Changing Welfare States - Böcker

In recent decades, and particularly since the financial crisis, continental Europe has seen an increasing gap between those workers who have well-protected, good-paying jobs with strong benefits and those who work lower-quality, nonstandard jobs, or who have no regular work at all. This situation would seem to call for increased spending on the social safety net, yet governments throughout the region have instead been turning to austerity. In the face of that reality, the options for helping disadvantaged workers are to extend coverage through re-allocating the benefits given to higher-level workers, maintain the benefits of the well-off as the number of outsiders continues to grow, or simply ignore the problem. This book asks why different nations have taken different tacks in handling-or not handling-this problem.

From the 1980s on, a privatization of labor market-related risks has occurred in the OECD. Governments have cut the generosity of social programs and tightened eligibility rules, particularly for the unemployed. Government Ideology, Economic Pressure, and Risk Privatization: How Economic Worldviews Shape Social Policy Choices in Times of Crisis analyses these curtailments for eighteen countries over the course of four decades and provides an encompassing comparative assessment of the interactive impact of government ideology and economic pressure. It demonstrates that the economic worldviews of governments are the most important factor in explaining why cuts are implemented or not. While ideas of non-intervention in the market underlie cuts in generosity, ideas of equality and fairness are at the heart of stricter eligibility criteria. This book also shows that the impact of the economic pressures often held responsible for the marginalization of politics and government ideology is in fact conditional on the specific ideological configuration.

Motivated by ongoing debates over welfare state retrenchment and growing economic insecurity, this book compares the situation of older workers in Germany and the United States over the past three decades. Both nations are seeing a rise in insecurity for older workers, but the differences in support programs, pensions, and retirement options have led to differing outcomes for workers faced with early retirement or job loss.

The integration of second-generation immigrants has proved to be a major challenge for Europe in recent years. Though these people are born in their host nations, they often experience worse social and economic outcomes than other citizens. This volume focuses on one particular, important challenge: the less successful educational outcomes of second-generation migrants. Looking at data from seventeen European nations, Camilla Borgna shows that migrant penalties in educational achievement exist in each one-but that, unexpectedly, the penalties tend to be greater in countries in which socio-economic inequalities in education are generally more modest, a finding that should prompt reconsideration of a number of policy approaches.

Losing a job has always been understood as one of the most important causes of downward social mobility in modern societies. And it's only gotten worse in recent years, as the weakening position of workers has made re-entering the labour market even tougher. The Impact of Losing Your Job builds on findings from life course sociology to show clearly just what effects job loss has on income, family life, and future prospects. Key to Ehlert's analysis is a comparative look at the United States and Germany that enables him to show how different approaches to welfare state policies can ameliorate the effects of job loss-but can at the same time make labour insecurity more common.

A critical scrutiny of the ‘miracle economies’ of the 1990s, analysing the role of the relatively small size of the national economies in question, and of accidental external circumstances which contributed to favourable developments.

Globalization, financial liberalization and neo-liberal economic policy thinking have been seen as contributors to the demise of social partnership in Western Europe. Recent examples of the re-emergence of social pacts have challenged these assumptions. The book offers a theoretical understanding of the challenges that increasing monetary integration posed for existing modes of adjustment in the political economies of EU member states, and explains why many governments have chosen to negotiate with trade unions over economic adjustment.

Advanced welfare states are said to be facing, in the words of Pierre Rosanvallon, a "New Social Question". The idea here, and it is a widely shared one, is that the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial environment has brought with it a whole new set of social risks, constraints and trade-offs which necessitate radical recalibration of social security systems. This book analyses in some depth how economic change has impacted on minimum income protection in advanced welfare states. There is a particular focus on how Bismarckian welfare states have fared over recent decades.

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)

Social Concertation in Times of Austerity investigates the political underpinnings of social concertation in this new context with a focus on the regulation of labour mobility and unemployment protection in Austria and Switzerland.

This book provides a comparative study of the electoral consequences of Third Way welfare state reforms, demonstrating that Third Way reforms went against the social policy preferences of social democracy's core voters and indeed produced an electoral setback for social democrats at the ballots.

The risks in the later stages of careers comparing the welfare states of Germany and the United States since the 1980s.

The Impact of Losing Your Job builds on findings from life course sociology to show clearly just what effects job loss has on income, family life, and future prospects.

This book analyses labour market changes in eighteen countries and shows that the most important factor in explaining whether cuts are made is the economic world view of a particular government rather than actual economic pressures.

This book asks why different nations have taken different tacks in handling-or not handling-the increasing gap between the regularly employed and those who have nonstandard, irregular work or are unemployed.