Active and passive labour market policies across Western Europe from welfare to workfare
... This paper is intended to make understand that in a changing capitalist world the limits of a welfare state are by and large given by the working of a globalising economy and by the responses of national democratic states. That is to say: the political room for manoeuvre appears to be more constrained than it used to be, and at the same time macro-economic policies were considered as outdated and ineffective. This cross-national development would have been conducive to a general pattern of retrenchment and transformation of welfare state arrangements (see: Pierson, 1996; Stephens et al. ... In fact, this ‘wave of retrenchment’ and change of social policy making is - at least empirically - less uniform across most of the established welfare states (i. ... Yet, at the same time, political scientists demonstrated that partisan politics, corporatist arrangements and institutional factors accounted for a larger cross-national variation of welfare statism (see: Van Kersbergen, 2000; Swank, 2001; Castles, 2002; Keman, 2003). ... Although most students of the welfare state agree that the ‘old’ welfare state is in a state of transformation, they however disagree about its future shape and size (see: Evans, 1997; Keman, 1998; Armingeon, 1999; Stephens et al. ... ) types of welfare states, namely: the nexus between the ‘state’ of the labour market and the ‘rate’ of decommodification (see: Esping-Andersen, 1990; Kitschelt et al. ... Yet, the actual shaping of the ‘new’ welfare state regimes at present is still by and large politically directed. In this paper I shall therefore focus on, one, the relationship between labour markets and policy responses; and two, on the relationship between partisan politics, corporatism & fiscal constraints and the patterned cross-national variation of decommodification & recommodification. For the rate of commodification labour produces at the end of the day the social risks for which the existing format of most welfare states cannot cater for (Keman, 1998; Pierson, 2001) because the ‘traditional’ welfare state cannot sustain (any more? ... In this paper I will investigate the direction and size of change in public expenditure for active and passive labour market policies from 1985-2000 in European countries. The focus is in particular on Western Europe. The reason is that we expect that exactly during the 1990s the socio-economic policies of EUropean nations have been drastically transformed. The research question is whether these changes are significant in terms of a trend towards recommodification of the labour force or not (Kvist, 2000). ... The aim is to establish whether or not there is a connection between the level of corporatism, political composition of the party-government, and membership of the E(M)U, on the one hand, and the direction and magnitude of changes in public expenditure for active and passive labour market policies, on the other. For we assume that these changes can tell us more about the future of an essential feature of the Welfare State, namely the rate of decommodification of labour (see: Esping-Andersen, 1990; Van Kersbergen, 1995; Stephens et al. ... In my view the development from decommodification towards recommodification would indicate a reformation of the ‘traditional’ welfare state to a ‘modern’ one, which is less characterized by surplus regulations (see: Keman, 1988; Kuhnle, 2000) and more by a combination of work before welfare as well as reduced levels of transfer oriented programmes and related expenditures (Keman, 1998; Becker and Van Kersbergen, 2002). In fact, the reputed term ‘workfare’ can be considered as an example of this development: no welfare benefits without employability, and - apart from job creation by public agents - a reduction of welfare is then functional for making people (look for) work. Hence, the state of the labour market is essential to make ‘workfare’ work. A first issue to be discussed in this paper is the ‘state’ of the labour market: who are participating (or not) and how are available jobs distributed across the labour force-population (men – women – young – old).