Anton Hemerijck
Biographic Data
| ID | 292863 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anton Hemerijck |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anton |
| FAMILY NAME | Hemerijck |
| SIGNATURE | HEMERIJCK A |
| AFFILIATIONS | European University Institute |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8695-1250 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 388 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Policy complementarity or substitution? The joint employment effects of active labor market policy and early childhood education and care
Scholars have long argued that social policies affect people’s employment chances in interconnected ways, where a given policy intervention might have employment effects that are strengthened or dampened by other interventions. This article theorizes and empirically assesses how national active labor market polices (ALMP) and early childhood education and care (ECEC) interact in affecting individuals’ employment chances. The objective is to addre…
Gouvernabilité, inégalités et État-providence
Insécurité économique et inégalités complexifient la gouvernance des sociétés politiques et celle du système international. La substitution des dépenses de sécurité aux engagements sociaux de l’État-providence n’a donc pas de sens sur le long terme. Il faut plutôt orienter cet État-providence vers une protection renforçant la capacité de production, surtout en un temps où les modalités de production risquent d’être bouleversées par l’irruption de…
Capitalism, Democracy, and the Welfare State
This review essay focuses on the intimate, yet contingent, historical relationships between capitalism, democracy and the welfare state in the OECD region. Six landmark studies, published over the past decade, are reviewed: Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty and The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty ; Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology ; Torben Iversen and David…
The Continental Social Investment Turn: Sequencing Corrective and Transformative Welfare State Change in the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy
European welfare states have experienced a binary transformation characterized by recalibration of traditional social protection programs and expansion of employment-oriented social policies, favoring the emergence of dual-earner families. This article sheds a new light on the pathways leading to these transformations in continental Europe. Theoretically, we characterize continental European welfare states as a configuration of complementary and …
Stepping-stone solidarity: The normative foundation of the social investment welfare state
In this article, we explore the normative foundations of the social investment welfare state. Social investment welfare enhances ex ante individuals' opportunities and capabilities to resolve the social risks typical of post-industrial societies - via early childhood education and care, vocational training over the life course, active-labour-market capacity-building and policies for work-life balance, such as paid parental leave, lifelong learnin…
Who's Afraid of the Welfare State Now?
Subnational Social Investment in Three European Cities: An Exploratory Comparison
With the evolution towards more service-intensive social investment welfare states across Europe, research on the institutional capacities of subnational welfare provision is increasingly relevant. Based on a comparative case analysis of three post-industrial municipalities in Europe, this article harbors a two-pronged objective: first, empirically, to show how regional and local governance capabilities are crucial to effective SI policy delivery…
European Welfare States’ Detour(s) to Social Investment
Since the end of the twentieth century, European welfare states have been reconfiguring the basic policy mixes upon which they were built after 1945. In the process, the overarching social policy objective has shifted from fighting unemployment in the 1990s to promoting employment participation through social investment. This chapter introduces the concept of social investment as a key to understanding recent welfare state change in Europe, in an…
Responsive corporatism without political credit: Social concertation, constructive opposition and the long tenure of the Rutte II cabinet in the Netherlands (2012–2017)
This paper analyses the unexpected return of social concertation in the Netherlands under the Rutte II government (2012–2017). Despite political fragmentation, electoral volatility and intensified EU budgetary surveillance, between 2012 and 2017 the Netherlands witnessed several social pacts that proved vital to the enactment of long-awaited reforms, allowed the government to turn post-crisis fiscal deficits into surpluses, and helped regenerate …
Social investment as a conceptual framework for analysing well-being returns and reforms in 21st century welfare states
Welfare provision is often conceived through the lens of decommodification and analysed in (re)distributive terms. This article argues that a distributive approach does not sufficiently capture the complexity of 21st century welfare state dynamics. It proposes re-conceptualizing provision as a mix of three policy functions: raising and maintaining human capital stock; easing the flow of gendered life-course and labour-market transitions; guarante…
The Philosophy of Social Justice and Welfare Provision: Towards Capacitating Solidarity
Policy Concertation and Social Partnership in Western Europe: Lessons for the Twenty-first Century
Policy concertation - the determination of public policy by means of agreements struck between governments, employers and trade unions - continues to thrive in Western Europe despite the impact of liberalizing trends that were expected to lead to its demise. This volume brings together a team of 23 experts with the aim to undertake paired historical and political studies of policy concertation in ten West European countries, which were then subje…
Resilient Welfare States in the European Union
Published: 28 April 2022
Social investment agenda setting: A personal note
This article reconstructs how, under the umbrella of the Europea Union (EU), discreet opportunities for EU social policy agenda setting opened for academic expertise from the late 1990s to the 2020s. This began with the Dutch presidency of the EU in the first half of 1997, endorsing the notion of 'social policy as a productive factor', followed by the 2000 Lisbon strategy for Growth and Social Cohesion in the open economy. The social investment l…
Recent Developments: Social Investment Reform in the Twenty-First Century
The trajectory of developed welfare states in the early twenty-first century is perhaps best understood through the idea of ‘social investment’. The first section of the chapter defines social investment as a sui generis welfare paradigm, distinct from both the Keynesian–Beveridgean welfare state and its neoliberal critique, and analytically rooted in the three interrelated policy functions of lifelong human capital stocks, work–life-balanced flo…
Measuring returns on social investment beyond here-and-now redistribution: A commentary on Parolin and Van Lancker’s response article
Social policy research is truly interdisciplinary with academics from very different theoretical perspectives working together in fervent open-mindedness towards diverse methodological approaches. The exploration of social investment (SI) welfare provision is a clear example of this spirit of interdisciplinary engagement, having stirred up critical scholarly reception and debate over the past decade. On the one hand, some colleagues underscore th…
Social investment as a policy paradigm
This contribution delineates the sui generis paradigmatic portent of the social investment perspective. After theoretically defining the notion of a policy paradigm in welfare state analysis, the substantive core of the social investment paradigm is presented in two consecutive steps. First, the substantive core of the social investment policy paradigm is exemplified in terms of three core policy functions, relating to: raising and maintaining hu…
Correlates of Capacitating Solidarity
The expansion of social investment welfare provision, in areas of early childhood education, long-term care, work-life balance reconciliation across the OECD world, since the turn of century, has opened up a space for normative recalibration, away from an emphasis on freedom from want towards freedom to act, more in tune with the Aristotelean critique on John Rawls by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Access to public housing, a core social servic…
The social investment litmus test: Family formation, employment and poverty
Over the past decade, the notion of ‘social investment’ (SI) has gained considerable traction in the political debates over welfare state futures. The multifaceted character of SI policy interventions, the effects of policy complementarities and interactions for different social groups and generational cohorts, and the challenge of delineating effects across different time dimensions, we argue, are not (yet) properly addressed by current empirica…
Social investment as a policy paradigm
Published online: 22 Mar 2018
Two or three waves of welfare state transformation?
Social Investment and Its Critics
The introduction to the volume surveys the emergence, diffusion, limits, merits, and politics of social investment as an ‘emerging’ welfare policy paradigm for the knowledge-based economy. After revisiting its intellectual roots, the chapter surveys the criticisms that are levelled against the social investment perspective in the academic literature. Provoked by critics, and also the growing evidence of social investment headway and theoretical p…
The Uses of Social Investment
The Uses of Social Investment surveys the emergence, diffusion, limits, merits, and politics of social investment as the welfare policy paradigm for the twenty-first century seen through the lens of the life-course contingencies of the knowledge economy and modern familyhood. Over a span of thirty-five contributions, The Uses of Social Investment revisits the intellectual roots, surveys the evidence of social investment progress in theory and pra…
A Normative Foundation for the Social Investment Approach
The SIA has been criticized for its productivist view of social policy and one-sided emphasis on economic returns. Indeed, it is fair to say that the social dimension of social investment has been paid lip service both in terms of policy developments and in academic research. In fact, it may be that one of the weaknesses of the SIA is its lack of clear normative underpinning or theory of social justice against which to develop a well-founded eval…
Le champ d’analyse de la politique d’investissement social
En réaction au néolibéralisme qui oppose croissance économique et protection sociale et s’appuie sur la dérégulation et le désengagement de l’État, le concept d’investissement social revisite la protection sociale mais en considérant les politiques sociales comme un facteur productif. Il projette ses interventions sur l’ensemble du cycle de vie en intégrant l’égalité entre les sexes et en faisant jouer les complémentarités institutionnelles trans…
Social investment as a policy paradigm
Published online: 22 Mar 2018
The Quiet Paradigm Revolution of Social Investment
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society - Volume 22, Number 2, Summer 2015
Neo-liberalism, the 'third way' or what? Recent social democratic welfare policies in Denmark and the Netherlands
n Contains fulltext :\n 151288.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)\n
The social investment litmus test: Family formation, employment and poverty
Over the past decade, the notion of ‘social investment’ (SI) has gained considerable traction in the political debates over welfare state futures. The multifaceted character of SI policy interventions, the effects of policy complementarities and interactions for different social groups and generational cohorts, and the challenge of delineating effects across different time dimensions, we argue, are not (yet) properly addressed by current empirica…
Social investment as a conceptual framework for analysing well-being returns and reforms in 21st century welfare states
Welfare provision is often conceived through the lens of decommodification and analysed in (re)distributive terms. This article argues that a distributive approach does not sufficiently capture the complexity of 21st century welfare state dynamics. It proposes re-conceptualizing provision as a mix of three policy functions: raising and maintaining human capital stock; easing the flow of gendered life-course and labour-market transitions; guarante…
Two Decades of Change in Europe: The Emergence of the Social Investment State
Since the late 1970s, the developed welfare states of the European Union have been recasting the policy mix on which their systems of social protection were built. They have adopted a new policy orthodoxy that could be summarised as the ‘social investment strategy’. Here we trace its origins and major developments. The shift is characterised by a move away from passive transfers and towards the maximalisation of employability and employment, but …
'A Dutch Miracle': Job Growth, Welfare Reform and Corporatism in the Netherlands
The G reat R ecession and Welfare State Reform: Is Retrenchment Really the Only Game Left in Town
By 2010, when the G reek sovereign debt crisis changed into an existential crisis of the euro, all developed democracies entered a phase in which they had to consolidate their budgets, typically implying a politics of austerity. The scholarly literature, as well as the popular press, suggests that – consequently – welfare retrenchment and cost containment became the only games left in town. In this article, we study the welfare state reform measu…
Recasting European Welfare States for the 21st Century
This article places European welfare states squarely in today's European integration context and looks optimistically at social policy perspectives ‘top down’ from the European level. It has the needs of European policy makers in mind, and thus their interests in optimal policy mixes, lessons from national experiences and in a new institutional architecture that links EU member states more effectively into All-European corridors of reform efforts…
Change and immobility: Three decades of policy adjustment in the Netherlands and Belgium
2000). Change and immobility: Three decades of policy adjustment in the Netherlands and Belgium. West European Politics: Vol. 23, Recasting European Welfare States, pp. 229-256
The future of the European “social model” in the global economy
This article examines the prospects for European welfare states in the context of globalization. It begins with a critical review of the globalization arguments. While there is some evidence that external constraints make life harder for policymakers seeking positive‐sum outcomes, it is the combination of national debt and spending limits, plus domestic tax resistance, that really count in making expenditure‐based social and employment policies m…
Measuring returns on social investment beyond here-and-now redistribution: A commentary on Parolin and Van Lancker’s response article
Social policy research is truly interdisciplinary with academics from very different theoretical perspectives working together in fervent open-mindedness towards diverse methodological approaches. The exploration of social investment (SI) welfare provision is a clear example of this spirit of interdisciplinary engagement, having stirred up critical scholarly reception and debate over the past decade. On the one hand, some colleagues underscore th…
Social investment agenda setting: A personal note
This article reconstructs how, under the umbrella of the Europea Union (EU), discreet opportunities for EU social policy agenda setting opened for academic expertise from the late 1990s to the 2020s. This began with the Dutch presidency of the EU in the first half of 1997, endorsing the notion of 'social policy as a productive factor', followed by the 2000 Lisbon strategy for Growth and Social Cohesion in the open economy. The social investment l…
The Continental Social Investment Turn: Sequencing Corrective and Transformative Welfare State Change in the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy
European welfare states have experienced a binary transformation characterized by recalibration of traditional social protection programs and expansion of employment-oriented social policies, favoring the emergence of dual-earner families. This article sheds a new light on the pathways leading to these transformations in continental Europe. Theoretically, we characterize continental European welfare states as a configuration of complementary and …
Subnational Social Investment in Three European Cities: An Exploratory Comparison
With the evolution towards more service-intensive social investment welfare states across Europe, research on the institutional capacities of subnational welfare provision is increasingly relevant. Based on a comparative case analysis of three post-industrial municipalities in Europe, this article harbors a two-pronged objective: first, empirically, to show how regional and local governance capabilities are crucial to effective SI policy delivery…
Stepping-stone solidarity: The normative foundation of the social investment welfare state
In this article, we explore the normative foundations of the social investment welfare state. Social investment welfare enhances ex ante individuals' opportunities and capabilities to resolve the social risks typical of post-industrial societies - via early childhood education and care, vocational training over the life course, active-labour-market capacity-building and policies for work-life balance, such as paid parental leave, lifelong learnin…
Responsive corporatism without political credit: Social concertation, constructive opposition and the long tenure of the Rutte II cabinet in the Netherlands (2012–2017)
This paper analyses the unexpected return of social concertation in the Netherlands under the Rutte II government (2012–2017). Despite political fragmentation, electoral volatility and intensified EU budgetary surveillance, between 2012 and 2017 the Netherlands witnessed several social pacts that proved vital to the enactment of long-awaited reforms, allowed the government to turn post-crisis fiscal deficits into surpluses, and helped regenerate …
Le champ d’analyse de la politique d’investissement social
En réaction au néolibéralisme qui oppose croissance économique et protection sociale et s’appuie sur la dérégulation et le désengagement de l’État, le concept d’investissement social revisite la protection sociale mais en considérant les politiques sociales comme un facteur productif. Il projette ses interventions sur l’ensemble du cycle de vie en intégrant l’égalité entre les sexes et en faisant jouer les complémentarités institutionnelles trans…
Correlates of Capacitating Solidarity
The expansion of social investment welfare provision, in areas of early childhood education, long-term care, work-life balance reconciliation across the OECD world, since the turn of century, has opened up a space for normative recalibration, away from an emphasis on freedom from want towards freedom to act, more in tune with the Aristotelean critique on John Rawls by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Access to public housing, a core social servic…
The Dutch model: An Obvious Candidate for the 'Third Way
The 'Dutch model' has become a catchphrase for progressive European politicians pondering the possibilities of a 'third way' between Anglo-American deregulation of labour markets and the bloated stagnation of European dirigiste economies. Foreign politicians, central bankers and union leaders alike praise the combination of fiscal conservatism, wage moderation, consensual welfare reform, job creation and the maintainance of overall social securit…
'A Dutch Miracle': Job Growth, Welfare Reform and Corporatism in the Netherlands
Negotiated Policy Change: Towards a Theory of Institutional Learning in Tightly Coupled Welfare States
Approaches focusing on ideological and cognitive factors to analyse public policy have moved to centre-stage in political science. This book presents the great variety of theoretical and empirical research on the role of ideas which has emerged in recent years.
The Dutch model: An Obvious Candidate for the 'Third Way
The 'Dutch model' has become a catchphrase for progressive European politicians pondering the possibilities of a 'third way' between Anglo-American deregulation of labour markets and the bloated stagnation of European dirigiste economies. Foreign politicians, central bankers and union leaders alike praise the combination of fiscal conservatism, wage moderation, consensual welfare reform, job creation and the maintainance of overall social securit…
Recasting European Welfare States for the 21st Century
This article places European welfare states squarely in today's European integration context and looks optimistically at social policy perspectives ‘top down’ from the European level. It has the needs of European policy makers in mind, and thus their interests in optimal policy mixes, lessons from national experiences and in a new institutional architecture that links EU member states more effectively into All-European corridors of reform efforts…
Change and immobility: Three decades of policy adjustment in the Netherlands and Belgium
2000). Change and immobility: Three decades of policy adjustment in the Netherlands and Belgium. West European Politics: Vol. 23, Recasting European Welfare States, pp. 229-256
The future of the European “social model” in the global economy
This article examines the prospects for European welfare states in the context of globalization. It begins with a critical review of the globalization arguments. While there is some evidence that external constraints make life harder for policymakers seeking positive‐sum outcomes, it is the combination of national debt and spending limits, plus domestic tax resistance, that really count in making expenditure‐based social and employment policies m…
Neo-liberalism, the 'third way' or what? Recent social democratic welfare policies in Denmark and the Netherlands
n Contains fulltext :\n 151288.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)\n
Why We Need a New Welfare State
Leading scholars in the field examine the highly topical issue of the future of the welfare state in Europe. They argue that welfare states need to adjust, and examine which kind of welfare architecture will further Europe's stated goal of maximum social inclusion and justice. The volume concentrates on four principal social‐policy domains: the aged and transition to retirement; the welfare issues related to profound changes in working life; the …
The Self‐Transformation of the European Social Model(s)
This chapter addresses the kinds of policies that are feasible and fair in instituting new welfare state models in Europe, given the existing large differences in welfare state design and decision‐making structures across Europe. These differences are discussed, and the characteristics of the different models outlined. Further sections of the chapter discuss bounded innovation in the welfare state, and deepening social Europe through open coordin…
Vier kernvragen van beleid
Recasting European Welfare States
The chapter presents, in synthesis form, some key elements of what is now understood about welfare regimes, their respective pathologies of development, their current paths of reform, and the challenges that still confront them. The first section examines welfare state performance thematically, focusing on employment, the scale and shape of social security systems, and distributive outcomes. The second section takes Europe’s four welfare regimes …
A Paradoxical Miracle: The politics of Coalition Government and Social Concertation in Dutch Welfare Reform
Until the recent slowdown in the world economy, the Dutch economy has prospered uninterruptedly for practically two decades. As sustained economic growth, low inflation and unprecedented job creation concurred without sharp increases in wage dispersion and incomes, the “Dutch model” has become a catch-phrase for progressive European politicians pondering the possibilities of a new model of “third way” capitalism with a human face, sufficiently fl…
Recalibrating Europe’s Welfare Regimes
In a well-known series of volumes on European welfare states published in the mid-1980s, Peter Flora coined the metaphor of’growth to limits’ (Flora 1986). This notion contained an institutional diagnosis of the social policy predicament which afflicted the Old Continent: the ambitious programs introduced during the trente glorieuses had come to (quasi–full) maturation and were therefore reaching their maximum extension in terms of coverage and g…
Welfare reform in the shadow of EMU
Since the 1980s European monetary integration has been a driving force behind domestic welfare reform across the European Union (EU). Triggered by the failure of Keynesianism in the 1970s and by macroeconomic instability in the 1980s and early 1990s, monetary integration to EMU marks a sea-change in macroeconomic policy. It has indirect effects on labor market institutions (Franzese, Jr., and Hall 2000) as well as direct effects on domestic budge…
Euros and Europeans: Monetary Integration and the European Model of Society
Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) is one of the most important developments in modern European politics. Building on two decades of monetary integration it transfers monetary policy, a core function of the modern state, to an independent European Central Bank (ECB) and limits member states' fiscal policy discretion. The ECB insists that growth and employment depend on 'flexibilizing' Europe's labor markets through deep reforms of the social polic…
The Forgotten Center: State Activism and Corporatist Adjustment in Holland and Germany
Whatever Happened to the Bismarckian Welfare State? From Labor Shedding to Employment-Friendly Reforms
Continental Welfare at a Crossroads: The Choice between Activation and Minimum Income Protection in Belgium and the Netherlands
Belgium and the Netherlands represent excellent prima facie cases for a comparative study of social policy reform and redirection in Continental welfare systems and this is for several reasons (Hemerijck, Unger and Visser 2000). First, Belgium and the Netherlands are small, open economies that share a tradition of social partnership in the areas of wage bargaining and social insurance administration. Employers and workers are well organized, espe…
Welfare without work?: Divergent experiences of reform in Germany and the Netherlands
Two or three waves of welfare state transformation?
This chapter analyses three distinct phases of welfare state reconfiguration: the era of welfare state expansion and class compromise, starting at the end of World War II; the period of welfare retrenchment and neo-liberalism, which took shape in the wake of the oil shocks of mid- to late-1970s; and the more recent epoch since the mid-1990s, in which social investment policy prescriptions took root. It provides us with an understanding of each pe…
Two or three waves of welfare state transformation?
Stress-testing the New Welfare State
Deep economic crises are moments of institutional truth, so the history of the 20th century teaches us. In the wake of both the Great Depression in the 1930s and the Great Inflation of the 1970s, the socioeconomic order of advanced economies, triggered by exceptional economic hardship, recast in fundamental ways. The aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 marks another ‘stress test’ for the welfare state. Can the welfare state wither th…
The welfare state after the great recession
The economic crisis has given rise to significant challenges to the welfare state. Given that welfare expenses account for a large proportion of all state spending in the member countries of the European Union, reducing government spending means cutting welfare measures. Yet social protection, in particular unemployment insurance benefits and minimum income support, has significantly softened the impact of the crisis for millions of individuals. …
Two Decades of Change in Europe: The Emergence of the Social Investment State
Since the late 1970s, the developed welfare states of the European Union have been recasting the policy mix on which their systems of social protection were built. They have adopted a new policy orthodoxy that could be summarised as the ‘social investment strategy’. Here we trace its origins and major developments. The shift is characterised by a move away from passive transfers and towards the maximalisation of employability and employment, but …
The G reat R ecession and Welfare State Reform: Is Retrenchment Really the Only Game Left in Town
By 2010, when the G reek sovereign debt crisis changed into an existential crisis of the euro, all developed democracies entered a phase in which they had to consolidate their budgets, typically implying a politics of austerity. The scholarly literature, as well as the popular press, suggests that – consequently – welfare retrenchment and cost containment became the only games left in town. In this article, we study the welfare state reform measu…
Political science (46 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (45 works) · Economics (38 works) · Law (31 works) · Welfare state (30 works) · Politics (28 works) · Market economy (25 works) · Welfare (25 works) · Political economy (21 works) · Social policy (19 works)