Abstract
ABSTRACT This article compares parliamentary preferences on welfare expenditure in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, and the United Kingdom between 1996 and 2013. The analysis is focused on the relationship between the type of welfare regime and the programmatic offer on the volume of social spending. Two indexes were calculated: social spending and social retrenchment. Upon emergence from the recession, an increasingly homogeneous conception is detected of social policies as being subordinated to economic policies; convergence has occurred within each of the worlds of welfare, maintaining the variation among them found prior to the Crisis.
Highlights
The reform of the welfare state (WS) has held a central position in the political agenda of European countries since the conservative revolution led by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s
In addition to the empirical analysis itself, in the third section, we provide a comparison of the reform policies developed in the different welfare states
In order to examine the eventual convergence in the position of the national parliaments regarding social spending in Europe, this work studies the countries of the EU-15 for the following two reasons: the Member States that joined the European Union later present welfare models that are too different from those above to be included in this comparative study; likewise, it is necessary to manage a sufficient period of EU membership in order to assess the impact of the Great Recession
Summary
The reform of the welfare state (WS) has held a central position in the political agenda of European countries since the conservative revolution led by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. The main risk lies in the high level of taxation required to maintain them and the threat the increasing mobility of money represents for their financing (Scharpf, 1991 and 1999) This regime has evolved towards the weakening of the state monopoly, bolstering combined services with an increasing weight of private management models and initiatives. Its evolution started in the 1980s and 1990s and has been focused on freezing or taking back control over the processes of universalization of healthcare and education, reinforcing the link between need accreditation and access to programs and the commitment to methods of provisioning that prioritize market formulas or volunteer associations and charities During this time, the Mediterranean regime has moved towards a “double dual system” with regard to both the service proposals (universal and selective) and the forms of provision (Losada, 2013 and 2015). Visions and missions that define them that have changed and are transformed
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