Changing Welfare States

By A. Hemerijck. 2013

634 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Changing Welfare States is is a major new examination of the wave of social reform that has swept across Europe over the past two decades. In a comparative fashion, it analyses reform trajectories and political destinations in an era of rapid socioeconomic restructuring, including the critical impact of the global financial crisis on welfare state futures. The book argues that the overall scope of social reform across the member states of the European Union varies widely. In some cases welfare state change has been accompanied by deep social conflicts, while in other instances unpopular social reforms received broad consent from opposition parties, trade unions and employer organizations. The analysis reveals trajectories of welfare reform in many countries that are more proactive and reconstructive than is often argued in academic research and the media. Alongside retrenchments, there have been deliberate attempts - often given impetus by intensified European (economic) integration - to rebuild social programs and institutions and thereby accommodate welfare policy repertoires to the new economic and social realities of the 21st century. Welfare state change is work in progress, leading to patchwork mixes of old and new policies and institutions, on the lookout, perhaps, for greater coherence. Unsurprisingly, that search process remains incomplete, resulting from the institutionally bounded and contingent adaptation to the challenges of economic globalization, fiscal austerity, family and gender change, adverse demography, and changing political cleavages.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c1c7efd95295cfecac4627b8757a33d593c620c

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In Political Science and International Relations

Citations in the corpus

The decline of the working-class vote, the reconfiguration of the welfare support coalition and consequences for the welfare state (2015, background): “The recent welfare state literature has extensively analysed the emergence of ‘new social policies’ (Bonoli, 2005), ‘social investment policies’ (Hemerijck, 2013; Morel et al., 2012) and the spread of ‘labour market activation’ policies (Bonoli, 2010) on the welfare reform agendas of European welfar”
The Quiet Paradigm Revolution of Social Investment (2015, background): “Subsequent publications all emphasize social investment is not substitute for protection, and that adequate minimum income protection is a critical precondition for an effective social investment strategy (Morel, Palier, and Palme 2012; Hemerijck 2013; De Deken 2014; Vandenbroucke and Bart Vanhercke”
Welfare states and environmental states: a comparative analysis (2013, result): “This was also the time when ideas of ‘productive welfare states’ and ‘social investment’ gained ground, led by the example of the Nordic countries, in particular Sweden (Hemerijck 2012).”
The Two Facets of Social Policy Preferences (2014, result): “Our results help reconcile some hitherto contradictory results in the literature and provide a parsimonious framework for studying the mixed patterns of welfare resilience and retrenchment of recent decades (Hemerijck 2012).”
Disappointing poverty trends: is the social investment state to blame? (2011, background): “…in unemployment benefit systems in welfare states as diverse as Denmark and Sweden, the UK and Germany, making benefits more selective and conditional, and diminishing their duration and replacement rates (Caminada et al., 2008, Table 5; Hemerijck, 2011; Scruggs, 2008; van Vliet, 2010, Table 4).”
Public opinion on policy and budgetary trade-offs in European welfare states: evidence from a new comparative survey (2017, background): “…now, welfare state researchers have observed the expansion of ‘social investment policies’, such as education policies, active labour market policies, or service-oriented family policies, in a number of European welfare states (Bonoli 2013; Esping-Andersen 2002; Hemerijck 2013; Morel et al. 2011).”
Public demand for social investment: new supporting coalitions for welfare state reform in Western Europe? (2018, methodology): “These reform proposals were inspired by policy instruments discussed in the literature on social investment and welfare state reform (Bonoli 2013; Hemerijck 2013; Morel et al. 2012).”
Social investment as a policy paradigm (2018, background): “Should we therefore not consider the causal arrow running in reverse with high-spending – socialinvestment-oriented – welfare states contributing to the long-run economic prowess of Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany, with above average spending levels on child and family policy, female-fr”
When Do Institutions “Bite”? Historical Institutionalism and the Politics of Institutional Change (2016, background): “…is difficult to overestimate the impact that theories of endogenous institutional change have had on HI scholarship, in particular on analyses of the development of the institutions of modern capitalism and welfare states (e.g., Béland & Waddan, 2012; Hemerijck, 2013; Ornston, 2012; Thelen, 2014).”