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Health Politics in Europe: A Handbook is a major new reference work, which provides historical background and up-to-date information and analysis on health politics and health systems throughout Europe. In particular, it captures developments that have taken place since the end of the Cold War, a turning point for many European health systems, with most post-communist transition countries privatizing their state-run health systems, and many Western European health systems experimenting with new public management and other market-oriented health reforms. Following three introductory, stage-setting chapters, the handbook offers country cases divided into seven regional sections, each of which ...
In this comprehensive Handbook, international experts examine theoretical and empirical research to analyse a core element of the public policy process: implementation. Traversing numerous sub-disciplines and traditions including top-down and bottom-up approaches to public policy implementation research, the chapters present a synthesis of the state of scholarship and stimulate future thinking in the field.
This book examines the history of the French welfare state from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. The French social security system has changed profoundly over the last few decades. The Bismarkian model of governance and social protection inherited from the Second World War has progressively faded away in favor of a reinforcement of the state’s capacity to intervene on policies and the implementation of national health insurance coverage. In order to understand this major transformation, this book draws on rich original sources to offer a historical and sociological perspective on elite policymakers and policy change. In doing so, it identifies correlations between the changing social backgrounds and career paths of elites in charge of social insurance policies since the 1940s, and the development of health policy programs. It will appeal to all those interested in public policy, health policy, social studies and French history and politics.
Following the locust years of the neo-liberal revolution, social democracy was the great victor at the fin-de-sicle elections. Today, parties descended from the Second International hold office throughout the European Union, while the Right appears widely disorientated by the dramatic "modernisation" of a political tradition dating back to the nineteenth century. The focal point of Gerassimos Moschonas's study is the emergent "new social democracy" of the twenty-first century. As Moschonas demonstrates, change has been a constant of social-democratic history: the core dominant reformist tendency of working-class politic notwithstanding, capitalism has transformed social democracy more than it has succeeded in transforming capitalism. Now, in the "great transformation" of recent years, a process of "de-social-democratization" has been set in train, affecting every aspect of the social-democratic phenomenon, from ideology and programs to organization and electorates. Analytically incisive and empirically meticulous, In the Name of Social Democracy will establish itself as the standard reference work on the logic and dynamics of a major mutation in European politics.
Democracy posits the universality of the equality principle: a community of citizens is governed by the principle of the formal equality of all individuals, whatever their real social, cultural, or other inequalities. Democratization, on the other hand, is motivated by the ambition of ensuring the real equality of citizens, and not simply their formal equality. The dynamics of democracy are thus insured by the development of a welfare state that increasingly intervenes in order to satisfy the social and economic needs of individuals. Especially focused on France, yet informed by the experiences of other European countries, this book examines the dilemmas of the search for equality in society...
The essays in Law and Citizenship provide a framework for analyzing citizenship in an increasingly globalized world by addressing a number of fundamental questions. How are traditional notions of citizenship erecting borders against those who are excluded? What are the impacts of changing notions of state, borders, and participation on our concepts of citizenship? Within territorial borders, to what extent are citizens able to participate, given that the principles of accountability, transparency, and representativeness remain ideals? The contributors address the numerous implications of the concept of citizenship for public policy, international law, poverty law, immigration law, constitutional law, history, political science, and sociology.
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.
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.
The OECD includes the richest nations in the world. It issues recommendations on economic and social policies. Is its counsel on welfare state policies coherent? And is it followed by member states in Western Europe? These are the guiding questions of this book, which is a first to deal with such issues. The OECD and European Welfare States comprises 14 country studies considering OECD recommendations and their implementation in Western European welfare states, an analysis of the internal processes in the OECD, a theoretical introduction and a concluding comparative chapter. The overall results show a large degree of consistency in OECD analyses and recommendations, though little efficacy is revealed. The authors of this book have compiled a major contribution to the analysis of the impact of international organizations on national welfare states, widening the scope of traditional analyses of national welfare state development.