The responsiveness to societal demands is both the key virtue and the key problem of
modern democracies. On the one hand, responsiveness is a central cornerstone of …

The analysis of policy change has so far concentrated on the assessment and explanation of
different degrees of change. The distinctions between radical versus incremental, path …

A core, but so far untested, proposition of the new politics perspective, originally introduced
by Paul Pierson, is that welfare state cutbacks will be implemented using so-called …

Scholars have found it difficult to identify the impact of austerity on policy outputs. This
difficulty may have arisen because studies tend to focus on the content of national and EU …

Why do some European welfare states protect unemployed and inadequately employed
workers (" outsiders") from economic uncertainty better than others? Philip Rathgeb's study …

The unemployed in Sweden today have to relate to several types of benefit schemes. Apart
from the public unemployment insurance program, different workplaces are covered by …

The literature on public policy is marked by the proliferation of different empirical and
conceptual studies addressing different types of policy change. Scholars have been …

This book introduces a unique, new dataset on welfare state reforms in the UK, Denmark,
Finland, France and Germany from 1974 to 2014. Using a variety of welfare state types in …

Welfare state retrenchment has been an object of research in political science for over 25
years now. The defining text remains Paul Pierson's book Dismantling the Welfare State …

The Swedish public unemployment insurance program is characterized by its governance
structure involving union-linked insurance funds, famously known as the Ghent system. This …