To What Extent Did the Financial Crisis Intensify the Pressure to Reform the Welfare State
By Barbara Vis, Kees van Kersbergen, T. Hylands. 2011
176 citations recorded by the source corpus.
If ever there was momentum to roll back the welfare state, it is the (aftermath) of the financial crisis of 2008-09. All theoretical perspectives within comparative welfare state research predict radical reform in this circumstance, but does it also happen? Our data indicate that - at least so far - it does not. Focusing on a selection of advanced welfare states (the UK, the USA, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden), we find that these countries face similar problems and that their initial response to these problems is also similar. The latter is surprising because, theoretically, we would expect varying responses across welfare state regime types. Rather than retrenchment, we observe a first phase of emergency capital injections in the banking sector and a second of Keynesian demand management and labour market protection, including the (temporary) expansion of social programmes. Continuing public support for the welfare state was a main precondition for this lack of immediate radical retrenchment. However, the contours of a third phase have become apparent now that budgetary constraints are forcing political actors to make tough choices and introduce austerity policies. As a result, the question of who pays what, when, and how will likely give rise to increasingly sharp distributional conflicts. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Subfields: Finance, Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/25e7811c172fe4c0b93b5e30987531683cccb493
How researchers see this paper
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In Finance
- Kees van Kersbergen
- B. Nolan
- A. Brandolini
- S. Jenkins
- Barbara Vis
- A. Hemerijck
- G. Bonoli
- Joel Stiebale
In Political Science and International Relations
- A. Hemerijck
- B. Nolan
- Kees van Kersbergen
- Barbara Vis
- A. Brandolini
- S. Jenkins
- Marius R. Busemeyer
- Julian L. Garritzmann
Citations in the corpus
- The Great Recession and the Distribution of Household Income (2013, background): “(eds) (2010). Income and Living Conditions in Europe. Luxembourg: Eurostat. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-3110-555/EN/KS-31-10-555-EN.PDF (accessed 16 July 2011). Atkinson, A. B. and Micklewright, J. (1983). ‘On the reliability of income data in the Family Expenditure Survey’.”
- The Great Recession and Welfare State Reform: Is Retrenchment Really the Only Game Left in Town? (2014, background): “Tables A1 through A4 in the Appendix summarize all reform measures we identified per country; the specific measures are described and discussed in more detail per country in Vis et al. (2012).”
- Two Decades of Change in Europe: The Emergence of the Social Investment State (2012, background): “…value of pension assets) or to return to the strict macroeconomic framework that stresses retrenchment policies necessary to balance the public budgets that before the outbreak of the financial crisis were already under strain (Starke, 2008; Hemerijck et al., 2009; Vis and van Kersbergen, 2011).”