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This volume provides an analytical framework that links welfare states to party systems, combining recent contributions to the comparative political economy of the welfare state and insights from party and electoral politics. It states three phenomena.
This book takes stock of the major economic and political challenges advanced capitalist democracies face today. It provides a synthetic view, allowing the reader to grasp the nature of key structural transformations and their consequences in terms of the politics of change, policy outputs, and outcomes.
This is the comprehensively-revised second edition of a volume that was welcomed at its first appearance as 'the most authoritative survey and critique of the welfare state yet published'. Its fifty-one chapters have been written by acknowledged experts in the field from across Europe, Australia, and North America. Some chapters are brand new; all have been systematically revised, and they are right up to date. The first seven sections of the book cover the themes of Ethics, History, Approaches, Inputs and Actors, Policies, Policy Outcomes, and Worlds of Welfare. A final chapter is devoted to the future of welfare and well-being under the imperatives of climate change. Every chapter is writt...
Poverty, increased inequality, and social exclusion are back on the political agenda in Western Europe, not only as a consequence of the Great Recession of 2008, but also because of a seemingly structural trend towards increased inequality in advanced industrial societies that has persisted since the 1970s. How can we explain this increase in inequalities? Policies in labor markets, social policy, and political representation are strongly linked in the creation, widening, and deepening of insider-outsider divides--a process known as dualization. While it is certainly not the only driver of increasing inequality, the encompassing nature of its development across multiple domains makes dualiza...
This innovative Handbook presents the core concepts associated with austerity, retrenchment and populism and explores how they can be used to analyse developments in different welfare states and in specific social policies. Leading experts highlight how these concepts have influenced and changed welfare states around the globe and impacted specific areas including pensions, long-term care, the labour market, taxation, social activism and gender equality.
Bringing together contributions from leading labour market policy scholars from across the globe, this state-of-the-art Handbook offers extensive and compelling analyses of labour market policy in advanced democracies. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.
This volume explores how digitalization--in different forms--affects the welfare state. Digitalization is likely to have a lasting impact on work, welfare, and the distribution of income. It will radically transform not only social risks in health, education and the labour market, but also the means by which these risks are addressed. The volume studies how digitalization affects policies as well as the underlying power relationship between actors, i.e. the politics of the welfare state. The volume brings together internationally renowned welfare-state scholars to identify - the socio-economic challenges that result from rapid technological change; - the ensuing political conflicts and strug...
As stable political alliances in democracies have dissolved, populism deepens social and economic divisions rather than addressing economic insecurity.
This book challenges existing theories of welfare state change by analyzing pension reforms in France, Germany, and Switzerland between 1970 and 2004. It explains why all three countries were able to adopt far-reaching reforms, adapting their pension regimes to both financial austerity and new social risks. In a radical departure from the neo-institutionalist emphasis on policy stability, the book argues that socio-structural change has led to a multidimensional pension reform agenda. A variety of cross-cutting lines of political conflict, emerging from the transition to a post-industrial economy, allowed governments to engage in strategies of political exchange and coalition-building, fostering broad cross-class coalitions in support of major reform packages. Methodologically, the book proposes a novel strategy to analyze lines of conflict, configurations of political actors, and coalitional dynamics over time. This strategy combines quantitative analyses of actor configurations based on coded policy positions with in-depth case studies.
Readership: Scholars and students of political science, especially those interested in comparative political economy, institutional change and comparative politics