Daniel Clegg

Levels and Levers of Conditionality: Measuring Change Within Welfare States

Bold claims are often made about the current development of welfare states, both by critical theorists of social policies and by the politicians that are reforming them. But characterizing the nature and magnitude of the changes that welfare states have undergone in recent decades seems to pose major problems for empirical – and particularly comparative empirical – analysis. The lively debate concerning the range of factors that may result in (more or less) change in social protection arrangements – including most importantly structural socioeconomic forces, changing power resources, new ideas, party competition, institutions, policy legacies and path dependence (for overviews, see van Kersbergen, 1995; Amenta, 2003) – is complicated by the fact that analysts struggle to agree on what, exactly, is the real character and extent of change to be explained. Controversies and contradictory readings abound in the comparative social policy literature. Have we, as some maintain, witnessed a ‘paradigm shift’ in the techniques and strategies for managing social risks, or merely a series of adjustments at the margins? And if recent reforms are leading to the emergence of a distinctively new ‘type’ or ‘form’ of social policy, is this equally true in all developed welfare states, or only (to date) in some? While in social sciences there is always scope for differing interpretations, convincingly and consistently answering these kinds of questions arguably turns first and foremost on the identification of the most appropriate data for examination. Differently put, the key challenge for assessing the extent of certain hypothesized or postulated changes in welfare state programmes is not so much one of accurate measurement, but rather of developing more adequate conceptualizations and operationalizations of the possibly variable qualities of welfare state programmes. Arguments about new forms of social policy provision or regulation speak to certain welfare state properties in

Welfare institutions and the mobilization of consent: Union responses to labour market activation policies in France and the Netherlands

Trade union responses to labour market activation policies are central to any assessment of their attitudes and strategies in the face of contemporary welfare state restructuring. Yet this issue has to date been the object of only limited theorization and minimal empirical investigation. We attempt to remedy this. Drawing on existing literatures in different disciplines, we first outline the theoretical grounds for predicting union opposition to or support for labour market activation measures. We then explore these competing arguments through a reconstruction and comparison of the development of union positions on labour market activation over time in two countries, France and the Netherlands. The case studies suggest that union stances on these policies are not straightforwardly determined by the structure of labour market institutions; considerations regarding the impact of activation initiatives on the role of unions in the institutions of the welfare state play a major role in mobilizing their consent or dissent.

Between Sectionalism and Revitalisation: Trade Unions and Activation Policies in Europe

Though the response of trade unions to activation policies seems a crucial test of their capacity to adapt to the challenges of post-industrialisation, the issue has to date received little systematic attention in the welfare state or labour market policy literature. This paper takes a first step in remedying this curious neglect. Drawing on relevant theoretical literature it first briefly outlines two very contrasting perspectives on how unions’ broad adaptation strategies could be expected to shape their attitude to activation reforms. It then analyses the role played by unions across around twenty years of labour market policy reforms in three strategically selected national case studies, confronting the differing assumptions to some preliminary empirical evidence. The cross-case evidence suggests that union attitudes to activation policies are rarely unambiguous reflections of either pure sectionalism or planned revitalisation platforms, but are instead shaped by a mix of strategic policy trade-offs, institutional incentives as well, at times, by the influence of new policy ideas.

Comparative social policy analysis and active labour market policy: Putting Quality before Quantity

In the past decade, active labour market policy (ALMP) has become a major topic in comparative social policy analysis, with scholars exploiting cross-national variation to seek to identify the determinants of policy development in this central area of the ‘new welfare state’. In this paper, we argue that better integration of this policy field into social policy scholarship requires rather more critical engagement with considerable methodological, conceptual and theoretical challenges in order to analyse these policies comparatively. Most fundamentally, rather more reflection is needed on what the substantially relevant dimensions of variation in ALMP from a social policy perspective actually are, as well as enhanced efforts to ensure that it is those that are being analysed and compared.

The Demise of Tax Credits

Introduced in the late 1990s, tax credits grew under successive Labour governments to become a cornerstone of UK social policy. Distinguished from traditional welfare policies by their target group and their mode of administration, and with goals that appeared capable of commanding support across the ideological spectrum, tax credits until recently seemed to hold the key to tackling poverty in a politically popular manner. But since 2010 the tax credit system has been systematically dismantled, initially qualitatively and latterly also quantitatively. This paper discusses the multiple factors that help to explain the rapid fall from grace in the UK of this liberal approach to supporting the incomes of poor working households.

Themed section: Reforming minimum income protection in Europe

Minimum income protection, or social assistance, has been attracting growing interest among comparative welfare state scholars in recent years. Reform of the “last safety net” is also high on the social policy agenda of the European Union, with the Active Inclusion strategy that was the object of a recommendation in 2008 having recently been re-launched as part of the 2013 Social Investment Package. The four articles in this themed section, which draw on research carried out in the three-year research project Combating Poverty in Europe funded by the European Commission under the seventh Framework Programme, aim to contribute to the growing academic and policy debate on this still under-studied pillar of the welfare state. Three of the articles offer diachronic comparative analyses of minimum income protection reforms across two European countries. Comparing the cases of Italy and Poland, Jessoula, Madama, Kubisa and Zielenska illustrate the crucial importance of party competition dynamics in explaining these two countries’ differing degrees of success in institutionalising minimum income protection in recent years from comparable starting points at the turn of the millennium. In a somewhat similar vein, through a comparison of recent highprofile reforms in France and the UK, Clegg illustrates how political competition can promote minimum income protection convergence in otherwise still very different welfare state contexts, particularly as regards initiatives to “make work pay”. In the third paper in the section, Angelin, Johansson and Koch deploy concepts from the literature on institutional transformation to show the limits of superficial characterisations of stability and change in this policy field. Comparing the cases of Germany and Sweden, they argue that in the Swedish case the structure of existing minimum income protection institutions has allowed a significant shift in minimum income protection policy to occur even without any equivalent to the highly disruptive and visible reforms seen in the German case with Hartz IV. The final article in the section takes a more cross-sectional and evaluative approach to the comparative analysis of minimum income protection schemes. Heidenreich, Petzold, Natili and Panican compare the articulation of minimum income provision, social services and labour market support in the German, Italian and Swedish welfare states. Their analysis highlights the enduring differences in the organisation and institutionalisation of minimum income protection across Europe, and underscores the crucial importance of the organisational dimension of minimum income protection policies for the successful pursuit of an Active Inclusion agenda.

Combating Poverty Through ‘Active Inclusion’? The European and National Contexts

This chapter describes the supranational and national contexts for recent local-level initiatives to combat poverty and social exclusion in Europe. It first discusses the emergence in the early 2000s of ‘active inclusion’, a European Union (EU) policy strategy intended to guide member state actions to combat poverty and social inclusion. It then considers in turn two major obstacles to which this strategy has been confronted subsequently, namely the substantial but even impacts of the Great Recession of the end of the decade and the considerable institutional diversity of existing anti-poverty policies in European countries. An analysis of recent reforms in five European countries shows that divergent policy legacies and differing socio-economic situations are most important in understanding current national reform agendas in the anti-poverty field.

Institutional arrangements and policy coordination in national anti-poverty regimes

Discovering methods to combat poverty and social exclusion has now become a major political challenge in Europe. This book offers an original and timely analysis of how actors at the European, national and subnational levels meet this challenge. Combining perspectives on multilevel and network coordination, the editors discuss to what extent actors join forces in these efforts and identify the factors limiting the coordination achieved in practice. The book builds on a European study comparing Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the UK.