Welfare-State Retrenchment: The Partisan Effect Revisited

Welfare-State Retrenchment Revisited: Entitlement Cuts, Public Sector Restructuring, and Inegalitarian Trends in Advanced Capitalist Societies

The goal of this article is to provide a balanced assessment of what has happened to the welfare state in advanced capitalist societies since 1980. What is one to make of recent spending cuts and welfare reforms? Do they represent a fundamental rollback of the welfare activities of the state and thus a belated victory for Thatcherite-Reaganite ideas? Or should these changes rather be seen as in...

Big Cuts, Little Time: Welfare State Retrenchment in Sweden

When harsh cuts were introduced in the Swedish welfare state in an agreement between the centre-right government and the opposition Social Democrats in 1992, there were astonishingly few disagreements between the political parties as to which social groups should carry the burdens of the cuts. The conventional wisdom on welfare state retrenchment would lead us to expect a clash of interests, es...

Regionalization and Retrenchment: the Impact of European Integration on the Welfare State*

This paper demonstrates the utility of a sociology of regional integration by addressing two central questions that have sparked much debate over the welfare state. Is there evidence of long-anticipated retrenchment? Does globalization cause that retrenchment? I redirect these debates by showing that there is evidence of retrenchment in Europe, and that regional integration – not globalization ...

Welfare state retrenchment and increasing mental health inequality by educational credentials in Finland: a multicohort study

OBJECTIVES Epidemiological studies have shown an association between educational credentials and mental disorders, but have not offered any explanation for the varying strength of this association in different historical contexts. In this study, we investigate the education-specific trends in hospitalisation due to psychiatric disorders in Finnish working-age men and women between 1976 and 2010...

Welfare Retrenchment and the “New Politics”: Explaining Reversals of Welfare Expansion