Suchergebnisse

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Tables and Figures -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Euro-Austerity and Europe's Welfare States -- 2 The Institutionalization of Euro-Austerity -- 3 From Euro-Austerity to Welfare State Retrenchment? -- 4 Euro-Austerity and the Political Economy of Reform in Belgium -- 5 Euro-Austerity and the Political Economy of Reform in Greece -- 6 Euro-Austerity and the Political Economy of Reform in Italy -- 7 Euro-Austerity and the Comparative Political Economy of Reform -- 8 Euro-Austerity – Episode II -- Notes -- References -- Index

AbstractThis article explores the politics of policy change by focusing on agenda setting through the lens of the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA), which has been travelling to ever-larger geographies. We aim to produce signposts for future case studies of policy change by bringing together insights from MSA and New Institutionalism. We ask: Which institutions should we focus on when studying agenda-setting politics in different geographies? How do these institutions shape MSA's structural elements – problem stream, policy stream, political stream, policy windows, and policy entrepreneur? In answering these questions, we hope to weave not only formal but also informal institutions into MSA's backbone more tightly. We bring together diverse case studies that are sufficiently abstract and whose findings travel easily across other institutional contexts. We revisit the structural elements of MSA and illustrate how key formal and informal rules structure the politics in these structural elements.

This paper looks at contemporary social policy developments in Greece and Turkey in light of exogenous economic pressures in the period 1980s-2000s. Three sources of exogenous pressures, which allegedly lead to a reduction in social expenditure budgets, are identified: globalization, the process of European integration in its EMU phase and IMF conditionality. Our case studies show that both countries were exposed to impending pressures of economic liberalization, but these exogenous pressures have not resulted in anticipated social policy outcomes. First, social expenditure levels in both countries have not declined; instead, we report rising trends in expenditure. Secondly, and especially in the case of Greece, the 20-year period analyzed shows an expansion in social welfare programmes. Thirdly, those outcomes are mediated by salient domestic political factors, such as democratization and liberalization of the political space. Finally, the positive association between an expanding welfare state and the presence of social democratic/socialist governments, reported in the literature, seems vindicated in our research.

There is widespread consensus in the comparative welfare state literature that the welfare state can be best conceptualized in terms of social rights of citizenship. The Social Citizenship Indicator Program (SCIP) and the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset (CWED), which rely on operational definitions of quantified legislated social rights, constitute centrepieces of this thriving research. As leading state-of-the-art tools for capturing welfare stateness, these two datasets are being widely used. Scholars in general have also been treating them as interchangeable measurement tools. Upon closer inspection, however, we discover that the two datasets point to contrasting images of welfare state change for certain countries and time periods. This article aims to contribute to the scholarly exchange on the validity problem in measuring welfare state generosity. The exchange has hitherto been confined to problems of dataset choice with respect to only replacement rates, a set of key indicators included in both datasets. However, there are 11 key non-replacement rate indicators SCIP and CWED have in common, whose convergent validity has yet to be questioned. We thus explore the convergent validity of these non-replacement rate indicators across the two datasets. We then replicate the two leading composite indexes (Decommodification Index (DI) and Benefit Generosity Index (BGI)) constructed on the basis of these indicators. We identify problems of invalidity manifested in discrepancies in non-replacement rate indicator scores and index values for DI and BGI. We show how these discrepancies could lead to contrasting assessments of welfare state change. We then identify a set of potential sources for these discrepancies, most of which are related to different operationalizations of similar concepts. We conclude by calling for more dialogue among developers of SCIP and CWED to further clarify their conceptual and operational points of departure.