Policy Change and the Institutional Foundations of Welfare State Regimes

Abstract

The global recession not only ended a global period of job growth and acerbated social inequalities and insecurities but also triggered a range of structural policy reforms in various fields of the welfare state. The papers of this panel examine such reforms from a comparative perspective investigating in particular to what extent such reform pressures are mediated by national factors. The paper by Tobias Wiss studies the relevance of national political institutions for the case of family policies across advanced industrialized societies whereas Christian Altavilla examines the effect of de-centralization reforms on social policy making in multilevel states. Specifically, he investigates the role of subnational governments in the provision of welfare state policies in Argentina and Spain. The paper by Janna Goijaerts studies the effect of mutually contesting policy paradigms for policy reforms, specifically the case of contesting policy paradigm regarding the gender dimension of the welfare state as exemplified for the LTC reform in the Netherlands. Besnik Pula analyses how national patterns of employment growth (in tradable services or in industrial and craft sectors) shape the reform trajectories of skill formation systems in the Eastern European countries.