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The European Social Model is at a crossroad. Although from the 1990s onwards, the threat of an imminent crisis shaped much of the rhetoric surrounding the future of the welfare state, disagreement within the academic community remains. What is however increasingly clear is that with the global financial crisis and the Euro crisis that followed it, the challenges the European Social Model faces have become more acute and demand action. This volume launches a multifaceted inquiry into these challenges. Each contribution, written by renowned scholars in their fields, represents an in-depth exploration of issues that cut to the core of current political, economic and social processes. They are an invitation to the seasoned scholars as well as to the beginning students of social sciences, public administration or journalism to engage with, by now, a large body of scholarship, to accompany the authors in their endeavours to seek an explanation to burning questions and start their own inquiries.
This book takes stock of the major economic and political challenges advanced capitalist democracies face today. It provides a synthetic view, allowing the reader to grasp the nature of key structural transformations and their consequences in terms of the politics of change, policy outputs, and outcomes.
The book sheds new light on the history of the Eurozone crisis and provides crucial lessons for the way forward.
Readership: Scholars and students of political science, especially those interested in comparative political economy, institutional change and comparative politics
While economic inequality has risen in every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe, the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to distribute top-income shares to citizens with low- and middle-income? Unequal Democracies offers answers to this question, bringing together contributions that focus on voters and their demands for redistribution with contributions on elites and unequal representation that is biased against less-affluent citizens. While large and growing bodies of research have developed around each of these perspectives, this volume brings them into rare dialogue. Chapters also incorporate analyses that center exclusively on the United States and those that examine a broader set of advanced democracies to explore the uniqueness of the American case and its contribution to comparative perspectives. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Building and sustaining solidarity is a compelling challenge, especially in ethnically and religiously diverse societies. Recent research has concentrated on forces that trigger backlash and exclusion. The Strains of Commitment examines the politics of diversity in the opposite direction, exploring the potential sources of support for an inclusive solidarity, in particular political sources of solidarity. The volume asks three questions: Is solidarity really necessary for successful modern societies? Is diversity really a threat to solidarity? And what types of political communities, political agents, and political institutions and policies help sustain solidarity in contexts of diversity? T...
Justice between generations is still not as prominent on any agenda as justice between rich and poor or men and women. For the first time, this three-part book explores the situation of young people of today in comparison to their direct predecessors. The first part, The Financial Situation of the Young Generation in a Generational Comparison, deals with this generation's financial standing; the second part, The Rush Hour of Life, examines their time restrictions. Both are considered from a life-course perspective. The third part, On the Path to Gerontocracy?, addresses the demographic shift in favor of the elderly in aging Western democracies.
As stable political alliances in democracies have dissolved, populism deepens social and economic divisions rather than addressing economic insecurity.
In developing her conception of structural injustice, Iris Marion Young made a strict distinction between large-scale collective injustice that results from the normal functions of a society, and the more familiar concepts of individual wrong and deliberate state repression. Her ideas have attracted considerable attention in political philosophy, but legal theorists have been slower to consider the relation between structural injustice and legal analysis. While some forms of vulnerability to structural injustice can be the unintended consequences of legal rules, the law also has potential instruments to alleviate some forms of structural injustice. Structural Injustice and the Law presents t...
"Much has been written since the publication in 1990 of Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism on the concept of welfare regime as an analytical tool to study social policy stability and change in Europe and beyond. As a concept, welfare regime emphasizes both stability over change and divergence between country clusters over convergence. Studying on concrete policy instruments rather than spending patterns and focusing on policies introduced to protect workers against the risk of unemployment and the loss of income, this chapter explores potential patterns of commonality and difference in the social policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in four distinct welfare regimes...