Reforming European Welfare States: Germany and the United Kingdom Compared

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Reforming European Welfare States: Germany and the United Kingdom Compared. By Jochen Clasen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 264p. $90.00.

This book traces welfare policy developments in Germany and the United Kingdom from the late 1970s to 2003. Focusing on three policy dimensions—unemployment policy, public pension policy, and family policy—Jochen Clasen seeks to understand the scope, nature, and timing of welfare reform. To his credit, the author avoids the usual trap of characterizing welfare reform exclusively in terms of retrenchment. Recognizing the complex nature of shifts in social policy over time, his work details and explains patterns of retrenchment, restructuring, and expansion. To understand the pathways of policy transformation, he considers three types of explanatory factors: party politics (mainly actors' preferences), contextual conditions (such as major events and social trends), and institutional parameters (including legal constraints, existing policy programs, and the characteristics of political economy structures). He also considers the relationships among these causal forces.