Gender and attitudes toward welfare state reform: Are women really social investment promoters?

This article contributes to the study of the demand side of welfare politics by investigating gender differences in social investment preferences systematically. Building on the different functions of social investment policies in creating, preserving, or mobilizing skills, we argue that women do not support social investment policies generally more strongly than men. Rather, women demand, in particular, policies to preserve their skills during career interruptions and help to mobilize their skills on the labour market. In a second analytical step, we examine women’s policy priorities if skill preservation and mobilization come at the expense of social compensation. We test our arguments for eight Western European countries with data from the INVEDUC survey. The confirmation of our arguments challenges a core assumption of the literatures on the social investment turn and women’s political realignment. We discuss the implication of our findings in the conclusion.

International Complementarities of National Capitalism

The adjustment pattern of the German model to low growth and to the transition to the service economy proved unsustainable in the medium to long term, and ultimately led to a profound welfare state reform that in many respects broke with the quasi-corporatism of Modell Deutschland. This has been associated with the spectacular revival of the German economy, before and after the Great Recession, also because its competitive characteristics were significantly strengthened within the euro area. Yet, the success of Modell Deutschland of course also contributes to the increasing imbalances and to the divergent economic dynamics within the common currency area, which ultimately have the potential to disrupt it. The chapter explains in more detail how wage moderation remained stable in Germany even though the strategic interaction with the German Bundesbank, on which the wage-moderation arrangement for a long time had been based, was a thing of the past after the introduction of the euro. It points to functional equivalents for the disciplining effect of Germany’s accommodating social policy.

Universalism in Welfare Policy: The Swedish Case beyond 1990

Despite its broad usage, universalism as a concept is not always clearly defined. In this article, a multidimensional definition of universalism in social policy is developed, based on four policy characteristics: inclusion, financing, provision, and the adequacy of benefits. In the empirical part of the article, the feasibility of this definition is tested by an analysis of recent changes in the Swedish welfare state, which is typically described as universal but has undergone substantive reforms since 1990. Four social policy areas are examined: pensions, social insurance, health care, and family policy. The results indicate that Swedish welfare policies retain their universalistic character in some dimensions but have become less universalistic in others. This demonstrates that a multidimensional approach is best suited to capture in full the nature and implications of welfare state reform.

Real but Unequal Representation in Welfare State Reform

Scholars have long debated whether welfare policymaking in industrialized democracies is responsive to citizen preferences and whether such policymaking is more responsive to rich than to poor citizens. Debate has been hampered, however, by difficulties in matching data on attitudes toward particular policies to data on changes in the generosity of actual policies. This article uses better, more targeted measures of policy change that allow more valid exploration of responsiveness for a significant range of democracies. It does so by linking multicountry and multiwave survey data on attitudes toward health, pension, and unemployment policies and data on actual policy generosity, not just spending, in these domains. The analysis reveals that attitudes correlate strongly with subsequent changes in welfare generosity in the three policy areas and that such responsiveness is much stronger for richer than for poorer citizens. Representation is likely real but also vastly unequal in the welfare politics of industrialized democracies.

Changed Roles and Strategies of Professionals in the (co)Production of Public Services

This paper investigates the changed roles and strategies of professionals in a context of hybrid welfare state reform. This context exposes public professionals to market regulation and rationalization (new public management), and simultaneously expects them to work across professional borders to co-produce public services together with their clients, colleagues and other stakeholders (new public governance). Adopting a comparative perspective, we studied different types of professionals for their views on the implications of this reform mix on their work. Hence, we investigate ‘strategy’ at the macro level of public sector reform and at the micro level of professionals’ responses. The study is based on literature and policy documents, participatory observations and especially (group) interviews with professionals across Dutch hospitals, secondary schools and local agencies for welfare, care or housing. We found that professionals across these sectors, despite their different backgrounds and status, meet highly similar challenges and tensions related to welfare state reform. Moreover, we show that these professionals are not simply passive ‘victims’ of the hybrid context of professionalism, but develop own coping strategies to deal with tensions between different reform principles. The study contributes to understanding new professional roles and coping strategies in welfare state reform, in a context of changing relationships between professions and society.