Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject Politics - Political systems in general and in comparison, grade: 2,0 (B), Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (Nijmegen School of Management), course: The American Political System, language: English, abstract: The following paper is a result of the course The American Political System"e; givenby Prof. Slomp at the Faculty of Management of the University of Nijmegen, wherethe author studies as an exchange student at the moment. In the introduction of the course the students had to think about the most importantdifferences between the political systems of the United States and the Europeancountries. Among other major points the class came to the result that especially thedifferent ways and extents of providing social security and welfare for their citizenscan be regarded as one of the most important differences between the Americanand European systems. Moreover the different models of welfare state p layed an important role in thediscussions between European and American exchange students in the last monthsand a lot of mutual prejudices dealing with the different kinds of welfare capitalismhad to be cleared up. For this reason the author chose the topic of social securityand welfare in Europe and the States for this assignment. Today systems of social security and welfare are part of every modern democracyin the world and most of the people in the western countries including the US -count on the social services and provisions given by the state. Over the last 120years and especially since World War II social and welfare policy has become oneof the major cores of modern democracies, without most of them the politicalsystems could be regarded as much more instable today. Nevertheless thedifferences between the single systems and their historical, economical and socialbackrounds are still strong, especially between America and Europe. Accordingly to the questions given above, in the following paper the author wants to- give a brief and critical overview of the american system of social security andwelfare (Chapter 2),- describe challenges and perspectives of the american system on the basis oftwo state issues (Chapter 3),- give a short comparison of the general character of the american and europeansystems of social security on the basis of the course literature, the modell ofEsping-Andersen and statistical data (Chapter 4) [...]
