The Continental Social Investment Turn’: New Wellsire article in Politics & Society

How do single breadwinner welfare models transform towards dual breadwinner systems? In their new [object Object], Donato di Carlo, Anton Hemerijck and Johannes Karremans identify a three-step sequence of reforms in continental European countries. Their argument applies specifically to so-called Bismarckian welfare states, i.e. contributory systems that are mostly financed through employment. These systems were developed during the industrial era, when single (mostly male) breadwinners had relatively highly productive jobs, with generous social benefits (e.g. pensions and unemployment benefits) contractually tied to their wages and largely funded by social contributions. With the decline of the industrial sector experienced in Europe between the 1970s and 1980s, there was an increase in beneficiaries of social benefits and a decrease of contributors. Hence, welfare cuts needed to be implemented and at the same time labour market liberalization was introduced to create more flexible and less protected jobs, increasing the number of contributors. As post-industrial jobs were relatively less productive than the old industrial jobs, a larger pool of workers was needed. In societies where the workforce was mostly male, the biggest pool of prospective workers to activate was the female population. As the female population traditionally fulfilled important home-care tasks, new social services were needed in order to facilitate women’s entry into employment. Di Carlo, Hemerijck and Karremans argue that the expansion of family policies witnessed during the past three decades in most European countries needs to be understood in this light: as a policy-complementarity that followed the welfare retrenchments of the (more or less) 1980s and the labour market liberalizations of the (more or less) 1990s and 2000s.

The article ‘[object Object]’ was published in the journal Politics & Society on 26 July 2024