Documents Vanhuysse, Pieter 5 résultats

"This article explores the diverging roles of left-wing parties and trade unions in determining active labour market programme (ALMP) spending. We argue that unions today increasingly take into account the distinct re-employability worries of their members. Rather than as a labour market outsider programme, unions now consider ALMPs, especially those sub-programmes most directly useful to their members, as their second-best or first-best feasible priority. Specifically, in countries where high job protection levels (the first-best goal) have not been achieved, more powerful unions will promote ALMP spending as an alternative way to offer their members some measure of labour market security. We test these arguments on a sample of twenty OECD countries between 1986 and 2005. Using a new measure of leftness, we find that left-wing party power has no effect on ALMP spending generally and a negative effect on job creation spending. By contrast, larger and more strike-prone unions are associated with higher ALMP spending overall, and specifically on those programmes most benefiting their members: employment assistance and labour market training. Moreover, union strategies are context dependent. More powerful unions push for more activation spending, especially in labour markets where jobs are not yet well protected."

"This Policy Brief summarizes the latest evidence on active labour market policy (ALMP) spending and Employment Protection Legislation across the OECD. It then summarizes theoretical findings from Tepe & Vanhuysse (2013), arguing that unions but not left-wing parties today increasingly take into account the re-employability worries of their members and have therefore adopted ALMPs as a second-best priority. Where high levels of employment protection have not been achieved (the first-best goal), more powerful unions will promote activation spending as an alternative way to offer their members - labor market insiders - some state help. This may consolidate the tendency towards dual labour markets, and it offers a possible explanation for why insiders have seen a status quo their job protection levels since the 1980s, whereas outsiders have seen strong reductions in job protection levels."

"Over the past decades, all affluent welfare states have been coping with two major new trends: population ageing and new social risks resulting from de-industrialization. How have these demand-side trends, and their timing, affected welfare spending? We investigate up to 21 OECD democracies with respect to eight separate programmes and two composite indicators of aggregate welfare spending bias towards the elderly and new social risks. We find that welfare regime logics still matter crucially in accounting for variation between countries, as does the timing of the large-scale arrival of new social risks. Both Southern European welfare states and countries that entered the post-industrial society comparatively late spend less on programmes such as education and family allowances, and more on survivor pensions. However within countries, contemporaneous levels of new social risks conspicuously fail to affect spending on programmes that deal with these risks. These findings defy simple neo-pluralist expectations of social policy responsiveness: on their own, even dramatic demand-side trends influence welfare spending relatively little in advanced democracies."

"This collection adopts novel theoretical approaches to study the diverse welfare state pathways that have evolved across Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism in 1989. Going beyond existing path dependency and neo-institutionalist explanations, it highlights the role of explanatory factors such as micro-causal mechanisms, ideas, discourses, path departures, power politics, and elite strategies.

This collection includes contributions from leading international experts to examine welfare in specific countries and across social policy domains. By providing a broad overview based on a theoretical foundation and drawing on recent empirical evidence, Post-Communist Welfare Pathways offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art account of the progress that has been made since 1989, and the main challenges that lie ahead for welfare state regimes in Central and Eastern Europe."

"Social scientists identify two core functions of modern welfare states as redistribution across (a) socio-economic status groups (Robin Hood); and (b) ‘the lifecycle' (the piggy bank). But what is the relative importance of these two key functions? Contemporary European welfare states are often maligned as ineffective Robin Hood vehicles riddled with Matthew effects that serve the middle classes at least as much as they serve the poorer or the more needy. However, we find that welfare states are actually better characterized as, first and foremost, inter-age redistribution machines performing an empirically more important task than inter-status redistribution: that is, lifecycle consumption-smoothing. Social policies have evolved to serve multiple goals for multiple historical and political economy reasons in Europe. But here we show that in practice social policies are not primarily responsible for poverty relief and inequality reduction: they are piggy banks, more than Robin Hoods. Nor are they solely responsible. Non-social policies such as economic, fiscal, infrastructural and environmental policies also have significant status-redistributive effects. Hence non-social policies could also be judged by the same yardstick: the extent to which they contribute to reducing inequality and poverty."