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This POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC DICTIONARY OF WESTERN EUROPEaims to give a comprehensive overview of the political and economic situation incontemporary Western Europe. In an ever-changing world, there is no ideal time torecord the political and economic state of the region. Yet, in our era of transient internetknowledge, it seems essential that at some point such facts are consigned to print. ThisDictionary may be regarded as a first point of reference for research on the region.

Ministerial office represents the pinnacle of political power. Quite rightly, politics and gender and comparative scholarship is paying increasing attention to women's access to political executives (Claveria 2014; Davis 1997; Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2005; Krook and O'Brien 2012; Reynolds 1999; Siaroff 2000; Whitford, Wilkins, and Ball 2007). These studies develop and test a range of hypotheses relating to the demographic, socioeconomic, political cultural, or political institutional factors at state or system level deemed to shape women's access to political executive office. The conclusions primarily emphasize relatively general correlations between women's ministerial representation and a nation's familiarity with women in positions of power (Reynolds 1999), the prevalence of "egalitarian societies" and "leftist values" (Siaroff 2000), or international pressure and regional contagion (Escobar-Lemmon and Taylor-Robinson 2005). Studies that address the importance of political institutional factors affecting the supply and demand of female government ministers highlight the different procedures for appointing ministers in presidential versus parliamentary democracies (Reynolds 1999; Whitford, Wilkins, and Ball 2007) or the generalist versus specialist recruitment traditions of ministerial recruitment in parliamentary democracies (Claveria 2014; Davis 1997; Siaroff 2000). All studies flag the significance of the numerical presence of women in parliament, and some, the way the electoral system or gender quotas influence women's access to parliament (Claveria 2014; Krook and O'Brien 2012).

The Coalition's economic strategy poses a significant threat to gender equality in the UK. In the absence of committed gender equality advocates in the government, campaigning is, again, from the outside. This article presents some of the new strategies developed by individuals and organisations such as the Women's Budget Group and the Fawcett Society to fight against the cuts and considers the effectiveness of their approaches.

AbstractPolitics and gender scholarship is increasingly seeking to understand the relationship between the presence of women in politics and gendered policy outcomes – the substantive representation of women (SRW). Yet its focus remains squarely on the activities of 'critical actors' in parliaments and women's policy agencies and on 'feminist' rather than 'mainstream' policy areas. In contrast, this article investigates the impact of feminist actors in a range of institutional settings on recent processes of welfare reform in the UK. It finds that the gendered welfare reform introduced by New Labour was initiated and pushed through by a coalition of committed feminist actors across a range of institutions. Crucially, the reforms relied on the existence of 'strategic actors' and 'gate openers', defined as feminist actors in positions of significant institutional power. It makes a contribution to the actor-centred SRW scholarship, develops an institutionalist approach to this research and identifies the need for a political economy perspective to understanding how women can shape policy outcomes.

The Lisbon Process, launched in 2000 and relaunched in 2005, revived the debate about the existence of a European social model. This article argues that the Lisbon agenda presents a coherent vision of a social model which can be characterized as a Europe-wide Adult Worker Model (AWM). This is a system which assumes paid employment for all adults in order to secure their economic independence. The article identifies evidence of a development in this direction in the European Employment Strategy guidelines from 1997 through to the 2005 integrated macro-economic and employment guidelines. It concludes that this reorientation of the European social model is a vision of a supported AWM welfare system more akin to Sweden than the United States. However, the soft governance method used for social policy makes it vulnerable to changing political constellations in member states.

Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über New Labours Strategien in der Sozialpolitik und bewertet auf der Basis sozialwissenschaftlicher Forschungsmeinungen, in wie weit es der Regierung gelungen ist, den Wohlfahrtsstaat zu modernisieren und dabei Armut und soziale Ausgrenzung zu bekämpfen. Die Politik der Labour-Regierung, so wird gezeigt, hat zu einer erheblichen Modernisierung Großbritanniens in diesem Bereich geführt. Hierbei sind allerdings verschiedene, sich teilweise gegenseitig widersprechende Ansätze wirksam geworden. Einerseits kann die Labour-Regierung Rekordzahlen bei der Beschäftigung verbuchen. Andererseits hat sich die Kluft zwischen den reichsten und den ärmsten Bevölkerungsschichten kaum verringert, Armut ist nach wie vor weit verbreitet und am Phänomen der sozialen Ausgrenzung hat sich kaum etwas verändert. Im Kern kann New Labours Strategie zur Bekämpfung von Armut und Ausgrenzung als arbeitszentriert gelten, sie weist jedoch auch redistributive und disziplinierende Elemente auf. (ICE2)