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Changing Welfare States (SPS-REHEM-WEL-24)

SPS-REHEM-WEL-24

Purpose

European welfare states are (once again) under intellectual and material reconstruction, in the aftermath of a series of crises and in view of predictable disruptions from the double transition of climate and technological change. National governments and the EU had to -- and will have to -- take unprecedented action to save lives and livelihoods. The openness of welfare states, especially in Europe, is both a challenge and a possible remedy. Welfare states have long been considered to be ties that bind a capitalist economy and a democratic polity together, if in different ways. They also create a social order more or less distinct from markets and create communities of risk that have social citizenship in their wake. Overall, the welfare state has shown resilience but these and other irritants conjure up pressures for welfare state adaptation. The diversity of European welfare states and the EU’s evolving capabilities can be exploited to study their combined systemic capacity for reform and adaptation to structural change.
 

Description

The course offers a comparative analysis of modern welfare state development and social reform against the background of changing nature of economics, politics, and society. The aim is to introduce researchers to the state of the art in comparative welfare state research literature, with a special emphasis on structural change, including the feminization of the labour market, demographic aging, economic internationalization and the lasting impact of the global financial crisis and the pandemic, on variegated national welfare states and EU social policy. The course aims to provide researchers with advanced knowledge in the basic institutions underlying modern welfare states and explaining their variation over time. Furthermore, the course provides skills in comparative cross-national and European welfare policy analysis, with special attention given to competing theories on welfare state change and continuity in terms of their theoretical and methodological strengths and weaknesses.

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