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The Malleable Politics of Welfare-to-Work Reform: Germany's "Hartz" activation compared with Dutch, British and Irish cases. ACES Cases No. 2009.1

Boyle, Nigel and Schünemann, Wolf J. (2009) The Malleable Politics of Welfare-to-Work Reform: Germany's "Hartz" activation compared with Dutch, British and Irish cases. ACES Cases No. 2009.1. UNSPECIFIED.

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    Abstract

    We compare the Hartz reforms in Germany with three other major labor market activation reforms carried out by center-left governments. Britain and Germany developed radically neoliberal “mandatory” activation policies, whereas in the Netherlands and Ireland radical activation change took a very different “enabling” form. The Irish and German cases were path deviant, the British and Dutch path dependent. We explain why Germany underwent “mandatory” and path deviant activation by focusing on two features of the policy discourse. First, the elite level discourse was “ensilaged” sealing policy formation off from dissenting actors. This is what the British and German cases had in common and the result was reform that identified long term unemployment as social delinquency rather than market failure. Second, although the German policy-making system lacked the “authoritative” features that facilitated reform in the British case, and the Irish policy-making system lacked the “reflexive” mechanisms that facilitated reform in the Dutch case, in both Germany and Ireland the wider legitimating discourses were reshaped by novel institutional vehicles (the Hartz Commission and FÁS) that served to fundamentally alter system-constitutive perceptions about policy. The findings suggest that major reform of welfare-to-work policy may be much more malleable than previously thought.

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    Item Type: Other
    Subjects for non-EU documents: Countries > Germany
    Countries > Ireland
    Countries > Netherlands
    Countries > U.K.
    EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > social policy > welfare state
    Subjects for EU documents: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Series and Periodicals: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Annual Reports: UNSPECIFIED
    Series: Series > American Consortium on European Union Studies > ACES Cases
    Depositing User: Phil Wilkin
    Official EU Document: No
    Language: English
    Date Deposited: 12 Jan 2015 13:44
    Number of Pages: 38
    Last Modified: 12 Jan 2015 13:44
    URI: http://aei.pitt.edu/id/eprint/59161

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