Suchergebnisse

Labor market policies have been re-configured during the "activation turn" in labor market policy-making in the 1990s. This included restricting behavioral requirements for job seekers and benefit claimants, but also improving services (e.g. better placement services). In a nutshell, the "rights and responsibilities" of jobseekers and labor market participants were re-balanced. To date, there is is no indicator that could capture this in a quantitative way. This paper sets out to fill this gap. Using a number of quantitative indicators for 20 core OECD countries, it is shown what instruments countries use and how they balance instruments that either enforce labor market participation or enable to participate. It is shown that countries are overall rather similar with regard to the degree of enforcement (responsibilities), but differ with regard to the support (rights) they offer. Despite similarities and differences transcending welfare regimes, three "worlds of activation" can be distinguished.

The advanced democracies of Europe, North America, and Australasia have gotten tough on unemployment. Since the mid- to late-1970s, they started to put greater pressure on the unemployed by reducing the time for which unemployment benefits were paid, by imposing stricter job-search requirements, by extending the range of jobs considered suitable for claimants, and by tightening the penalties for non-compliance with these rules. This dissertation addresses several important gaps in the existing research on the politics of these 'demanding' reforms. It overcomes a key limitation of previous research, the lack of systematic comparative data, by drawing on two novel datasets on demanding unemployment benefit reforms. Four essays provide novel insights about the changes that have been introduced, about the determinants of voter attitudes, and about the roles of economic conditions and the type of government. The first paper shows that, while the unemployed are indeed under greater pressure to seek and accept work, this has not led to a complete erosion of claimant rights. Not only are many rules and provisions now formulated more precisely, making enforcement more predictable, but some protective provisions have actually been strengthened. The second paper shows that tighter sanctions are introduced in order to address the concerns of voters about overspending on social protection in austere times. The third paper shows that politically weak governments tend to compensate those who are hurt by demanding reforms by expanding labor market training programs, while this is not the case for governments who are in a stronger position. The fourth and final paper shows that the attitudes of voters toward demanding reforms are driven by different considerations, depending on whether such reforms are being introduced or not.

Analyses of data that include observations of multiple countries over longer periods of time--time-series cross-section data--have become an important tool for researchers in comparative politics, international relations, and many other fields. Such analyses are challenging, however. Researchers using time-series cross-section data may, for instance, experience that their results change radically once they make (seemingly) small changes to their regression models. In this Case Study, we explain how we went about our own analysis of time-series cross-section data related to welfare state reforms, why we chose our strategy, which problems we encountered, and how we dealt with them. We also provide a list of recommendations for researchers wishing to use time-series cross-section data that can help them make robust and valid inferences.

This paper presents new information on activity-related eligibility criteria for unemployment and related benefits in OECD and EU countries in 2017, comparing the strictness of "demanding" elements built into unemployment benefits across countries and over time. Eligibility criteria for unemployment benefits determine what claimants need to do to successfully claim benefits initially or to continue receiving them. Benefit systems feature specific rules that define the type of job offers that claimants need to accept, requirements for reporting on the outcomes of independent job-search efforts, obligations to participate in active labour market programmes, as well as sanctions for failing to meet these requirements. Such rules aim to strengthen incentives to look for, prepare for, and accept employment. They may also be used as a targeting device to reduce demands on benefit systems, and on associated employment services. While this may serve to limit support to genuine jobseekers, strict requirements can also exclude some intended recipients from financial and re-employment support, e.g., by discouraging them from applying. This paper presents detailed information on policy rules in 2017, summarises them into an overall policy indicator of eligibility strictness, and gauges recent policy trends by documenting changes in the strictness measures. A novelty is the inclusion of lower-tier unemployment or social assistance benefits in the compilation of policy rules. Results document a large number of reforms enacted after the Great Recession and suggest a slight convergence of policy rules across countries even though overall measures of the strictness of activity-related eligibility criteria have remained broadly unchanged during the recent past. In countries with multiple layers of support for the unemployed, availability requirements tend to be more demanding for lower-tier assistance benefits, while sanction rules tend to be more stringent for first-tier programmes.

This paper examines unemployment benefit reforms in twenty-five advanced democracies between the middle of the 1980s and the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. The paper's main argument is that the type of government – coalition or single-party – has an effect on whether cutbacks in social benefits are combined with compensating measures that mitigate the negative effects of the cuts. We show empirically that when cuts in unemployment benefit duration were made by coalition governments, spending on training programs tended to increase, but when cuts in duration were made by single-party governments, training spending tended to decrease. This pattern suggests that coalition governments, but not single-party governments, use compensation mechanisms to build political support for labor market reforms.

Compared to their male counterparts, refugee women exhibit low employment rates in many countries. Discrimination by recruiters could possibly explain this phenomenon, but thus far, there is little direct evidence on this. This study addresses this gap. We develop a set of hypotheses about the effects of gender and family status on refugees' labor market integration, and then test these hypotheses using data from an original survey experiment administered in 2019 to online panels of recruiters in three major refugee-receiving countries (Germany, Austria, and Sweden). We find that recruiters indeed prefer female over male refugees across different job types, all else equal. However, we also find evidence of a disadvantage connected with motherhood among refugees. Overall, our findings raise doubts about the relevance of discrimination as an explanation for the observed employment gap between male and female refugees.

Whether and under which conditions immigrants should be admitted and obtain access to employment and social security is an issue of continuously high political salience across the advanced democracies. Unions and employers, as traditionally influential actors in immigration and social policymaking, have important roles to play in this area, but their exact preferences, strategies and behaviour are theoretically difficult to determine and are still only partly understood. This article outlines a series of research problems regarding the roles of social partners in the social and economic integration of immigrants and discusses how the articles contained in this special issue address these problems.

This contribution investigates public attitudes toward providing financial help to the self-employed, a less well-researched area in the otherwise vibrant literature on welfare state attitudes. We analyse to what extent the self-employed themselves soften their general anti-statist stance in times of need, and how the public thinks about supporting those who usually tend to oppose government interventions. To answer these questions, we study public attitudes towards providing financial aid to the self-employed during the lockdowns adopted in response to the COVID pandemic in Switzerland, using survey data collected in the spring and in the autumn of 2020. The results show that most respondents favour the provision of financial support. In addition, the self-employed are the staunchest supporters of the more generous forms of help, like non-refundable payments. We conclude that, when exposed to significant economic risk, need and interests override ideological preferences for less state intervention.

AbstractHow do the labor market risks associated with technological change affect policy preferences? We argue that higher perceptions of technology-related risks should increase support for compensation and decrease support for social investment. We expect the opposite effect for individuals who use technology constantly at work, have a university degree and earn higher incomes. However, as the perception of technology-related employment risks in the latter group of individuals increases, so does their preference for compensatory and protective policy solutions to technological change. Our expectations are confirmed by novel data from a survey of 24 diverse Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries that includes specifically designed questions on technology-related risks and policy preferences. The results suggest that technology-related risks not only correlate with certain demographic and occupational characteristics, but also cross-cut them. Thus, technology-related risks might not only become a source of new cleavages between the losers and winners of technological change, but also the basis for new cross-class coalitions.

AbstractWith the arrival of vaccines against the novel coronavirus in late 2020, the issue of how vaccines should be distributed and which groups should be prioritized has become salient. We study popular attitudes toward the distribution of COVID‐19 vaccines and how these have changed over the course of the pandemic in Switzerland, drawing on data from two rounds of an original public opinion survey conducted in the spring and winter of 2020. We find that the public supports prioritizing vulnerable groups such as health care workers or the elderly. We also find a notable degree of cross‐generational solidarity: younger age cohorts prioritize the elderly, while older groups prioritize (typically younger) health care workers. We then examine whether this finding is not in fact driven by vaccine hesitancy. This is not the case for older age groups, whose solidarity thus seems to be genuine. Vaccine hesitancy is an issue among younger groups, however.