Dear colleagues

Please excuse cross-posting and delete now if you're not 
interested in book notices:

Welfare States Under Pressure

Edited By: Peter Taylor-Gooby : University of Kent, 
Canterbury 

Cloth (076197198X) November 2001 £50.00
Paper (0761971998) November 2001 £16.99

Available from Sage (http://www.sagepub.co.uk/) and usual 
internet bookstores.


The welfare state in Europe is like guaranteed annual pay 
rises, 9 to 5 working and family meal-times - traditional, 
much-loved but not quite the modern style.  Welfare states 
developed during the period of secure growth, male 
bread-winner family systems and stable labour-markets.  
Globalization, technological unemployment, fewer children 
and more older people, new patterns of migration, shifts in 
political ideology - all these developments call the 
traditional settlement into question.  Recent studies of 
the response to these challenges have reported that - 
surprisingly - the European welfare state is in much better 
health than might have been expected.  Spending continues 
to increase, privatization is relatively unimportant in most
countries and most people express enthusiasm for the 
maintenance of existing standards of provision.  Reforms are
best summed up as adjustment or 're-calibration' of the 
welfare settlement, not fundamental restructuring.

This book examines welfare policy-making in detail in seven 
key European countries, chosen to represent the main 
welfare regimes, political configurations and policy-making 
frameworks - Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden 
Switzerland and the UK.  Each country chapter is written by 
a leading national expert to an overall conceptual 
structure developed through a lengthy collaboration.  

The work focuses on the welfare politics and on the 
policy-making framework (the particular configuration of
constitutional factors and institutions through which the 
relevant social actors interact) in each country, as well as
welfare regime-type, in its account of the national 
trajectory of policy. It also builds on the evidence of 
recent policy development and of changes in the roles and 
opportunities open to the various political actors to 
construct an account of the factors likely to influence 
policy in the future.  Much research in this field pays 
considerable attention to regime type and policy 
development but gives less weight to political and 
institutional factors which, we argue, are changing rapidly 
in a number of countries.

This approach produces a rather different picture of the 
sustainability of the European welfare settlement from that 
derived from accounts which assume continuity between the 
future and the pattern of recent years.  
Current reforms and continuing 
pressures are likely to shift the balance of forces among 
policy actors, so that adjustment will develop into much 
more substantial reforms.  The detail of these shifts will 
vary according to national context, but there are changes 
that are likely to challenge current welfare development in 
all the countries reviewed, from the most consensual to the 
most majoritarian, from federal to centralised, from 
social-democratic to liberal.  All  European welfare states 
are subject to the 'competitiveness imperative' which 
drives a determination to activate policies to sustain 
higher levels of productive employment and lower state 
spending on dependent groups, so that benefits are targeted 
and the private sector expands.  The obstacles to movement 
in these directions in the policy-making frameworks of most 
European countries have now been eroded. Opportunities for 
radical change in welfare systems that were not available 
in the past are now opening up through institutional 
changes in France and the 'neo-liberal turn' of the SPD in 
Germany and the liberal consensus in the UK reinforces a 
similar policy direction.  The past and the present are 
unlikely to be a good guide to the future of the European 
welfare state.

Chapters:
1. The Politics of Welfare in Europe: Peter Taylor-Gooby
2. Earning Welfare Citizenship: Welfare State Reform in 
Finland and Sweden: Virpi Timonen 3. Reshaping the Social 
Policy-Making Framework in France: Bruno Palier 4. 
Stumbling towards Reform: The German Welfare State in the 
1990s: Frank Bönker and Hellmut Wollman 5. Spain, A Via 
Media of Welfare Development : Luis Moreno 6. Switzerland: 
Stubborn Institutions in a Changing Society Giuliano 
Bonoli 7. Welfare Reform in the UK: the Construction of a 
Liberal Consensus: Peter Taylor-Gooby 8. Polity, 
Policy-Making and Welfare Futures: Peter Taylor-Gooby


----------------------
Peter Taylor-Gooby
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Phone: 01227-827514
Fax: 01227-824014, 01227-827005
Mail:  SSPSSR, Darwin College, University of Kent, CT2 7NY, UK