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Political attempts to reform existing policies often fail to bring about substantial change. When they succeed, the new policy is heavily influenced by the pre‐existing policy path. This is confirmed by the story of Danish welfare reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, which can be explained in terms of their path dependency. In order to understand better the mechanisms of path dependency I draw on the fundamental insights of the new institutionalisms: rational choice institutionalism, historical institutionalism, and social constructivist institutionalism. The article begins with a brief presentation and comparison of the three new institutionalisms. It then discusses the dialectics of path shaping and path dependency before seeking to explicate the mechanisms of path dependency. Finally, the various accounts of path dependency are applied in an empirical study of the failure of welfare retrenchment in the 1980s and the relatively successful restructuring of the welfare state in the 1990s.

Denmark has recently seen a significant drop in unemployment that has not been matched by any corresponding increase in inflation. This article assumes that this remarkable achievement is rooted in the ongoing transition from the Keynesian welfare state (KWS) to a Schumpeterian workfare regime (SWR). The article compares the main features of the KWS with those of the SWR. It analyses the economic and political pressures behind the transition from the KWS to a SWR, and argues that we need to focus on the discursive construction of these pressures in order to avoid the dangers associated with functionalist explanations of societal changes. It then goes on to analyse the introduction of workfare policies in Denmark. The central claim is that Denmark has adopted an offensive workfare strategy. Hence, in Denmark workfare is disarticulated from the neo-liberal context within which it is located in the UK and the US and rearticulated with the social-democratic and universalistic welfare model. This disarticulation and rearticulation has produced significant emphases on activation rather than benefit and minimum wage reductions; on improving the skills and work experience of the unemployed rather than merely increasing their mobility and job-searching efficiency; on training and education rather than work-for-benefit (quid pro quo ); on empowerment rather than control and punishment; and on broad workfare programmes rather than programmes which only target the unemployed. In addition, although it contains strong neocorporatist elements, the Danish workfare strategy can be characterized as a neo-statist strategy. The article concludes with some tentative remarks about the mix of political and institutional factors that contribute to explaining the particular Danish variant of the SWR, and about what we can learn from the Danish case.

Der vorliegende Beitrag versteht sich als ein Stück Futurologie, d.h. er untersucht und diskutiert einige der Aspekte der Zukunft des Wohlfahrtsstaats in den Gesellschaften Skandinaviens aus der Sicht der Regulationstheorie. Der Autor behandelt diese umfangreiche Problematik, indem er neuere Trends in Dänemark im Lichte der These eines Übergangs vom keynesianischen Wohlfahrtsstaat zum schumpeterianischen "Workfare-Staat" auswertet. Die Ausführungen beginnen mit einer kurzen Erörterung, wie der moderne Wohlfahrtsstaat zu definieren ist. Alsdann wird die sozio-politische Reorganisation des dänischen Wohlfahrtsstaates analysiert. Der Autor schließt mit einer kurzen Erörterung der Frage, wie die gegenwärtigen und zukünftigen Transformationen des modernen Wohlfahrtsstaates zu erklären sind. (ICE2)