Welfare States and Employment Regimes (original) (raw)
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Activating Labour Market Policies and the Restructuring of 'Welfare' and 'State
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Analysis of the change of governance in activating labour market policy in Denmark, the UK and Germany supports the restructuring thesis advanced in the course of the debate on how to classify the change in the welfare state. New objectives, such as 'the promotion of employability', have been accompanied by a general trend towards a decline in state responsibility for service delivery and a reduction of rights to transfer payments. At the same time, however, the state's responsibility as guarantor in respect of rights to social services has increased and the obligation to work has been introduced, in conjunction with an increase in reflexive forms of governance. Thus the observed restructuring has brought about a change in the nature of both 'welfare' and 'state'. Although the outlined trend of changing forms of governance and statehood is to be found in all three countries, level and scope of certain instruments and governance forms vary strongly, and characterise the emergence of quite different activating policies, respectively a convergent divergence of welfare state development.
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2016
The literature on welfare states or, more modestly, systems of social protection, has expanded rapidly over the past few decades. Since the publication of the first edition of this Handbook, major progress has been made in three research areas: the relationship between welfare states and production regimes, gendered determinants and outcomes of welfare state regimes, and the distributive outcomes of welfare states. Esping-Andersen ended his chapter in the first edition with a call for an embedded approach to the study of welfare states, for a relational analysis of the welfare state – economy nexus. Two developments have contributed to the advancement of such an approach: progress in research on production regimes in advanced industrial societies, and the dramatic impact of economic transformations on the systems of social protection in ex-communist countries and in Latin America. Progress in research on the gender dimension of the welfare stateeconomy nexus has been spurred by chan...
2011
We acknowledge the helpful comments of Birgitta Swedenborg, the other members of the Center for Business and Policy Studies/ National Bureau of Economic Research group, and conference participants-especially Nils Gottfries (our discussant) and Bertil Holmlund. We also thank Albin Kainelainen, Kjell Salvanes, Per Skedinger, and Roope Uusitalo for help with the data. We are responsible for the errors. Some of the work on this chapter was done while Fredriksson was at the Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University. 1. Even at its peak during the 1950s, union coverage in the United States never exceeded 35 percent. Private-sector unionism has been in steady decline since. Union coverage has increased only in the public sector, where roughly 36 percent of workers now belong to unions. Government intervention in labor markets has increased over time, mainly as a result of workplace regulations and the erosion of the employment at will doctrine that has historically characterized much of U.S. employment relations. Public employment as a fraction of total employment remains low by international standards.