Education

This chapter illustrates the transformative role that national education policies can play in working toward Sustainable Development Goals. Offering comparative examples from the ‘pluri-national state’ of Ecuador and the ‘Northern European welfare state’ of Finland, it highlights the potential of teaching languages, integrative thinking practices, and cultural alternatives to high-consumption lifestyles.

Political Priorities of Public Administration, Welfare-state and Constitutional Democracy after the 2020-2021 Pandemic

At the time of the official Coronavirus, 2020-2021 Pandemic emergency measures and general restrictions on the freedom of movement and the other fundamental human and constitutional rights and freedoms were and still are in place. The question of what kind of world will we enter after the official end of the Pandemic was quickly raised. The problem of fear intensified. This is not only a social problem but also a legal one: people have a fundamental human right to protection against fear. The absolute short-term priorities of public administration in all EU and Council of Europe Member States will have to be focused on ensuring that fear and anxiety do not become a new epidemic. Concern for the efficiency and quality of the public health system should be strengthened and improved. Including mental health care and suicide prevention, care for the well-being of the elderly and terminally ill, people with disabilities (in general and disabled workers), care for children, especially children with special needs, and care for large, diversified, and quality palliative care. Also, a need exists for a changed and improved legal policy regarding the system of education, scientific research, and employment. Last but not least, care must be taken not to take fundamental human rights and freedoms for granted. The health crisis will result in a new economic crisis. It should not be accepted as the end of the Welfare (Social) State. It is a new opportunity to defend social and economic human rights and to create the common European Welfare State. Right now, new ideas are needed –even crazy ideas. We need a kind of utopia. And faith and hope in it, which will be the driving force of active action. The experience of the Pandemic must not prevent or take this away from us.

Impacts of Social Innovation on Spatiality in Mountain–Lowland Relationships Trajectories of Two Swiss Regional Initiatives in the Context of New Policy Regimes

This article places the topic of “social innovation” in the context of the paradigm shift of the 1980s. This shift from Fordism to post-Fordism has led to a weakening of the model of the European welfare state. Social innovation has become an instrument to promote regional self-responsibility and entrepreneurial activity by local authorities. The concept of social innovation has become widespread among various disciplines and controversially used by them. Referring to regional and corporate success stories based on the commitment of grassroots movements and civil society has its shortcomings, as the new spatiality regimes show increasing disparities. The article shows the different lines of conflict in the discussion about social innovations and makes suggestions for the specification and delimitation of the concept. Using two case studies on social innovations from mountain regions of Switzerland, based on standardized interviews, including the results of a social network analysis, the article distinguishes between adaptive and transformative social innovations. The adaptive social innovations analysed did not result in changing the inferior position of the regions; however, they prevented even greater destabilization by mobilizing the dynamic actors in the valley to work together. This is helpful for ensuring that the urban majority continues to show solidarity with the population in rural and mountain areas. The constructive interaction between public, private, and civil society institutions is seen as the key factor of social innovation in the European peripheral areas to which most mountain areas belong.

European Welfare State Constitutions after the Financial Crisis

At a time when Europe is in the grip of a new crisis, it is especially useful to look back at the experiences of the European welfare states’ constitutions during the most recent financial crisis. This book provides unique insights by analysing social protection reforms undertaken in nine European countries, from both a social law and a constitutional law perspective. It highlights the mixture of short-term cuts in benefits and of structural changes in social protection schemes. The crisis might have helped to further the partial and temporary implementation of reforms, but it certainly cannot spare us from the debates and political compromises that are unavoidable in order to reform social protection thoughtfully and thoroughly. Moreover, the book records the outcome of relevant constitutional review proceedings and thereby demonstrates that, even if corrections remained restricted to relatively few cases, social rights matter. The financial crisis advanced their protection one step further, but left many questions open. One lesson is of paramount importance, also for helping us overcome the current pandemic crisis: we need a substantial and commonly accepted agreement in the Europe Union on how to balance the economy and social protection in the future.

What Drives the Immigration-Welfare Policy Link? Comparing Germany, France and the United Kingdom

Western European states have increasingly linked immigration and welfare policy. This trend has important implications for European welfare-state trajectories, but accounts of the policy reasoning behind it have diverged. Are policymakers attempting to delimit social citizenship to secure welfare-state legitimacy? Pursuing new, market-oriented welfare-state goals? Symbolically communicating immigration control intentions to voters? Or attempting to instrumentally steer immigration flows? These accounts have rarely been tested empirically against each other. Redressing this, we employ 83 elite interviews in a comparative process-tracing study of policies linking welfare provision and immigration status in Germany, France, and the UK during the 1990s. We find little evidence suggesting welfare-guided policy reasonings. Rather, this policy linkage appears “immigration-guided:” meant to control “unwanted” immigration or resonate symbolically in immigration politics. Differences in exclusions from welfare support for migrants grew from existing national differences in welfare-state design and politicizations of immigration, not from policy intentions, which were largely shared.

Precarious employment and mental health in European welfare state regimes: a multilevel approach

Background Precarious employment (PE) is a key social determinant of health that is, in turn, shaped by the broader institutional framework of the country in which it is embedded. At the same time, evidence sustains that welfare state regimes (WSRs) have a decisive role in determining people's health. However, the interaction effect between them is yet to be studied from a public health perspective. This article examines how WSRs, PE and mental health (MH) relate in Europe, and whether this relationship differs between women and men. Methods Data were derived from the European Working Conditions Survey 2015. PE was measured through the Employment Precariousness Scale for Europe (EPRES-E), validated for comparative research in 22 European countries, which were classified into five WSRs (Bismarckian, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Southern and Central-Eastern). MH was measured through the WHO-5 Well-Being Index. In a sample of 30,795 formal employees, we performed multilevel poisson regression models stratified by women and men. Results Results show a gradual association between PE quartiles and poor MH (PR Q2=1.37 CI95% [1.13-1.65], Q3=1.86[1.51-2.30], Q4=2.96[2.31-3.81] men; PR Q2=1.15[0.97-1.37], Q3=1.48[1.22-1.79], Q4=2.06[1.64-2.58] women) after adjusting for control variables. Further, the Scandinavian WSR displayed an overall protective effect for MH among men, as compared with the Bismarckian (PR = 0.58[0.34-0.99]). Regarding the interaction effects, these were only significant in the Central-Eastern WSR, which was found to boost the negative association between PE and MH among women (PR = 1.17[1.03-1.33]). Conclusions These findings point to a differential effect of WSRs on the negative relationship between PE and MH according to gender. Key messages European welfare state regimes unequally affect the negative association between precarious employment and mental health. This differential is also gender-based, since the Central-Eastern regime further deteriorates the mental health of precarious employees only among women, as compared to the Bismarckian.

COVID-19 and care homes and nursing homes crisis in Spain: ageism and scarcity of resources

The European Welfare State crisis since 2008 has shown the weakness of these European welfare systems to cope with a health crisis such as COVID-19, which in turn has not guaranteed the rights and wellbeing of older people. This article aims at shading light on the scarcity of resources in Spanish care homes and nursing homes system, while analyzing its integrated care failure and the urgent legislative measures implemented to overcome COVID-19 health crisis. At the same time, this paper advocates for a reflexion on ageist practices, so as to foster a debate on the ‘desisntitucionalization’ process of older adults in Spain. In this COVID-19 context, it has become utmost in implementing an older adults’ policy to guarantee older adults rights as vulnerable population; likewise, which has already been done in respect to laws protecting children rights.

The 1978 Spanish Constitutional Design

Forty years after its making, the 1978 Spanish Constitution is now subject to growing criticism and demands for reform. This chapter examines first the context in which this constitutional design developed, and the main influences it received: the West European welfare state model, external economic and geostrategic constraints and a tight balance of power between the most significant actors in the Spanish political arena. It then points to the key founding bargains achieved during the democratic transition over traditional and new political and social issues. Finally, it assesses the constitutional design performance and looks at its prospective development. Having exceeded all its historical precedents in time and efficiency, the 1978 Constitution is now challenged by a deep social and economic unrest, a recurrent national-territorial conflict and public distrust of political institutions