Kees van Kersbergen

• Head of Department at Aarhus University

To what extent, and under what conditions, have workfare reforms shaped public opinion towards the unemployed? This article unpacks the punitive and enabling dimensions of the workfare turn and examines how changes to the rights and obligations of the unemployed have influenced related policy preferences. To do so, it presents a novel dataset on th...

This chapter examines the emergence, expansion, variation, and transformation of the welfare state. It first considers the meaning of the welfare state, before discussing three perspectives that explain the emergence of the welfare state: the functionalist approach, the class mobilization approach, and a literature emphasizing the impact of state i...

Does neoliberalism lie behind the increased use of social policy to control and incentivize labour market behaviour? We argue that this assumed connection is theoretically weak and empirically inaccurate, and we point to an alternative explanation centred on government paternalism. Using a new comparative dataset on workfare reforms, we first descr...

Modern democratic states are increasingly adopting new information and communication technologies to enhance the efficiency and quality of public administration, public policy and services. However, there is substantial variation in the extent to which countries are successful in pursuing such public digitalization. This paper zooms in on the role...

The Scandinavian welfare states stand out when it comes to future-oriented social investment policies and the associated social and economic performance (e.g., human capital formation, equality, inclusive growth). This chapter first explains how the inclusive social investment approach in Scandinavia came about. In the second part, it asks, is Scan...

Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policymakers’ main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented “social investment” policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive va...

Social acceleration – the progressively faster rate of technological, social and life-pace change – poses a dilemma for democratic problem solving: It increases the amount of new social problems emerging on the political agenda and hence amplifies the demand for rapid and effective policy solutions. Democratic politics is, however, slow. So either...

This chapter introduces the volume’s research questions, goal, and approach, as well as the various contributing chapters. The overarching research question of this volume is: to what extent and how will the politics and policies of welfare states respond to the new challenges of digitalization? The chapter outlines two constituent sub-questions. F...

This chapter presents a set of observations about digitalization and health-related risks, and explains why these are of interest to anyone concerned about the sustainability of social protection systems in Western democracies and, by implication, socioeconomic inequalities. The chapter explains that health risks are life course risks, that such ri...

This concluding chapter summarizes the main take-away point from the chapters of this volume, focusing on the core research questions identified in the introduction: How does digitalization affect the changing policy space as well as the political space of contemporary welfare states? The chapters provide multifaceted and differentiated responses t...

Digitalization is likely to have a lasting impact on work, welfare, health, education, and the income distribution. It will radically transform not only social risks but also the means by which these are addressed. The contributions to this volume explore how digitalization—in different forms—affects the welfare state. They study how it influences...

This volume explores how digitalization—in different forms—affects the welfare state. Digitalization is likely to have a lasting impact on work, welfare, and the distribution of income. It will radically transform not only social risks in health, education and the labour market, but also the means by which these risks are addressed. The volume stud...

This is the comprehensively revised second edition of a volume that was welcomed at its first appearance as ‘the most authoritative survey and critique of the welfare state yet published’. Of its fifty-one chapters, some chapters are brand new; all have been systematically revised, and they are all right up to date. The first seven sections of the...

The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Europe offers a detailed overview of religious ideas, structures, and institutions in the making of Europe. It examines the role of religion in fostering identity, survival, and tolerance in the empires and nation-states of Europe from Antiquity until today; the interplay between religion, politics, and ideologie...

Since the Maastricht Treaty (1993), subsidiarity has guided the political process surrounding the distribution of competences between administrative layers in the European Union (EU). The EU’s subsidiarity regime affects the politics and governance of the EU, because the notion of subsidiarity allows for continuous negotiation over its practical us...

This chapter examines the emergence, expansion, variation, and transformation of the welfare state. It first considers the meaning of the welfare state, before discussing three perspectives that explain the emergence of the welfare state: the functionalist approach, the class mobilization approach, and a literature emphasizing the impact of state i...

This article contributes to the literature on party appeals to social groups by introducing a new dataset on group and policy appeals in Scandinavia (2009–2015). In addition to coding to what social groups parties appeal, we collected information on what policies parties offer for the groups they mention and what goals and instruments they specify...

In many countries, new, broad, and normative “conceptions of society” gained prominence that represent fundamentally different discursive alternatives to the classical welfare state. We present two political projects that contain radical alternative conceptualizations of the classical welfare state, the “Big Society” in Britain and the “Participati...

The starting point for our contribution on the (alleged) crisis of the European social model is David Weisstanner and Klaus Armingeon’s (2018) study on the cross-national variation in wage premiums to discuss the temporal dimension of social investment policy – futureoriented policy par excellence. Our guiding propositions are that: (1) “social acc...

Transformative welfare reform in consensus democracies This article takes up Lijphart’s claim that consensus democracy is a ‘kinder, gentler’ form of democracy than majoritarian democracy. We zoom in on contemporary welfare state change, particularly the shift towards social investment, and argue that the kinder, gentler hypothesis remains relevant...

This paper investigates how and why welfare state universalism can shape the integration of migrants into the national community. Universalism is broadly regarded as central to the integrative and solidarity-building potential of welfare states, but we argue that the traditional approach to understanding the concept is fraught with inconsistencies....

This article explores the moral politics of the welfare state and the social conflicts that underlie them. We argue that existing research on the moralism of redistributive and social policy preferences is overly one dimensional, with a longstanding concentration on attitudes toward welfare state beneficiaries. To widen our understanding of the phe...

Social class, with its potentially pivotal influence on both policy-making and electoral outcomes tied to the welfare state, is a frequent fixture in academic and political discussions about social policy. Yet these discussions presuppose that class identity is in fact tied up with distinct attitudes toward the welfare state. Using original data fr...

This article explores how preferences for redistribution among voters are affected by the structure of inequality. There are strong theoretical reasons to believe that some voter segments matter more than others, not least the so-called median-income voter, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to directly analysing distinct income groups...

The Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data set quantifies how much parties emphasize certain topics and positions and is very popular in the study of political parties. The data set is also increasingly applied in comparative political economy and welfare state studies that use the welfare-specific items rather than the CMP’s left–right scale to...

The Nordic countries pursue permissive policies with regard to morality issues. There is, however, one exception: the Faroe Islands. This country pursues remarkably conservative policies. Drawing on morality issue theory, secularization theory, and the supply side theory of religion, we develop a framework that explains the political dynamics aroun...

Given the ill-fated political experience with the Third Way, one would not expect social democratic parties that return to office after long opposition spells to take up again the liberal, supply-side oriented policies that were so typical for the Third Way. A case study of Denmark, however, shows that that is precisely what happens and that it has...

There is no doubt that Esping-Andersen’s three worlds’ typology has been extremely valuable. However, the literature inspired by it shows signs of Kuhnian normal science, which is impairing empirical and theoretical progress. We explain normal science, demonstrate that it characterizes recent empirical regime studies and ask why this has come about...

Populist parties increasingly take a welfare chauvinistic position. They criticize mainstream parties for cutting and slashing welfare at the expense of the ‘native’ population and to the benefit of the ‘undeserving’ immigrant. Given the electoral success of populist parties, we investigate whether and when mainstream parties ignore, attack or acco...

This contribution analyzes the history of the language of the Dutch welfare state. We progress with the 1960s and 1970s, when the passive, benefit-oriented “verzorgingsstaat” was completed and perfected and the term not only became dominant, but the system’s generosity became a source of political pride for both Social Democrats and Christian Democ...

The Dutch term used to describe the welfare state is ‘verzorgingsstaat’. ‘Verzorgen’ means ‘to take care of ‘, but also ‘to care’, and implies ‘to nurture’, ‘to tend to’ and ‘to nurse’. The word ‘verzorging’, for instance, also appears in the term ‘verzorgingshuis’ (nursing home). The distinct connotation of the Dutch term is paternalistic and remi...

By 2010, when the Greek 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 conta...

Older people increase their well-being and contribute to the community when they volunteer. Therefore, policy-makers sometimes consider supporting older volunteers. However, they reach different conclusions on whether they should introduce policies for older volunteers, and on what policy would be the most suitable. This article studies how policie...

Why are some governments able to push through radical welfare state reforms while others, operating in similar circumstances, are not? Why are some ideas more acceptable than others? We present an open functional approach to reform to answer these questions and illustrate it empirically by discussing the drastic reform of the Dutch disability schem...

Will voters punish the government for cutting back welfare state entitlements? The comparative literature on the welfare state suggests that the answer is yes. Unless governments are effectively employing strategies of blame avoidance, retrenchment leads to vote loss. Because a large majority of voters supports the welfare state, the usual assumpti...

Older people increase their well-being and contribute to the community when they volunteer. Therefore, policy-makers sometimes consider supporting older volunteers. However, they reach different conclusions on whether they should introduce policies for older volunteers, and on what policy would be the most suitable. This article studies how policie...

This edited volume consists of country studies of social policy reforms in most continental European – or ‘Bismarckian’ – welfare states over the past decade and a half. In addition, it contains chapters on financing the welfare state, employment policy, and the role of social partners in administering social policy, an introduction and summarizing...

This important volume sheds light on a group of smaller European countries, often overlooked in economic discussions, that share a high degree of corporatism - Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. The contributors to this book investigate the various trajectories of these countries' economies, with p...

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 m...

Religion and War Resistance in the Plowshares Movement. By NepstadSharon Erickson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 284p. $93.00 cloth, $27.00 paper. - Volume 10 Issue 2 - Kees van Kersbergen

This edited volume consists of country studies of social policy reforms in most continental European – or ‘Bismarckian’ – welfare states over the past decade and a half. In addition, it contains chapters on financing the welfare state, employment policy, and the role of social partners in administering social policy, an introduction and summarizing...

Welfare state reform occurs in all advanced capitalist democracies, but it does not occur in identical ways, to the same degree or with similar consequences. in Comparative Welfare State Politics, Kees van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis explain the political opportunities and constraints of welfare state reform by asking ‘big’ questions. Why did we nee...

If ever there was momentum to roll back the welfare state, it is the (aftermath) of the financial crisis of 2008–09. All theoretical perspectives within comparative welfare state research predict radical reform in this circumstance, but does it also happen? Our data indicate that – at least so far – it does not. Focusing on a selection of advanced...

Despite its centrality in European politics, Christian democracy came to be the object of systematic research only recently. We review the research that has emerged since the mid-1990s and pinpoint its contributions in specifying the origins, evolution, and broader impact of Christian democratic parties. We begin with a discussion of the origins of...

The study of political religion has focused on how religious structure and substance came to permeate grand political ideologies such as fascism and communism. The relevance of various relatively veiled forms of religion in modern day-to-day democratic politics has been undervalued and we therefore fail to appreciate to what extent, and how religio...

This article is the result of concern about some developments in comparative politics, and it offers some points for discussion. It seems that three trends unduly confine the domain, scope and quality of research in the field. The subdiscipline (1) hardly deals with the social sources of political phenomena anymore and is disproportionally engaged...

In their response to my discussion paper, Gerald Schneider and Markus Haverland focus on the issue of variation versus similarity. Schneider insists that I wish to move comparative politics towards similarity analyses only. This is not the case. Yes, variation is important. But there are similarity puzzles that merit attention. We should keep open...

Most comparativists who study welfare state development agree that religion has played a role in the development of modern social protection systems. The early protagonists of the power resources approach, however, had only stressed the causal impact of Socialist working-class mobilization on modern social policy (see Esping-Andersen and van Kersbe...

Introduction Two major puzzles have occupied research on the Dutch welfare state. First, why was social policy so late to emerge, and why did it remain underdeveloped for such a long time? Second, why did the Dutch welfare state in the period after World War II so suddenly and rapidly expand to become one of the most comprehensive, generous, and pa...

This book radically revises established knowledge in comparative welfare state studies and introduces a new perspective on how religion shaped modern social protection systems. The interplay of societal cleavage structures and electoral rules produced the different political class coalitions sustaining the three welfare regimes of the Western world...

The Dutch welfare state has always posed analytical and empirical puzzles, since existing theories cannot adequately explain the characteristic features of its welfare regime (especially its paternalism and generosity). We discuss two interconnected puzzles about Dutch welfare state development and propose solutions. First, we show that the Dutch e...

This paper draws attention to the problem of matching abstract theory and specific hypotheses within welfare state research, which reinforces the dependent variable problem and entails methodological difficulties. We show that matching theory and hypotheses is a ubiquitous problem in the literature. We further elaborate and illustrate the argument...

Christian democracy is still posing theoretical problems of definition and empirical puzzles of classification and interpretation. Analyses based on secularization theory produce puzzles and anomalies and have little to offer as explanations for the variation in Christian democratic power mobilization. Empirically, this article focuses on Christian...

We study the impact of the 'foreigners issue' on centre-right politics in the Netherlands. This issue concerns a complex of problems related to migration, asylum-seekers, nationalism, multiculturalism and European integration. The Dutch centre-right has moved towards hard-line and restrictive policies in these areas. By connecting issues of immigra...

We take up a longstanding question within the field of European Union (EU) studies: What explains the variation in public support for European integration? There are two dominant explanations: the utilitarian self-interest and the national identity perspectives. The former viewpoint stresses that citizens are more likely to support European integra...

Theories on the role of norms in international relations generally neglect the possibility that after their adoption a new battle over their precise meaning ensues, especially when a norm remains vague and illusive. Norm implementation is not only a matter of internalization and compliance, but also of redefinition. Building on insights from ration...

Why and how do political actors pursue risky welfare state reforms, in spite of the institutional mechanisms and political resistance that counteract change? This is one of the key puzzles of contemporary welfare state research, which is brought about by the absence of a complete account that identifies both the cause and causal mechanisms of risky...

Subsidiarity has been introduced at the 1991 Maastricht conference as a principle of European governance. This article traces its development over the past 15 years and attempts to assess the effect of the subsidiarity principle on European governance. The impact of subsidiarity varies across time and across issue area. This is related to the fact...

This chapter studies the thesis of the ‘Christian democratisation’ of British social democracy. This debate has been conducted mostly in German, and it is argued that the adoption of such Christian democratisation can stretch as far as Rauchbier and Schwartzbier. It indicates that continental social democracy has unsuccessfully tried to break with...

Introduction: the Christian democratisation of social democracy? One intriguing observation – at least from a continental perspective – on the British debate on the nature of New Labour concerns what may be called the thesis of the ‘Christian democratisation’ of British social democracy. David Marquand early on suggested that Tony Blair’s aim was t...

Modern societies have in recent decades seen a destabilization of the traditional governing mechanisms and the advancement of new arrangements of governance. Conspicuously, this has occurred in the private, semi-private and public spheres, and has involved local, regional, national, transnational and global levels within these spheres. We have witn...

This review examines the comparative, empirical literature that concerns the impact of social democracy on welfare state development and on economic performance. The theoretical basis of this research lies in reformist social democratic ideology which, in turn, is given substantial empirical confirmation in the sense that the balance of political p...

Christian democracy has been one of the most successful political movements in post-war Western Europe yet its crucial impact on the development of the modern European welfare state has been critically neglected. This book describes the origin and development of the Christian democratic movement and presents comparative accounts of the varying degr...

This review essay discusses a large variety of recent studies of social democracy. Much of the literature is characterized by a certain amount of politicization. This may affect the sort of questions posed. It may also negatively impinge on the quality of scholarly analysis. Particularly, the debate on the ‘Third Way’ and New Labour in the United K...

The development of European Social Democracy has once more attracted significant scholarly attention. This time, the debate is centred around the 'third way' as the catchphrase for the transformation of European Social Democracy. Based on the experience of the Danish and Dutch Social Democrats, two questions are raised in this article, namely what...

This article presents and discusses the state of the art in political science research on welfare state reform. While scholars first aimed at explaining the emergence and growth of the welfare state, national variation in its development, and crises of welfare state regimes, more recently the focus has shifted to the persistence and reform of the m...

After the wave of conservative or neo-liberal governments in Europe in the 1980s, social democratic parties are back in government in most European countries. At the same time, with the 'third way' as its catch phrase, European social democracy seems to have regained the ideological upper hand. The questions posed in this article are, first, whethe...