20 years after the end of state socialism. It also explores the shifts in gender relationships and inequalities, and tries to depict the interdependencies between these two processes. The contributors to this volume tackle the following main questions: how far are welfare states and gender regimes in these countries comparable with the types found in Western and Southern Europe? To what extend were traditional institutions and practices preserved under the new circumstances resulting from the system change? How have gender relations been affected by EU accession and welfare state change through the transformation process?