The Handbook of West European Pension Politics

Ellen M. Immergut is Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Social Sciences at Humboldt University Berlin. She did her graduate work at Harvard University, was appointed as Assistant and Ford Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Visiting Professor at the Instituto Juan March in Madrid, and Professor of Political Theory at the University of Konstanz. She is author of the book Health Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1992), co-editor of a special issue of Governance on crises of governance in coordinated market economies, as well as various articles on the new institutionalism, institutional design and the politics of constitutional reform.Karen M. Anderson is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Nijmegen University. She received her PhD in political science from the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the comparative political economy of the welfare state, particularly the role of unions and social democratic parties in welfare state restructuring processes. Her work has appeared in Comparative Political Studies, Zeitschrift für Sozialreform, Canadian Journal of Sociology, and the Journal of Public Policy. She is currently completing a book about the restructuring of the Swedish welfare state during the 1990s.Isabelle Schulze is a researcher at the Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES) at the University of Mannheim for the project "Governance of Supplementary Pensions in Europe: The Varying Scope for Participatory and Social Rights ". She is writing a dissertation at Humboldt University Berlin on the role of electoral threat in pension politics, and received her MA at the University of Konstanz on agricultural politics in Britain and Germany. She was awarded a dissertation fellowship from the Forschungsnetzwerk Alterssicherung of the Federation of German Pension Insurance Institutes (Verband Deutscher Renten­versicherungs­träger; now Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund).

...represents a unique source of comparable data and a promising step beyond the traditional contributions on the 'stickiness' of pension programmes.

• PART I. SINGLE VETO PLAYER GOVERNMENTS; NO VETO POINTS; PART II. MULTIPLE VETO POINTS; PART III. MANY PARTISAN VETO PLAYERS; PART IV. MODERATE VETO POINTS AND VETO PLAYERS; PART V. CLOSED VETO POINTS, MODERATE VETO PLAYERS, UNUSUAL ELECTORAL SYSTEMS