The Politics Of Welfare State Reform In Continental Europe

This book demonstrates that political exchange and coalition building have become the key ingredients for continental European pension reform.

This book challenges existing theories of welfare state change by analyzing pension reforms in France, Germany, and Switzerland between 1970 and 2004. It explains why all three countries were able to adopt far-reaching reforms, adapting their pension regimes to both financial austerity and new social risks. In a radical departure from the neo-institutionalist emphasis on policy stability, the book argues that socio-structural change has led to a multidimensional pension reform agenda. A variety of cross-cutting lines of political conflict, emerging from the transition to a post-industrial economy, allowed governments to engage in strategies of political exchange and coalition-building, fostering broad cross-class coalitions in support of major reform packages. Methodologically, the book proposes a novel strategy to analyze lines of conflict, configurations of political actors, and coalitional dynamics over time. This strategy combines quantitative analyses of actor configurations based on coded policy positions with in-depth case studies.

In The Politics of the New Welfare State the main reforms in work and welfare are summarized and analyzed to provide up-dated evidence of policy change and its main determinants to policymakers, researchers, and stakeholders interested in the field.

Bruno Palier is CNRS Researcher at Sciences Po Paris. --

This book provides an extensive and comparative account of all welfare reforms that occurred during the last three decades in Continental European countries. It reveals unexpected important structural reforms, to be understood as the culmination of a long reform trajectory, analyzed in detail with the tools of comparative historical institutionalism. With these reforms, Bismarckian welfare systems have lost their encompassing capacities, have partially turned to employment-friendliness and weakened the strongest elements of their male breadwinner bias. "This volume is the definitive work on the politics of reform in Bismarckian welfare regimes. It is essential reading for any scholar interested in welfare reform - or indeed, in institutional and policy change more generally." (Kathleen Thelen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ) "The contributors to the volume are all recognized experts on their field and provide strictly comparable analyses in their chapters, making this volume a gold mine for comparative welfare state scholars. Palier's volume is certain to be a benchmark study for the foreseeable future." (John D. Stephens, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) "This volume, representing the best available scholarship in comparative socio-economic research, provides important and highly policy-relevant insights. A must-read." (Fritz Scharpf, Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Societies).

This book focuses on the relationship between European integration, its outputs and national institutional and political settings. It explores the political mechanisms through which the EU plays a role in domestic social policy changes.

The case studies focus on the factors that motivated welfare reform, the political process that led to the adoption of the reforms, the objectives sought by the reforms, and an assessment of the likelihood that the reforms would achieve their objectives. Introductory and concluding essays knit together national trends in welfare reform and summarize results of recent evaluations of various reform proposals.

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.

This new study assesses the welfare state to ask key questions and draw new conclusions about its place in modern society. It shows how the welfare states that we have inherited from the early post-war years had one main objective: to protect the income of the male breadwinner. Today, however, massive social change, in particular the shift from industrial to post-industrial societies and economies, have resulted in new demands being put on welfare states. These demands originate from situations that are typical of the new family and labour market structures that have become widespread in western countries since the 1970s and 1980s, characterised by the clear prevalence of service employment and by the massive entry of women in the labour market. Against this background, this book: * presents a precise and clear definition of 'new social risks'. A concept being increasingly used in welfare state literature. * focuses on the groups that are mostly exposed to new social risks (women, the young, the low-skilled) in order to study their political behaviour. * assesses policymaking processes that can lead to successful adaptation. It covers key areas such as child care, care for elderly people, adapting pensions to atypical career patterns, active labour market policies, and policy making at the EU level. This book will be of great interest for all students and scholars of politics, sociology and the welfare state in particular.

This volume analyses citizenship in relation to recent changes in European welfare states. It examines concrete changes in social rights and citizenship roles, and offers normative investigations of citizenship.