A. Eleveld

The Role of Ideas in Policy and Institutional Change: A Comparison of the Open Functional Approach, Constructivism and Discourse Theory

Most scholars engaged in ideational analysis agree that the availability of new ideas may cause existing welfare state policies and institutions to alter. This article considers the extent to which the open functional approach and constructivist approaches are able to explain the role of ideas in policy and institutional change. Notwithstanding their contribution to the study of the role of ideas in policy and institutional change, these approaches suffer from some shortcomings as they fail to view ideas as non-stable entities. In order to address these shortcomings, an alternative poststructuralist discourse theoretical explanatory model is presented. Applying this model to the case of the rise and fall of Dutch life course policy, the article shows how a discourse theoretical view of ideas as floating signifiers contributes to the study of the role of ideas in welfare state change.

The Duty to Work Without a Wage. A Legal Comparison between the Social Assistance Legislations in Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom

Since the rise of the activation paradigm in the 1990s, the duty to work without a wage has become widespread in European social assistance legislation. This paper investigates in a precise way the extent to which the duty to work without a wage follows the legal logic of a contractual relationship and how this duty is related to the fundamental right to an adequate standard of living. A comparison between German, Dutch and British social assistance legislation shows that the duty to work without a wage increasingly takes the form of a reciprocity requirement. That is, instead of re-integrating into regular paid work, recipients of social assistance are required to show that they are worthy of attaining basic social rights, not only by improving their capability to work but, above all, by showing a willingness to work. It concludes that the duty to work without a wage enhances governmental control over recipients of social assistance rather than improving their employability and notes that, in this respect, the Dutch social assistance regime seems to be stricter than the German and British ones.

The Governmentalization of the Trade Union and the Potential of Union-Based Resistance. The Case of Undocumented Migrant Domestic Workers in the Netherlands Making Rights Claims

Ambivalence about rights is well known: rights may both challenge existing injustices while simultaneously re-enforcing sovereign regulatory control over citizens. In this article, we focus on the paradox that potentially radical and transformative claims to rights are made at a site – civil society – that under liberal governmentality has increasingly become a site of government. By exploring the unionization of undocumented migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in the Netherlands, we aim to show how rights claims are shaped and controlled by civil society. Using the analytical category of (in)visibility, the case study discloses the dualistic role of the union. On the one hand, the union operated as a site of resistance supporting undocumented MDWs to make their rights claims. On the other hand, it operated as a site of government of the same undocumented MDWs by selectively promoting work-related rights claims and excluding more radical claims for the right to come and go.

Dealing with Unemployment: Labour Market Policy Trends

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Book Review: Rune Ervik, Nanna Kildal and Even Nilssen (eds), New Contractualism in European Welfare State Policies:

Due to multiple policy failures, the European Union is challenged with the deepest crisis since its inauguration. The European Union in Crisis edited by Kyriakos Demetriou provides an authoritative account of the EU’s current predicament by investigating the roots of the problem, from the democratic legitimisation of European politics to European federalism versus regionalism, and attempts to anticipate future developments, especially those which threaten the future of the Union. The book consists of 12 chapters grouped within four inter-related themes. The first part, entitled ‘National Euroscepticism’, focuses on the British approach towards integration and Germany as an agenda-setter with the largest population and strongest economic performance in the EU and evaluates Euroscepticism in East Central and Southern Europe at the crossroads. While the second part evaluates the European Monetary Union and its legitimacy issues, the third part appraises the future of the EU by focusing on the conceptions of democracy and legitimacy alongside cosmopolitanism within the neoliberal agenda. This part highlights the densely integrated economy and addresses the EU’s unique governance and the role of the European Parliament in the crisis. The final part concentrates on the EU’s deficits and legitimacy and discusses the importance of representativeness. It establishes a link between democratic deficit frames and post-modern legitimacy conceptualisations and it analyses the legitimacy of the EU’s foreign and defence policy by assessing the logic and practices of its decision-making process. Finally, the EU is evaluated as a world trade superpower. Taking as read that the crises have moved the EU into a new phase of integration (pp. 11–13), several of the book’s authors agree that the ‘lack of accountability’ of EU institutions is the major shortcoming. The Union’s initial liberalist ideology was to establish a ‘more democratic and social Europe as a potential alternative to American hegemony’ (pp. 107, 135). However, the ‘Troika’ – the triumvirate of the European Commission (‘the most undemocratic institution’; p. 174), the ‘undemocratic’ European Central Bank (p. 79) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – take a top-down approach and dictate the policies where national parliaments have no political influence. In addition, the democratic deficit of the EU has been a long-standing contentious issue (pp. 104–116) which leads to the conclusion that the Union suffers from a legitimacy deficit as well (pp. 64, 101–102). Although The European Union in Crisis mostly focuses on the politico-economic aspects of the EU’s crises, it provides a comprehensive review of the issue and is recommended to those scholars, students and policymakers who are interested in European integration and Euroscepticism – particularly in the case of the United Kingdom – especially with regard to the democratic legitimisation of politics and the correlation between monetary union and the current economic crisis.

Sancties in de bijstand en het geval van sociale uitsluiting. Van de wortel en de stok in de put

SamenvattingSancties in de bijstand worden vaak opgevat als prikkel ter verhoging van de arbeidsparticipatie. Maar dat is een eenzijdige benadering. Want sancties kunnen ook het fundamentele recht op minimale middelen van bestaan aantasten. Wat betekent dat voor beleid en regelgeving?

Work-Related Sanctions in European Welfare States: An Incentive to Work or a Violation of Minimum Subsistence Rights?

Since the 1990s (Western) European welfare states have adopted a series of reforms aimed at promoting the return to employment of recipients of social assistance benefits. The economic crisis has prompted welfare states to cut the expenditures on enabling instruments and to opt increasingly for work-related sanctions (i.e. sanctions that are imposed on recipients who fail to comply with activation measures). This paper examines the regulation of work-related sanctions from a social rights perspective in 25 European welfare states. Based on this perspective, the paper investigates, first, the extent to which work-related sanctions are mitigated by specific legal clauses and by the composition of the social assistance benefits. Second, this paper investigates the relationship between the socio-economic situation of the European welfare states and the harshness of the sanctions. The paper concludes that the socio-economic situation in countries that have adopted harsh work-related sanctions reinforces the risk of violation of the right to minimum means of subsistence. The (relative) lack of mitigation clauses in these countries further reinforces this effect. In order to prevent this effect this paper recommends the construction of a system of social assistance benefits on which basis a work-related sanction only affects a basic component of social assistance benefits, without touching components for the costs for children, paternity, rent, heating and the partner.

Work, Care, and Gender: Statistical Data in the Reframing of Public Policy in the Netherlands

This article analyzes how Dutch policies on women’s emancipation were reframed between the years 2000 and 2007. It considers, in particular, the role of statistical data in the reframing process. Drawing on the framing literature in post-positivist analysis and on studies in governmentality, the article shows how statistical data in policy documents can be conceived of both as interpretive products of situated subjects and as knowledge producers that constitute subjects as governable subjects.