Giuliano Bonoli
Biographic Data
| ID | 253200 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Giuliano Bonoli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Giuliano |
| FAMILY NAME | Bonoli |
| SIGNATURE | BONOLI G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Lausanne |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2832-0984 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 86 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1241 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 81 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
Do institutions matter for refugee integration? a comparison of case worker integration strategies in Switzerland and Canada
In this paper we explore the extent to which differences in institutional settings, with a focus on the human capital formation regime, shape the integration trajectories proposed to recently- arrived refugees. To do so, we compare two countries, Switzerland and Canada, which are committed to implementing integration policy for refugees and belong to two different human capital formation regimes. We investigate whether ending up in a country with…
Moral Dilemmas in the Practice of Aspiration Management: Coping Strategies Among Swiss and Finnish Street‐Level Bureaucrats Providing Integration Services to Refugees and Migrants
This paper examines the moral dilemmas faced by street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) as they engage in aspiration management while providing integration services to migrants and refugees. European integration policies prioritise rapid employment, often directing refugees toward low‐skilled jobs, which may conflict with their higher professional and educational aspirations. Drawing on case studies from Switzerland and Finland, we investigate how SLBs n…
Skill recognition as social investment. Employer perceptions of the value of alternative credentials in the childcare sector
In advanced knowledge economies, access to quality employment depends crucially on skills. The social investment perspective has recognised this and promotes skill development as a means of dealing with social problems. However, possessing skills may not be enough. Individuals who have been educated abroad or have acquired skills through experience face the risk of labour market marginalisation. To address this issue, most European countries have…
Re‐Skilling in the Age of Skill Shortage: Adult Education Rather Than Active Labor Market Policy
European economies face the task of providing the necessary skills for the “twin transition” in a period of skill shortage. As a result, we may expect countries to reorient their labor market policy towards re‐skilling. We look for evidence of a reorientation in two relevant policy fields: active labor market policy (ALMP) and adult education (AE). We explore general trends in both fields based on quantitative indicators and compare recent policy…
Welfare solidarity in multi-ethnic societies: Can Social Investment Reduce the Anti-Immigrant Bias
Migration flows have diversified western societies, challenging the political viability of inclusive welfare states. This is very clear in research on perceptions of deservingness to social benefits, which consistently shows that immigrants are considered as less deserving of collective help than natives. At the same time, welfare states are being reoriented towards social investment, putting more emphasis on services that strengthen human capita…
Who deserves the spot? Attitudes towards priorities in access to subsidised childcare
Integration through vocational training. Promoting refugees’ access to apprenticeships in a collective skill formation system
With this paper we want to contribute to the debate on the usage of vocational training as a tool to promote the integration of disadvantaged groups. We focus in particular on programmes that target refugees and highlight the organisational and coordination challenges that must be addressed in order to develop such programmes. Relying on knowledge developed by scholars of collective skill formation and by those who have studied policy coordinatio…
Upskilling as integration policy: Making the most of refugees' human capital in a context of skill shortage
The integration of refugees is a serious social policy problem in many advanced countries, and current trends suggest that this issue is unlikely to disappear soon. At the same time, these countries are also experiencing skill shortages in expanding sectors. These twin pressures create an opportunity to use education as a tool to pursue refugee integration. We investigate how refugees are trained in a country, Switzerland, where employers play an…
Normative, rational, and relational motives in crosscoalition coordination for a VET refugee programme
Shared beliefs are seen as a basis for policy coordination in the literature. Actors sharing beliefs coordinate their activities in order to translate their beliefs into policies. However, the literature shows that actors also coordinate for policy change across such belief coalitions for diverse reasons. Drawing on the literature on incentives in collective action organisations, we systematise these motives. We argue that rational motivations, s…
Conditional Solidarity - Attitudes Towards Support for Others During the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to study how humans allocate scarce resources in times of hardship. We study public preferences regarding who should get access to government aid for the self-employed, a bed in the intensive care unit, and permission to cross the border using original conjoint survey experiments administered to an incentivised online panel in Switzerland during the first and second waves of the pandemic in 2020…
Collective Skill Formation in the Knowledge Economy
Collective Skill Formation in a Knowledge Economy: Challenges and Dilemmas
Collective skill formation systems have been long hailed for their capacity to provide high quality vocational training, thereby straddling the twin demands of supplying relevant skills to employers and offering access to stable and relatively well-paid jobs for individuals without university education. Yet the rise of the knowledge economy has put a question mark over whether such efficient and solidaristic outcomes are still sustainable. This i…
Sometimes needs change minds: Interests and values as determinants of attitudes towards state support for the self-employed during the Covid-19 crisis
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 publ…
A Recast Framework for Welfare Deservingness Perceptions
Many important societal debates revolve around questions of deservingness, especially when it comes to debates related to inequality and social protection. It is therefore unsurprising that a growing body of research spanning the social and political sciences is concerned with the determinants of deservingness perceptions. In this contribution, we engage with the currently central theoretical framework used in deservingness research and point out…
Popular Attitudes Toward the Distribution of Vaccines Against Covid‐19: The Swiss Case
With 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 th…
The limits of decentralized cooperation: Promoting Inclusiveness in Collective Skill Formation Systems
This paper examines how collective skill formation systems balance economic objectives related to competitiveness and social objectives related to inclusion. Based on a simple theoretical model, we argue that there are clear limits to how much inclusiveness can be achieved in collective skill formation systems. Firms are generally successful in resisting pressure by governments to be more inclusive because they benefit from their structural power…
Public attitudes toward pandemic triage: Evidence from conjoint survey experiments in Switzerland
The question of how to implement medical triages has become highly salient during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to be actively discussed. It is important to know how members of the general public think about this issue. For one, knowledge about the public's standpoint can help resolve important questions where ethical considerations are by themselves not sufficient, for instance whether the patient's age should matter. It can also help iden…
Good intentions and Matthew effects: Access biases in participation in active labour market policies
The objective of this contribution is to investigate whether active labour market policies manage to reach the most disadvantaged individuals or are subjected to Matthew effects in the shape of access biases. We investigate this question for two typically disadvantaged groups of unemployed people: the low-skilled and immigrants. Our analysis is based on a systematic review of 87 evaluations of active labour market policies (ALMPs) covering 14 dif…
Immigrant integration and social investment
This article offers an overview of scholarship on social investment policies in relation to the integration of immigrants and the role they can play in multicultural societies. At first sight, social investment is a promising strategy to deal with the inequalities in human capital and life chances that plague multicultural societies. However, on the basis of the available knowledge, the article shows that the benefit of social investment interven…
More than noise? Explaining instances of minority preference in correspondence studies of recruitment
Published online: 25 Jul 2018
What Signals Do Employers Use When Hiring? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in the Apprenticeship Market
How do employers use different types of signals-that is, information believed to be associated with productivity-when hiring apprentices? We use a survey experiment in Switzerland-a country with a well-developed dual training system-to study employers' hiring behaviour. The results reveal that whenever possible, employers resort to direct signals, i.e. information such as educational credentials and aptitude test scores, when making hiring decisi…
Bringing firms on board. Inclusiveness of the dual apprenticeship systems in Germany, Switzerland and Denmark
In dual vocational education and training (VET) systems, the state and employers collaborate in order to meet a country’s needs in terms of education for youth and professional skills for the labour market. These systems are considered as effective tools to lower youth unemployment. However, since firms in dual VET systems select the apprentices, not every candidate gets access to in‐firm training. Consequently, governments develop measures that …
The Matching Hierarchies Model: Evidence from a Survey Experiment on Employers’ Hiring Intent Regarding Immigrant Applicants
We seek to understand why immigrants encounter labor market integration difficulties and thus propose a model that combines ethnic and occupational rankings to predict which candidates employers will favor for particular occupations (a matching hierarchies model). In a Swiss survey experiment, we found that employers’ evaluations of non-natives follow sociocultural distance perceptions and that a non-native background is a disadvantage mainly in …
A federalist’s dilemma: Trade-offs between social legitimacy and budget responsibility in multi-tiered welfare states
In multi-tiered states, subnational policymakers face a dilemma: on one hand, they must ensure the social legitimacy of their subnational unit by owning relevant policies including their potentially negative consequences; on the other, they have to manage their budget responsibly, which limits the scope of policy development. We study this dilemma in relation to social policies, by examining how the constituent units and municipalities in Germany…
Good intentions and Matthew effects: Access Biases in Participation in Active Labour Market Policies
The objective of this contribution is to investigate whether active labour market policies manage to reach the most disadvantaged individuals or are subjected to Matthew effects in the shape of access biases. We investigate this question for two typically disadvantaged groups of unemployed people: the low-skilled and immigrants. Our analysis is based on a systematic review of 87 evaluations of active labour market policies (ALMPs) covering 14 dif…
The politics of the new social policies: Providing Coverage Against New Social Risks in Mature Welfare States
English Current socioeconomic transformations that have brought into existence postindustrial labour market and family structures are generating new social needs and demands, labelled new social risks (NSRs). These include reconciling work and family life, lone parenthood, long-term unemployment, being among the working poor, or having insufficient social security coverage. These new risks tend to be concentrated among women, the young and the lo…
Time Matters: Postindustrialization, New Social Risks, and Welfare State Adaptation in Advanced Industrial Democracies
Western welfare states were built during the postwar years, with one key objective: to protect family (male) breadwinners against the consequences of losing their ability to extract an income from the labor market. Structures of social risk, however, have changed dramatically since then, so that current social risks include precarious employment, long-term unemployment, being a working poor, single parenthood, or inability to reconcile work and f…
The Political Economy of Active Labor-Market Policy
Active labor-market policies (ALMPs) have developed significantly over the past two decades across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, with substantial cross-national differences in terms of both extent and overall orientation. The objective of this article is to account for cross-national variation in this policy field. It starts by reviewing existing scholarship concerning political, institutional, and ideati…
Classifying Welfare States: A Two-dimension Approach
This article begins with a survey of some influential classifications of welfare states based on different dimensions of social policy. Advantages and shortcomings are pointed out in relation to each classification reviewed. It is argued that none of these single-dimension classifications is in fact adequate to understand past and current developments in European social policy. An alternative classification, which combines elements of the ones re…
Good intentions and Matthew effects: Access Biases in Participation in Active Labour Market Policies
The objective of this contribution is to investigate whether active labour market policies manage to reach the most disadvantaged individuals or are subjected to Matthew effects in the shape of access biases. We investigate this question for two typically disadvantaged groups of unemployed people: the low-skilled and immigrants. Our analysis is based on a systematic review of 87 evaluations of active labour market policies (ALMPs) covering 14 dif…
The political economy of childcare in OECD countries: Explaining cross‐national variation in spending and coverage rates
If childcare policy has become topical in most OECD countries over the last ten years or so, actual developments display huge cross‐national variations. Countries like Sweden and Denmark spend around 2 per cent of GDP on this service, and provide affordable childcare places to most children below school age. At the other extreme, in Southern Europe, only around 10 per cent of this age group has access to formal daycare. Against this background, t…
Two Worlds of Pension Reform in Western Europe
The European pension policy landscape is generally depicted as a major building site, where governments are scaling back the pension systems they have inherited from the postwar years in order to adapt them to population aging. Europe is often seen as a graying continent that will have to face the effects of a demographic time bomb and that needs to reduce its pension commitments radically. As a matter of fact, in the last decade pension policy h…
Swiss worlds of welfare
Are there different worlds of welfare in Swiss cantons, analogous to different national welfare state regimes? Are the welfare regimes made up of functionally related sub-regimes in the field of employment, education, taxation and social security, as argued in recent analyses of 'varieties of capitalism'? And can the variations between such cantonal welfare regimes be explained by the same politico-institutional variables that account for the dev…
The limits of decentralized cooperation: Promoting Inclusiveness in Collective Skill Formation Systems
This paper examines how collective skill formation systems balance economic objectives related to competitiveness and social objectives related to inclusion. Based on a simple theoretical model, we argue that there are clear limits to how much inclusiveness can be achieved in collective skill formation systems. Firms are generally successful in resisting pressure by governments to be more inclusive because they benefit from their structural power…
Social Policy through Labor Markets: Understanding National Differences in the Provision of Economic Security to Wage Earners
Recent work in comparative political economy has emphasized the existence of functional equivalents to the welfare state in the area of labor market policy. In many European countries, in Australia, and in New Zealand, labor laws, minimum wages, and collective agreements have traditionally played an important role in guaranteeing a certain level of economic security for workers and their families. This article tries to explain why different count…
When Past Reforms Open New Opportunities: Comparing Old‐age Insurance Reforms in Bismarckian Welfare Systems
France, Italy, Germany, Austria and Spain have all gone through several waves of pension reforms both in the 1990s and in the early 2000s. Comparing the politics of these reforms shows some similar trends: reforms were usually postponed until European integration and/or economic recession forced governments to act. Before the first wave of reforms, the main form of ‘action’ had been to increase payroll taxes to finance pensions. In the 1990s, ref…
Pension politics in France: Patterns of co‐operation and conflict in two recent reforms
This article looks at the political side of pension reform in France. Policy makers are caught between two contrasting pressures: increasing expenditure on the one hand, and strong public support for existing arrangements on the other. In the last few years, the government has attempted to deal with the issue on two occasions, with rather different results. First, in 1993 a pension reform was successfully adopted after negotiations with the union…
Availability, Cost or Culture? Obstacles to Childcare Services for Low-Income Families
Recent research has highlighted the existence of a social bias in the extent to which children have access to childcare. In general, children living in higher income households are more likely to be cared for in childcare centres. While the existence of a social bias in access to childcare services has been clearly demonstrated, we currently lack a clear explanation as to why this is the case. This paper uses a unique dataset based on survey data…
How do welfare states change? Institutions and their impact on the politics of welfare state reform in Western Europe
In the 1980s and 1990s West European welfare states were exposed to strong pressures to ‘renovate’, to retrench. However, the European social policy landscape today looks as varied as it did at any time during the 20th century. ‘New institutionalism’ seems particularly helpful to account for the divergent outcomes observed, and it explains the resistance of different structures to change through past commitments, the political weight of welfare c…
A Recast Framework for Welfare Deservingness Perceptions
Many important societal debates revolve around questions of deservingness, especially when it comes to debates related to inequality and social protection. It is therefore unsurprising that a growing body of research spanning the social and political sciences is concerned with the determinants of deservingness perceptions. In this contribution, we engage with the currently central theoretical framework used in deservingness research and point out…
Social expenditure in the 1990s: Data and Determinants
English This article examines patterns of social expenditure change in 21 OECD countries in the period 1990-2001 and seeks to uncover their determinants. Key trends identified include an overall stability of spending patterns, a marginal shift from transfers to inkind service provision and emergent signs of increased control of age-related spending. Important conclusions derived from a multivariate analysis include the major impact of economic gr…
The Matching Hierarchies Model: Evidence from a Survey Experiment on Employers’ Hiring Intent Regarding Immigrant Applicants
We seek to understand why immigrants encounter labor market integration difficulties and thus propose a model that combines ethnic and occupational rankings to predict which candidates employers will favor for particular occupations (a matching hierarchies model). In a Swiss survey experiment, we found that employers’ evaluations of non-natives follow sociocultural distance perceptions and that a non-native background is a disadvantage mainly in …
Phénomènes de Path Dependence et réformes des systèmes de protection sociale
Dans cette discussion critique du concept de path dependence, et plus particulièrement de son application à l'étude des réformes des systèmes de protection sociale, il apparaît que les analyses des changements de politiques sociales en termes de path dependence exagèrent les phénomènes de stabilité politique et de persistance des arrangements institutionnels d'après guerre. Ces analyses ne prennent pas en compte la possibilité de réformes innovat…
Changing the Politics of Social Programmes: Innovative Change in British and French Welfare Reforms
The first wave of welfare state reform, which occurred during the 1980s in Britain and the US, and in the early 1990s in continental Europe, has left most social protection systems to a large extent intact. However, some of the changes adopted then have provided new op portunities for reform, that are currently being exploited by the reformers of the late 1990s. In this second wave of reform, the results achieved might be more substantial. The ar…
Inequality in social capital and labour market re-entry among unemployed people
Who Wants What From the Welfare State
This article investigates socio-structural cleavages in relation to social policies in Switzerland. It examines the extent to which vertical stratification, age and gender explain variation in individual social policy preferences. We use survey data on reported voting behaviour in 22 direct democratic referendums on distributional issues between 1981 and 2004. Our two main findings are the following: (1) age seems to be the most relevant line of …
Why do immigrants have longer periods of unemployment? Swiss evidence
Immigrant groups, especially those originating from non‐European countries, tend to experience disadvantages in the labour market and to be overrepresented among the recipients of welfare benefits in many European countries. In the public debate, this outcome is sometimes explained with reference to migration‐related factors such as weaker work values than natives (i.e., acceptability of remaining on benefits), smaller and lower quality of inform…
Statistical Discrimination and Employers' Recruitment
This paper deals with the recruitment strategies of employers in the low-skilled segment of the labour market. We focus on low-skilled workers because they are overrepresented among jobless people and constitute the bulk of the clientele included in various activation and labour market programmes. A better understanding of the constraints and opportunities of interventions in this labour market segment may help improve their quality and effective…
Public Attitudes to Social Protection and Political Economy Traditions in Western Europe
Studies of public attitudes to the welfare state have generally failed to uncover consistent and clear country variations in relation to patterns of support for different social programmes. This finding contrasts with the important degree of cross-national variation that exists with regard to the institutional structure of welfare states. This article argues that in order to capture the extent of cross-national variation in public attitudes to so…
Federalism and Welfare to Work in Switzerland: The Development of Active Social Policies in a Fragmented Welfare State
This article is concerned with the impact that federal structures have on the development of welfare to work or activation policies. More precisely, it argues that the incentives and the risks associated with a division of responsibilities among different jurisdictions may constitute an obstacle to broad reforms that promote labor market participation of nonworking benefit recipients. This argument is illustrated with a case study discussing poli…
Entre Bismarck et Beveridge: « Crises » de la sécunté sociale et politique(s)
Entre Bismarck et Beveridge « Crises » de la sécunté sociale et politique(s)
peu interprétés en termes de « crise de sécurité sociale ». Cette « crise » semble traduire et impliquer des changements profonds, d'organisation, de procédures, de fonctions et même de principes. La triple analyse des « crises » (financières, économiques, sociales) de la sécurité sociale replacée dans le contexte politique constitué de modalités nouvelles d'intervention publique dans le domaine social, et d'affrontement entre groupes d'acteurs a…
Politics Against Convergence? Current Trends in European Social Policy
In this article, we look at the issue of convergence in social policymaking within EU member‐states. Proponents of the convergence thesis argue that since European welfare states are facing similar socioeconomic challenges, they are likely to develop common response strategies. Our analysis, based on a survey carried out among policymakers, looks at political debates on the future of social protection in four EU member states. The main focus is o…
Reclaiming Welfare: The Politics of French Social Protection Reform
As the 1995 wave of strikes has powerfully shown, the French welfare state is currently the object of a political struggle between sections of the labour movement and the government. In this article, we look at the politics of the current transformation of the French social protection system. First, we describe the key features of welfare institutions; second, we look at the debate on the socio-economic problems that welfare is currently facing. …
Pension politics in France: Patterns of co‐operation and conflict in two recent reforms
This article looks at the political side of pension reform in France. Policy makers are caught between two contrasting pressures: increasing expenditure on the one hand, and strong public support for existing arrangements on the other. In the last few years, the government has attempted to deal with the issue on two occasions, with rather different results. First, in 1993 a pension reform was successfully adopted after negotiations with the union…
Classifying Welfare States: A Two-dimension Approach
This article begins with a survey of some influential classifications of welfare states based on different dimensions of social policy. Advantages and shortcomings are pointed out in relation to each classification reviewed. It is argued that none of these single-dimension classifications is in fact adequate to understand past and current developments in European social policy. An alternative classification, which combines elements of the ones re…
Changing the Politics of Social Programmes: Innovative Change in British and French Welfare Reforms
The first wave of welfare state reform, which occurred during the 1980s in Britain and the US, and in the early 1990s in continental Europe, has left most social protection systems to a large extent intact. However, some of the changes adopted then have provided new op portunities for reform, that are currently being exploited by the reformers of the late 1990s. In this second wave of reform, the results achieved might be more substantial. The ar…
La réforme de l'Etat social Suisse: Contraintes institutionnelles et opportunités de changement
La politique sociale suisse a connu, pendant les années 90, une période de changements législatifs importants. Ce mouvement de réforme trouve son origine dans la crise des finances publiques, qui s'est répercutée sur les assurances sociales, et dans la montée du chômage. Dans ce contexte, malgré un cadre institutionnel comportant plusieurs lieux de veto, les autorités politiques suisses sont parvenues à adopter une série de réformes importantes. …
Phénomènes de Path Dependence et réformes des systèmes de protection sociale
Dans cette discussion critique du concept de path dependence, et plus particulièrement de son application à l'étude des réformes des systèmes de protection sociale, il apparaît que les analyses des changements de politiques sociales en termes de path dependence exagèrent les phénomènes de stabilité politique et de persistance des arrangements institutionnels d'après guerre. Ces analyses ne prennent pas en compte la possibilité de réformes innovat…
Switzerland Adjustment Politics Within Institutional Constraints
Among ‘Continental’ welfare states, Switzerland had and has the highest per capita income and the highest employment ratio in the group of advanced welfare states included in this study. Its export‐oriented industries and services have remained highly competitive; its levels of taxation and welfare expenditures are low; and its labour‐market institutions are highly flexible. Nevertheless, Switzerland suffered severe job losses in the first oil‐pr…
The Politics of Pension Reform: Institutions and Policy Change in Western Europe
European pension systems are increasingly under pressure. In this book Giuliano Bonoli examines policymakers' efforts to cope in a context where they are caught between public support for existing pension schemes and the expected inability to sustain current arrangements in the long run. The book explores the impact of formal institutions and decision-making procedures on welfare retrenchment and modernisation. It compares and assesses the proces…
Public Attitudes to Social Protection and Political Economy Traditions in Western Europe
Studies of public attitudes to the welfare state have generally failed to uncover consistent and clear country variations in relation to patterns of support for different social programmes. This finding contrasts with the important degree of cross-national variation that exists with regard to the institutional structure of welfare states. This article argues that in order to capture the extent of cross-national variation in public attitudes to so…
How do welfare states change? Institutions and their impact on the politics of welfare state reform in Western Europe
In the 1980s and 1990s West European welfare states were exposed to strong pressures to ‘renovate’, to retrench. However, the European social policy landscape today looks as varied as it did at any time during the 20th century. ‘New institutionalism’ seems particularly helpful to account for the divergent outcomes observed, and it explains the resistance of different structures to change through past commitments, the political weight of welfare c…
The Politics of Pension Reform: Institutions and Policy Change in Western Europe
Political Institutions, Veto Points, and the Process of Welfare State Adaptation
This is the second of three chapters on the implications of electoral politics and the design of political institutions for welfare state adjustment. Bonoli explores the relationship between political institutions and patterns of welfare retrenchment, both on a theoretical level and on the basis of the observation of welfare reforms adopted in countries characterized by different levels of institutional power concentration. The main empirical foc…
The New Swiss Employment Puzzle
Switzerland has traditionally had a better employment performance than most other European countries. In the past, this could be explained with a specific foreign workers policy and to the buffer role women played in the labor market. In the late 1990s, however, foreigners and women occupy a considerably more stable position in the labor force than in the 1970s. Therefore, other factors must explain this good employment performance. International…
Third Ways in Europe
It has been claimed that there is a global Third Way (TW) debate. Giddens (2001: 1) writes that, ‘Across the world left of centre governments are attempting to institute third way programmes – whether or not they favour the term itself. ‘ He claims that there are self-declared third way parties in power in the UK, New Zealand, Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, among many other countries. Similarly, according to Blair (2001), the ideas a…
Two Worlds of Pension Reform in Western Europe
The European pension policy landscape is generally depicted as a major building site, where governments are scaling back the pension systems they have inherited from the postwar years in order to adapt them to population aging. Europe is often seen as a graying continent that will have to face the effects of a demographic time bomb and that needs to reduce its pension commitments radically. As a matter of fact, in the last decade pension policy h…
L'Etat social suisse face aux nouveaux risques sociaux: Genèse et déterminants de l'adoption du programme d'impulsion pour les structures de garde pour enfants bas age
In this article we highlight the factors and the mechanisms that influence decision making processes in the adoption of new social policies in Switzerland, on the basis of a recent example: the introduction in 2002 of a federal subsidy for new child care facilities. The article begins with a discussion of various hypotheses, inspired from the social policy literature. It then reviews the policymaking process that lead to the adoption of the new p…
Social Policy through Labor Markets: Understanding National Differences in the Provision of Economic Security to Wage Earners
Recent work in comparative political economy has emphasized the existence of functional equivalents to the welfare state in the area of labor market policy. In many European countries, in Australia, and in New Zealand, labor laws, minimum wages, and collective agreements have traditionally played an important role in guaranteeing a certain level of economic security for workers and their families. This article tries to explain why different count…
Federalisme et protection sociale en suisse: Entre Immobilisme Et Innovation
Cet article propose de revisiter les analyses qui considèrent la Suisse comme l’un des pays occidentaux où les politiques sociales sont le moins développées, et qui imputent généralement ce faible développement à la nature fédérale du système politique helvétique. Les auteurs invitent à relativiser cette vision, en montrant qu’elle tient trop peu compte des politiques sociales menées à l’échelon cantonal, qui sont remarquablement développées. Plu…
Social Democratic Party Policies in Contemporary Europe
1. Social Democracy in Europe: Renewal or Retreat? Martin Powell 2. Policy Changes of European Social Democrats, 1945-1998 Andrea Volkens 3. Models of Citizenship and Social Democratic Policies Dietmar Braun and Oliver Giraud 4. Social Policy in Belgium and the Netherlands: Third Way or Not? Renaat Hoop 5. The Portuguese Socialists and the Third Way Marina Costa Lobo and Pedro C. Magalhaes 6. Turning Ideas into Policies: Implementing Modern Socia…
Swiss worlds of welfare
Are there different worlds of welfare in Swiss cantons, analogous to different national welfare state regimes? Are the welfare regimes made up of functionally related sub-regimes in the field of employment, education, taxation and social security, as argued in recent analyses of 'varieties of capitalism'? And can the variations between such cantonal welfare regimes be explained by the same politico-institutional variables that account for the dev…
Social policies in Switzerland and Japan: Managing Change in Liberal‐Conservative Welfare States
Both the Swiss and the Japanese welfare states are difficult to classify in any one of the most widespread typologies, as each of the two countries combines features that are typical of the liberal model, such as a large private sector role in the delivery of welfare, with aspects that are more reminiscent of the conservative model. These include a social insurance system geared toward status preservation and low employment rates for mothers. In …
Labour Market and Social Protection Reforms in International Perspective: Parallel or Converging Tracks
Political science (75 works) · Economics (69 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (58 works) · Law (39 works) · Politics (38 works) · Economic growth (34 works) · Welfare (30 works) · Welfare state (30 works) · Labour economics (25 works) · Market economy (25 works)