Looking for a Christmas gift? Maybe you are happy to hear that the new book on welfare state reforms is out now and might be a gift idea for your family and friends (probably not…), but perhaps for yourself (who knows?).
At any rate, I am happy to see this joint work with Carsten Jensen (Aarhus University) finally in print. The book draws heavily on the work done by the WSCEP project team (Carsten, myself, Christoph Arndt and Seonghui Lee), but centers mostly on the policy side – that is the complicated world of social policy legislation. It introduces our new dataset on welfare state reforms in the UK, Denmark, Finland, France and Germany from 1974 to 2014, which is now also available online on Harvard Dataverse.
In the book, we have systematically investigated core questions that have preoccupied the welfare state literature at least since the 1990s. These include the extent of path dependency in mature welfare states, the usage of so-called “invisible” policy instruments for hiding cutbacks, and the role of partisanship – on whether the ideological color of the incumbent affects policy – which have been analysed in depth by examining the new dataset presented in this book.
Georg Wenzelburger