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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 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 European Social Model is at a crossroad. Although from the 1990s onwards, the threat of an imminent crisis shaped much of the rhetoric surrounding the future of the welfare state, disagreement within the academic community remains. What is however increasingly clear is that with the global financial crisis and the Euro crisis that followed it, the challenges the European Social Model faces have become more acute and demand action. This volume launches a multifaceted inquiry into these challenges. Each contribution, written by renowned scholars in their fields, represents an in-depth exploration of issues that cut to the core of current political, economic and social processes. They are an invitation to the seasoned scholars as well as to the beginning students of social sciences, public administration or journalism to engage with, by now, a large body of scholarship, to accompany the authors in their endeavours to seek an explanation to burning questions and start their own inquiries.
Documents the waves of protest that spread across Europe in the wake of the Great Recession.
The book sheds new light on the history of the Eurozone crisis and provides crucial lessons for the way forward.
Readership: Scholars and students of political science, especially those interested in comparative political economy, institutional change and comparative politics
This book serves as a sequel to two distinguished volumes on capitalism: Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge, 1999) and Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1985). Both volumes took stock of major economic challenges advanced industrial democracies faced, as well as the ways political and economic elites dealt with them. However, during the last decades, the structural environment of advanced capitalist democracies has undergone profound changes: sweeping deindustrialization, tertiarization of the employment structure, and demographic developments. This book provides a synthetic view, allowing the reader to grasp the nature of these structural transformations and their consequences in terms of the politics of change, policy outputs, and outcomes. In contrast to functionalist and structuralist approaches, the book advocates and contributes to a 'return of electoral and coalitional politics' to political economy research.
This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the many different facets of the Swiss political system and of the major developments in modern Swiss politics. It brings together a diverse set of more than 50 leading experts in their respective areas, who explore Switzerland's distinctive and sometimes intriguing politics at all levels and across multiple themes. In placing the topics in an international and comparative context and in conversation with the broader scholarly literature, the contributors provide a much-needed counterpoint to the rather idealized and sometimes outdated perception of Swiss politics. The work is divided into thematic sections that represent the inherent diversit...
Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policy-makers' main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented social investment policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive variance in the development of social investment strategies. The World Politics of Social Investment: Welfare States in the 21st Century is the first of two volumes of the World Politics of Social Investment (WOPSI) project, which systematically maps and explains different welfare reform strategies in democratic countries around the world. This volume...
While economic inequality has risen in every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe, the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to distribute top-income shares to citizens with low- and middle-income? Unequal Democracies offers answers to this question, bringing together contributions that focus on voters and their demands for redistribution with contributions on elites and unequal representation that is biased against less-affluent citizens. While large and growing bodies of research have developed around each of these perspectives, this volume brings them into rare dialogue. Chapters also incorporate analyses that center exclusively on the United States and those that examine a broader set of advanced democracies to explore the uniqueness of the American case and its contribution to comparative perspectives. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.