By Mark Vail
In "Recasting Welfare Capitalism", Mark Vail employs a cosmopolitan and unique theoretical method of evaluate welfare states and political-economic adjustment in Germany and France. He examines how and why institutional swap occurs and what elements represent fiscal evolution while relocating from instances of prosperity to extra austere sessions and again back. masking the Seventies to the current, Vail analyzes social and fiscal reforms, together with exertions coverage, social-insurance, and anti-poverty courses. He makes a speciality of the strategies and activities of key political gamers, and demolishes the stagnation argument that means that France and Germany have principally frozen political economies, incapable of reform. Vail unearths those respective evolutions contain interrelated adjustments in social and financial rules and are characterised by way of political relationships which are constantly renegotiated - frequently in unpredictable methods. within the procedure, he provides a compelling re-conceptualization of swap in either the welfare country and the wider political economic climate in the course of an age of globalization.
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Extra info for Recasting Welfare Capitalism: Economic Adjustment in Contemporary France and Germany
Example text
There are other reasons that this broad process of economic stabilization and marketization tends to precede the subsequent phase of welfare reform and revamping of social protection. First, governments often need a robust welfare state to make large-scale liberalization socially and economically feasible. Second and relatedly, policymakers cannot attack all sources of economic support simultaneously without seriously jeopardizing the stability of their economies and their hold on power. In a way that Paul Pierson has described with respect to welfare reform,37 imposing costs on mobilized constituencies requires maintaining legitimacy and convincing voters (or at least enough of The Politics of Austerity in Advanced Industrial Democracies 29 them) that governments are acting in the public interest.
The Politics of Austerity in Advanced Industrial Democracies 21 As it discredited the postwar European economic order, austerity presented elites with a daunting set of political challenges. The postwar Keynesian consensus, based on an implicit exchange of wage moderation and labor peace for government support for economic growth, progressive taxation, and generous social policies, had acted as a bulwark of political and social stability for nearly three decades. When Europe’s models of capitalism could no longer deliver the consistent economic performance on which this compromise rested, growing social and political unrest forced governments to alter their political strategy.
Even as they liberalized and marketized the economy, French authorities expanded the welfare state, placing particular emphasis on programs such as early retirement and new forms of income support designed to preserve the legitimacy of reform. In Germany, the challenges of this first phase of adjustment to austerity were even more daunting. Though German economic performance had begun to decline in the 1980s, with rising unemployment and declining rates of economic growth, the shock of reunification created a full-blown social and economic crisis.