Learning under pressure: Welfare state responses to Covid-19 in Southern Europe

NALDINI, Manuela, THE FAMILY IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WELFARE STATES. Portland, Oregon: International Specialized Book Services, 2003, 248 pp., $62.50 hardcover.Manuela Naldini examines the influence of a welfare state's institutions on families. She concentrates her studies on the Mediterranean area, specifically on developments in Spain and Italy during the last decades. Thereby, she uses a historically and culturally comparing perspective at the same time.The book consists of three chapters: Al first the types of welfare states and models are being discussed. After that political developments in both states after the fascist era are being introduced. Finally, the and as well as the alternations concerning families in Spain and Italy during the following democratic period are being shown. The empiric material mostly covers the second half of the 20. century and gives information concerning employment, educational participation, fertility, relational contacts or childcare institutions for example.Part one (pp. 9-46) supplies the theoretical frame: Naldini presents some definitions of family, social politics and the relation of and state. Additionally there is an overview of different approaches (gender studies, welfare state studies) to then depict two typologies of welfare states in detail: The of Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism of Esping-Anderson and the typology of Ferrera with the differentiation of occupational versus universalistic. The overview of the field of research delivers two results: South European countries have mostly been neglected so far. Compared to other European countries, Southern Europe shows three peculiarities: Old-age benefits are strongly connected to the status of employment, which leads to discrimination of families. The health system is more oriented to the civil rights than to the status of employment. The development of the state and the welfare state has not grown very far and are hardly connected.Naldini demands a new theoretical perspective concerning the historical context of Southern Europe and working on and relational contacts from a gender and intergenerational perspective. Thereby, she also criticizes the narrowness and one-sidedness of the male breadwinner model and extends it with two more types: The dual earner model and the family / kinship solidarity model.Part two (pp. 49-93) delivers the historical description of the two cases of Italy and Spain starting with the fascist era (1922-43, 1939-75). …

Tentative Table of Contents 1. Mimi Ajzenstadt and John Gal: Introduction Part I: Setting the Scene 2. John Gal: Exploring the Extended Family of Mediterranean Welfare States 3. Hadas Mandel: Gender and the Welfare State 4. Tomas Olk: Children, Childhood and the Welfare State 5. Jim McDonell: Children, Communities and Well-Being Part II: Country Studies 5. Valeria Fargion: Children, Gender and Families in the Italian Welfare State 6. Celia Valiente: Children, Gender and Families in the Spanish Welfare State 7. Azer Kilic: Children, Gender and Families in the Turkish Welfare State 8. Theano Kallinkaki: Children, Gender and Families in the Greek Welfare State 9. Mimi Ajzenstadt: Children, Gender and Families in the Israeli Welfare State 10. Index

This work analyses in a historical and comparative perspective the relationship between the family and the welfare state in two Mediterranean countries: Italy and Spain. Two aims form the focus of the book. Firstly, to open the black box of the family in welfare state analysis, introducing a focus on inter-generational and kin relations. Secondly, to explain why the southern welfare states have offered very low support to families with children by taking into account several factors: the legacy of fascism, the role of the Church, and the specific role played by leftist parties in defining family policy as labour policy.

Fiscal Integration in an Experimental Union: How Path-Breaking Was the EU's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic?

The historical variations in the relationship between the state and the family and the definitions of public and private responsibilities with regard to the needs of dependent individuals on the basis of age, generation, gender and degree of kinship are the issues discussed in this paper. Two aims form the focus of the article. First, it opens the black box of the family in welfare state analysis. To this end it provides a new theoretical perspective for analysing social policies in mediterranean welfare states. It introduces fully the family in the analysis of social policies, focusing not only on gender, but also on intergenerational and kin relations. The second aim of the article is to testify the validity of the previous argument by providing some empirical examples. To this end the author illustrates the way in which social policies and legal norms have defined the family in two mediterranean countries: Italy and Spain. The main findings of the analysis of the Italian and Spanish cases, in historical and comparative perspective, are that in these two countries social policies, fiscal policies and family law have incorporated and extended concept of family relationships. In particular, the male breadwinner family model which informed the assumptions underlying social policies and legal norms in most other European countries was of much lesser importance in mediterranean countries. Rather, in these two countries, the principle of the male breadwinner family model had always been stretched to include a family/kinship model. This model was based on a set of assumptions about the existence of intergenerational ties and kin solidarity throughout the life course and between households, and these assumptions were incorporated at the level of prescription in social policies and laws.

In the context of examining the Mediterranean welfare states, this chapter carries out a country-level analysis in order to uncover the common characteristics, as well as the differences, between the eight countries in this region. The chapter is divided into three sections: the first section draws a portrait of the demographic characteristics of the eight countries, the second section contains key aspects of social life in those countries, and the third section introduces key data concerning social aspects of the welfare state. This third and final section attempts to link the demographic characteristics and aspects of social life of each country to the respective welfare state. This contribution is analyzed in a comparative perspective.

The goal of this article is to suggest that an extended family of Mediterranean welfare states exists and that it consists of eight different nations, some of which have been ignored in the ongoing discourse on Mediterranean welfare states. More specifically, it is claimed that the extended family of Mediterranean welfare states includes Cyprus, Greece, Israel, Italy, Malta, Spain, Portugal and Turkey. The article underscores a number of features common to members of this extended family of welfare states. Finally, three overarching themes that, in the past and present, appear to underlie the commonalities of Mediterranean welfare states and that can offer potential fruitful avenues for further study will be identified and discussed. These are religion, family and the role of clientelist—particularist relations in the structuring and functioning of welfare state institutions.

“We are no longer sure,” wrote the late Giovanni Arrighi in his monumental survey of the long twentieth century, “that the crisis of the 1970s was ever really resolved.”1 Almost two decades on, this observation seems truer than ever. Another economic crisis, larger even than that of the seventies, is upon us, and the European left is stranded without an economic program. Over one hundred years after the first of the parties affiliated to the Second International won a plurality in a parliamentary election (Finland, 1907),2 social democracy—that most protean of political traditions—may finally be running out of rope.Today's stark choices are being posed as the result of a major economic shift within capitalism: the deep disruption of capital accumulation as a consequence of the crisis in global financial markets unleashed in 2008. With the end of the recent long boom—or rather, long bubble—social democrats have been dealt a tremendous double blow. On the one hand, their decade-long strategy of full accommodation to neoliberalism in order to skim off the surplus for ameliorative social spending has collapsed with the end of the growth upon which it depended. On the other, they have fallen victim to a breathtaking act of political jujitsu. Contrary to expectations, the crisis has not thus far unseated neoliberalism as the reigning economic paradigm, and with this “strange non-death”3 financiers and the political right have neatly turned the tables on the center left. The big banks, having caused the crisis in the first place and led governments to borrow vast sums to come to their aid, have successfully redefined the resulting fiscal deficits as a matter of the need to cut back public spending and slash social protection. Sovereign debt crises are painted as cause rather than effect of the downturn.4 Social democrats have thus been cut off from the exits, unable to escape into the soft neo-Keynesianism that is their more progressive reflex.Nature, too, has some nasty surprises in store: “The repo girl is at the door.”5 As a result of global warming that has already occurred, it is now too late to avoid “a cascade of local and regional ‘natural’ disasters in the medium term.”6 Price shocks, supply disruptions, dislocations, the rising costs of urban coastal infrastructure and remediation efforts: Hurricane Sandy—a direct hit on the world's financial and media capital at an estimated cost of $60 billion and counting—is the shape of things to come: price shocks, supply disruptions, dislo- cations, the rising costs of urban coastal infrastructure and remediation efforts. At the same time, a $20 trillion bubble of “unburnable carbon” inside the global financial system7 will require—if the planet is to be saved—deliberate capital destruction on a scale roughly twice that of the end of slavery.8Even when—if—growth resumes, it will not deliver on the promises with which it is being invested. A modeling exercise for the Resolution Foundation by the Institute for Employment Research and the Institute for Fiscal Studies finds that on the basis of annual average UK growth of 2.5 percent from 2015–2020—an optimistic scenario—and no further cuts in public spending, living standards will fall for low and middle income households by as much as 15 percent.9 Only the rich will escape this ravening maw of austerity. We may not quite be facing the “end of growth”10 altogether, but it would be a foolhardy politics that retained any strategy relying upon a return, even in the medium term, to anything approaching the status quo ante.It is in these circumstances that the political battle lines of the coming era are being drawn. In a thousand voices the figures of the established order—politicians, financiers, economists, media commentators, spokespersons of the ‘international community’—all urge the same course: “Given the harsh world that daily confronts us with challenges, we must climb the steep slopes of productivity, budget reduction, technological innovation, the good health of our banks, and job flexibility.”11 For all the difficulties, the crisis has at least smashed the false separation of politics from the market that has been a precondition of neoliberal theory. As governments move to close schools, pare back local authorities, cut public spending and reduce wages, they are conjuring up a series of class struggles that are already playing out in the streets. Continuing through this tunnel of pain, the hope for the left should be to emerge from the other end with a new political economy and a system design truly capable of sustaining democracy, equality and community, while meeting head on the challenges of concentrated ownership and power, and ecological meltdown. The question is whether social democracy will play its part in the development of these solutions or whether it will become an obstacle on the road to systemic change.How have Europe's social democrats responded to this conjuncture? The early signs are not propitious. There are “morbid symptoms” aplenty, of precisely the kind Gramsci ascribed to a crisis interregnum in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”12 There has been a near-total lack of solidarity among the parties of the Socialist International, whether in government or in opposition, as they have fallen in with the needs of their own narrowly defined national capitalisms. The mask of the much vaunted European social model—proclaimed just a few short years ago by Jürgen Habermas to be “a model” for the rest of humanity13—has slipped badly, revealing the true features of northern capital that were behind it all along: Once crisis struck, cohesion in the Eurozone could only come, not from social expenditure, but political dictation—the enforcement by Germany, at the head of a bloc of smaller northern states, of draconian austerity programmes, unthinkable for its own citizens, on the southern periphery, no longer able to recover competitivity by devaluation.14The politics of austerity is proving as disruptive as the economics. To the “zombie households, companies and banks”15 of the post-crisis landscape must now be added “zombie governments.” A horror show of decrepit political formations not seen since the interwar years has been exhumed from the crypt and installed across Europe: national governments, externally-imposed technocrats, even—in Greece—a troika-dictated regimen “reminiscent of Austria in 1922, when a High Commissioner was posted to Vienna by the Entente—under League of Nations colours—to run the economy to its satisfaction.”16 Turnouts at elections are falling, and an anti-incumbency tide has swept over Europe to which governing parties in country after country—Britain, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, France—have succumbed. The likelihood of continuing political volatility can be seen in the fact that, for the most part, their successors are prescribing even larger doses of the same awful medicine.Against this backdrop, many social democrats—still desperate to haunt the “house of power”17—have begun to position themselves as the left wing of austerity. Social democrats are propping up conservative-led governments in Ireland and the Netherlands. In France, hopes that Socialist president François Hollande might rally the center left for a challenge to German-led austerity have quickly given way to disappointment as Paris reached its own détente with Berlin. Hollande has seen his poll ratings plunge to the lowest level ever afforded a new French president. In Germany, prospects for change in the bastion of austerity policies seem highly doubtful. The Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) is running Peer Steinbrück, perhaps the most conservative of the leading social democratic contenders, against Angela Merkel in 2013. Merkel is looking increasingly unassailable.One result of this posture is that social democracy is beginning to face significant challenges from the left: from Sinn Féin in Ireland, the Socialist Party in Holland, Die Linke in Germany, the Front de gauche in France.18 Another is the rise of populist anti-politics in keeping with the Argentine slogan of 2001, ¡Que Se Vayan Todos! (“They All Must Go!”), typified by forces such as the Five Star Movement of Beppe Grillo in Italy. Thus far, existing party systems have just about contained the fallout. Greece, however, is the counter example, and should serve as a cautionary tale. The Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) went into the May 2012 elections on the back of a 43.9 percent showing last time around but carrying heavy baggage as a signatory of the troika memorandum. The retribution it was dealt was impressive. PASOK slumped to 13.2 percent, a fall of some 2.2 million votes since 2009. New Democracy, meanwhile—the main party of the center right—also lost ground: At 32 per cent, the combined total for the two ‘parties of government’ was less than half their aggregate support in the previous elections. PASOK's vote share was even lower than the 13.4 per cent it secured on its first appearance in 1974. Similarly, ND's vote share was the lowest ever received by the main party of the right since the interwar period.19The main beneficiary of this rupture has been SYRIZA, the left coalition, which trebled its vote to 16.8 percent—a close second—and will be waiting in the wings when the current ‘grand coalition’ falls. The response of social democrats elsewhere in Europe has been to heap vitriol on SYRIZA and paint its leader, Alexis Tsipras, in the most lurid of colors. His crime? Opposing austerity and daring to put forward what amounts to a genuine social democratic platform.The difficulties facing social democrats today are deeply embedded in their history. Always more pleased with itself than its record would warrant, social democracy must now make a true reckoning of that history if it is to emerge from the current crisis as a continuing force for progressive change.Social democrats first entered government in the interwar period, “largely as temporary shock-absorbers in the great European turbulence that followed the Armistice.”20 Part of their function was containment and suppression of political unrest. The widespread belief that they were moving with an inevitable historical current seemingly absolved them of the need for any specific economic program of their own, and as a result they did not initially make their mark anywhere. “The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning,” Walter Benjamin observed, “attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well.”21 In Berlin in 1923, the SPD's Rudolf Hilferding was a model of economic orthodoxy, as was Philip Snowden in London in 1924, chancellor in a minority Labour government that busied itself with nothing much besides RAF bombing of recalcitrant tribes in Iraq.22It was not political victory but total war that first installed social democracy in government with an effective economic program of counter-cyclical demand management and welfare state expenditure. In this, social democrats were borrowing the clothes of two heirs of nineteenth-century liberal progressivism: Keynes and Beveridge.23 With the Second World War and victory over fascism, there was a mass influx of workers into unions and politics across Europe. The stage was set for an extended period of broad-based economic growth that could accommodate both increased profit rates for capital and higher real living standards for labor.24 Thus began les trente glorieuses, the ‘thirty glorious years’ of the postwar boom. Among the principal beneficiaries of this golden age was social democracy, which had now found its raison d' être: Keynesianism suddenly provided working-class political parties with a reason to be in office…. If the economy was producing at a level below its capacity, given the existing stock of capital and labor, a proper government policy could increase output until it approached the economy's full potential.25Underpinning it all was the increased political weight of organized labor. The power of trade unions provided social democracy with ‘a place to stand’ vis-à-vis the economy from which to engage in redistributive politics.The extent of social democratic success during this period should not be overstated. Center left parties were not hegemonic. Nor did the class struggle simply disappear, instead being partially displaced onto public budgets through struggles over welfare provisions, subsidies to business, military and social spending, conflicts over taxation and the like.26 “Revisionist in ideology, reformist in project, and technocratic in practice,”27 from the Erfurt Program of the German SPD in 1891 to the crisis of the 1970s, the deep conservatism of the Western social democratic parties became apparent in their defense of a generalized status quo: They defended the growth model of Western capitalism … many traditional socialist commitments were in practice abandoned or relegated to an ever-receding long term: the end of capitalism, universal peace, the reform of the state, the abolition of all forms of political and economic inequality between the sexes. Attention was entirely concentrated on the main short-term aims: full employment for all male workers and the provision of welfare services to meet needs not provided through the market.28Attempts to push in another direction by radicals hostile to the wholesale adoption of reformist statism, from Rosa Luxemburg to G.D.H. Cole, were rebuffed. In Britain, the Labour Party rejected out of hand plans for social credit, guild socialism, and other such solutions in favor of the dismal managerialism of nationalization, and then only for industries—such as electricity, coal, gas, civil aviation, telecommunications, and railways—which were not particularly profitable at the time, and for which their owners were richly compensated.29In America, it did not even prove necessary to have a social democratic party to create a welfare state (albeit a severely truncated one—the US was always a “welfare state laggard,” in Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's phrase).30 What in Europe had taken the might of the organized parties of the left—socialist, social democratic, and labor—was in the United States largely the work of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “a pseudo-aristocratic politician whose avowed ambition was ‘the salvation of American capitalism’.”31 In The Great Evasion, William Appleman Williams that the New became “a state in the and that, as was the with the welfare state, it was by the the and other received on their in than the or the The from the during was The government a total of billion on all its public its public health its to and all other welfare is not to that the social systems in the United States and Western Europe were or that they were without a They were to years of and to the power of in a period that the of national struggles and and in the United States in the and of the welfare state was only and through the of war and War and the resulting of and increased military spending, which time and to the economy out of of the social democratic posture became In redistributive social spending was to the postwar boom. the of the 1970s, the of this were being into as and facing rates of new to mass trade in the 1970s social democrats had no at As social democratic and policies of the era to the mass of in the of a new of political of facing welfare programmes, left the of the accumulation of social democratic redistributive taxation that, in the long it was an and particularly when set against the of for in the social there were to what could be the of social democracy in that the social democratic was The change in … the public of … rates were many and into the services the of the … Thus the of economic was a of social and political the of social democratic it is not that there are not a of good for the taxation of is the of any capital increasingly to over time, both to conservative political and to economic the late seventies, the social democratic was in crisis, with a by wages, in social and global and an to the democrats found themselves face to face with a new The victory of social democracy in its was to have successfully its conservative of the of its now the set In the some were to a most with the in which would have to the of accumulation through a share and the of it was social democrats themselves were the first to Keynesianism for beginning with the government in With of the of the no less a social democratic than to if the it make such a if Labour be few years the was New governments were installed across the social democratic of northern Europe. In reduction, and became the main of a to a economic The had been set for the and are all with the end of this The of a long period in for social democratic such as Labour in and the SPD in Germany, with continuing and led the parties of the Socialist International into a accommodation with one in social market The long years in the social democracy was “the great at the with center left governments in in out of of the of the European social democratic policies were to be economic these governments largely to and in some to In political they further their own Part of the price for into government had been the total of parties that were on into In Britain, of the of “a party with a its job being to the parliamentary into there is a election … fall into the the is The was a of the of the Great social democratic parties to have been in when the crisis are to their and a to austerity. The itself now in the as a and in a of or the for social democrats that in the of will be in the of economic management already into social democrats may that an for solutions will only further their As long defense of policies with the to the for the good while social democracy may be at an history is on the to and from to the of change is in the and as a of a of has out across southern in in and and in Greece, and A crisis is in the social from the continuing economic crisis has it the first time in about capitalism in a this new for a major public about political challenges to the system thus far have been contained by the continuing of a lack of the same time, the of has an of of the fact that for much of the the US has largely been elsewhere has as the of this innovation, with new in and in perhaps lack of many of the social democratic features of European a of has been place in the United of have been They new and can work in What is more capital to up the over an and to all this and show in it forms the of a system capable of economic and ecological this about a is perhaps more in and the United Europe is no to the many of them have their in the political and economic struggles of the and European The of the can be back to the and now a billion In and on the lines of austerity are that show the power of these when taken to scale in the of Spain, the is now the has been an economic the The is much lower in the country than in as a when was to off workers in and they were by other companies within the in has given rise to the The economy now over half of the and has from one of the in in to one of the in Europe social democrats have not already given themselves over to the new politics of austerity have not the to the that would their political to these and to the new unleashed by the Social democrats are of and the as a of from which they turned long or as but They should one to the of organized that has social democratic we to up other power that can to stand’ in the democracy today is of an economic program. will be in in the of demand At the same time, the left has not an to an and state The of their two major political in any the that they are no longer the way for the European left to to its and the that are a part of its is time to new and forms of ownership of this the American left is already a has the question as to from a global the too a to a on its own, if the social now way are to their this may the and of democratic an for the and of the left in Europe and the United States as through the of a new set of economic and political power this will a to change and a to of the false choices and of crisis this, the behind austerity must be into is a deep that the Great is among some of the the world has ever the of the forces of have been new As and have elsewhere in this the US economy in per of In in the same the was in Germany, it was in Greece, through the of reached over per is given the by change and other to The challenge is not technological but and is a matter of systemic is already to out the of what a system on forms of democratic capital ownership might there is political to be in this is increasingly For social democracy, there are for such to Among the most is the The Rudolf at the the trade his in the 1970s as a response to the two facing the at the time, to increase the level of but not inequality of and to that an increase in would into the kind of that would full and the of a and on the that in part from public the that a significant of their to workers as To capital would not have the right to their they would be to regional public or would for a time to the as capital within the and direct the to meet social would not only have provided an income from capital for public spending some of the on but would have it for the and to welfare system by running their in and off to as has to the abolition of ownership and by the estimated that it would have taken years to percent of the of a at an annual of profit of the real of the was that the higher the the the that, a such as that percent of its the would percent of the stock after for In years it would have over percent and would be in fact the as as the at which reform over into systemic The was in but the lost the election that and the was a much finally being by the the support of the in a of the with share could have the of the economy within is as against with spending more the than the out by all the parties in the given we the against a of economic As the in would no longer be to over of the further seems to have reached its The would increase the of over their … the of … would then more and more the question of and the without in other in its the however, the that were set up the position that they would not simply had and that, as one put capital can work just as as other capital In we are for the of Social Democracy, this is the place to In the face of the current crisis, the are any left strategy the after capital been dealt out of the for the left suddenly has to play for As and new there is the of a new world in the For Europe's social these will some of the from long in the of If they are to play their part it will the first time in their political force to be as as

Policy makers aim to raise the retirement age for economic reasons. For individuals, longer employment maintains income and social contacts. However, retirement allows more time for socially integrating activities with family and friends. There is therefore tension for midlife individuals between the perceived advantages of employment and retirement. Welfare states vary in policies toward older workers, in terms of incentives for working longer or “early exit,” which may influence individuals’ preferences concerning retirement timing. Data from 20 European countries were used to examine middle-aged women’s and men’s attitudes toward employment and other time uses. The analysis incorporated age, gender, socioeconomic circumstances, and type of welfare regime. Work-life conflict was evident, expressed as preferring more time for family, friends, and leisure, especially where employment rates were highest and more for women than men. Many full-timers preferred shorter hours. Differences between desired and actual employment status were greatest among working-class, female, and older individuals. Unmet demand for jobs was most common in transitional and Mediterranean welfare states. The likelihood of employment was related to the type of welfare regime.

We use cross-national, longitudinal data to explore the impact of educational level on changes in health outcomes among Europeans aged over 50. Our analyses are performed separately for Northern, Western and Southern Europe, as these regions broadly represent different welfare state regimes. We find that low education is associated with higher incident events — over a two-year period — of poor health, chronic diseases and disability, but it is less consistently associated with new events of long-standing illness. Net of behavioural risk factors, educational effects are more consistent in Western and Southern Europe than in the Nordic welfare states. In Northern Europe, lower education is associated with less financial and employment disadvantage than in Southern or Western Europe. After controlling for educational differences in these factors, effects of educational level on health deterioration remain significant for most outcomes in Western and Southern Europe, whereas they are weaker and non-significant after adjustment in Northern Europe.

Disagreements and conflicts over public policy can create opportunities for people to learn about how others value and prioritize policy issues or what types of policy alternatives are feasible in the face of conflicting goals. Such learning can have feedback effects that either mitigate or enhance conflicts. Despite the logical intersections between policy conflict and learning, limited empirical attention has been paid to understanding their dynamics. To address this limitation, this paper employs the Policy Conflict Framework as a guide to analyzing learning in the context of policy conflicts. To examine the relationship between policy conflict and learning, we use interview data from policy actors involved in water management conflicts in Colorado. We find empirical evidence that the intersection between policy conflict and learning is dynamic and multifaceted. First, learning is not simply an outcome of conflict; it can be an intentional conflict mitigation strategy. Second, understanding the differences between types of learning can help inform how conflict intensity is fueled or contained. We also find that several characteristics of the policy conflict settings can support learning processes that can mitigate conflicts. These include collaborative venues with resources, trusting relationships, and influential actors, and conflict issues consequential to diverse interests. The findings inform both policy conflict and learning literature by empirically assessing the factors that enable learning in the face of policy conflict. Related Articles Butz, A. M., M. P. Fix, and J. L. Mitchell. 2015. “Policy Learning and the Diffusion of Stand‐Your‐Ground Laws.” Politics & Policy 43, no. 3: 347–377. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12116 . Anderson, D., L. A. Lawhon, J. Berggren, J. Huda, E. Koebele, and A. Kroepsch. 2017. “A Narrative Policy Framework Analysis of Wildfire Policy Discussions in Two Colorado Communities.” Politics & Policy 45, no. 4: 626–656. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12207 . Shanahan, E. A., M. K. McBeth, and P. L. Hathaway. 2011. “Narrative Policy Framework: The Influence of Media Policy Narratives on Public Opinion.” Politics & Policy 39: 373–400. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2011.00295.x/abstract .

Using microsimulation tools, we explore the social policy responses to the Great Recession and the COVID-19 crisis, and their impact on preserving living standards in Ireland. During the Great Recession, the focus was on cost reduction. By contrast, during the COVID-19 crisis, the focus was on mitigating the impact on household incomes. In addition, an innovation in joint public and private responses emerged through social partnership. We find a stronger policy response during the COVID-19 crisis than the Great Recession. The COVID-19 crisis was more rapid, leaving more individuals out of work, thus family support was weaker. This was compensated by stronger private support through social partnership. Consequently, those with lower incomes had larger disposable incomes at the onset of the crisis; an effect that reduced with policy learning. We find increasing trust in public institutions during the COVID-19 crisis as opposed to a decline during the Great Recession.

Central banks have been important yet underexplored actors in the fight against the Great Recession. In addition to ultra-low interest rates, they adopted large-scale bond-buying programmes known as quantitative easing (QE). Yet there is significant variation in QE programmes with important distributive consequences. Why has the Fed adopted multi-trillion-dollar bond-buying programmes in housing, while the ECB has not? This article argues that the Fed targeted the integrated housing finance market as a monetary transmission strategy to stimulate core elements of the US growth model: credit, demand, and consumption. In contrast, the ECB hardly stimulated housing given the eurozone’s fragmented housing finance markets and the macroeconomic frictions with some eurozone growth models, particularly export-oriented Germany. Analysing archival and interview data, this article traces the decisions of these central banks since the Great Recession, contributing to scholarship on the politics of central banking, economic policy in hard times, and the welfare state.

The Repoliticization of the Welfare State grapples with the evolving nature of political conflict over social spending after the Great Recession. While the severity of the economic crisis encouraged strong social spending responses to protect millions of individuals, governments have faced growing pressure to reduce budgets and make deep cuts to the welfare state. Whereas conservative parties have embraced fiscal discipline and welfare state cuts, left-wing parties have turned away from austerity in favor of higher social spending. These political differences represent a return of traditional left-right beliefs over social spending and economic governance. This book is one of the first to systematically compare welfare state politics before and after the Great Recession, arguing that a new and lasting post-crisis dynamic has emerged where political parties once again matter for social spending. At the heart of this repoliticization are intense ideological debates over market regulation, social inequality, redistribution, and the role of the state. The book analyzes social spending dynamics for 28 countries before and after the crisis. It also includes in-depth country case studies representing five distinct welfare state types: Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Spain, and the Czech Republic.

ABSTRACTIn the wake of the ‘Great Recession’, welfare states have entered a new phase of austerity. Simultaneously, new social risks and the rise of the knowledge economy fuel new demands on the welfare state. We analyse how demands for social investment policies – particularly education – come into conflict with budgetary concerns, using new survey data on individual-level preferences in eight European countries. Paying particular attention to fiscal and budgetary trade-offs, we find that social investments are generally very popular, but as soon as realistic budget constraints are added, public support drops considerably. The largest drop occurs when social investments would be financed with cutbacks in social transfers rather than higher taxes or higher public debt levels. Furthermore, when studying the determinants of preferences, we find that in the era of permanent austerity distributive conflicts within welfare states exhibit a different political dynamic than conflicts about the size of the welfare state.