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Labor Movement Visions and Welfare State Restructuring in Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany
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Labor Movement Visions and Welfare State Restructuring in Sweden,
the Netherlands and Germany
Karen Anderson
Department of Political Science
Nijmegen University
Box 9108
6500 HK Nijmegen
The Netherlands
k.## email not listed ##
tel: +31 (0)24 36 11630
VERY ROUGH DRAFT!
ABSTRACT
Much of the welfare state literature implicitly assumes that labor movements everywhere would choose roughly the same set of institutions if only they possessed the power resources to do so. Sweden is implicitly or explicitly seen as the model, with a large public sector providing comprehensive social services and income maintenance during sickness, unemployment, and old age. That countries such as Germany and the Netherlands fell short of achieving this standard is typically attributed to the inferior power resources of labor movements in these countries (i.e. they had to share power with strong Christian Democratic and/or Liberal Parties) and/or an unfavorable institutional context. An issue which has received less attention is whether labor movements in Germany and the Netherlands even wanted to follow a more “Swedish” strategy. In short, labor movements have developed their own, nationally distinct understandings of the role of the state in the provision of social welfare and regulating the market. This paper asks how labor movement visions of “the good society” in Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany shaped their responses to pressures for welfare state restructuring in the 1990s and 2000s. To do so, the paper first compares and contrasts the ideas, norms and cognitive understandings embedded in the Swedish, German and Dutch social democratic cognitive framing of the welfare state and asks how these understandings shaped welfare state restructuring processes in the 1990s and 2000s. What were the core values that social democratic parties and unions sought to defend when faced with pressures to reform? How did the embeddedness of norms and cognitive understandings in specific welfare state institutions shape labor’s approach to restructuring?
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| | Authors: Anderson, Karen. |
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Labor Movement Visions and Welfare State Restructuring in Sweden,
the Netherlands and Germany
Karen Anderson
Department of Political Science
Nijmegen University
Box 9108
6500 HK Nijmegen
The Netherlands
k.## email not listed ##
tel: +31 (0)24 36 11630
VERY ROUGH DRAFT!
ABSTRACT
Much of the welfare state literature implicitly assumes that labor movements everywhere
would choose roughly the same set of institutions if only they possessed the power resources
to do so. Sweden is implicitly or explicitly seen as the model, with a large public sector
providing comprehensive social services and income maintenance during sickness,
unemployment, and old age. That countries such as Germany and the Netherlands fell short of
achieving this standard is typically attributed to the inferior power resources of labor
movements in these countries (i.e. they had to share power with strong Christian Democratic
and/or Liberal Parties) and/or an unfavorable institutional context. An issue which has
received less attention is whether labor movements in Germany and the Netherlands even
wanted to follow a more “Swedish” strategy. In short, labor movements have developed their
own, nationally distinct understandings of the role of the state in the provision of social
welfare and regulating the market. This paper asks how labor movement visions of “the good
society” in Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany shaped their responses to pressures for
welfare state restructuring in the 1990s and 2000s. To do so, the paper first compares and
contrasts the ideas, norms and cognitive understandings embedded in the Swedish, German
and Dutch social democratic cognitive framing of the welfare state and asks how these
understandings shaped welfare state restructuring processes in the 1990s and 2000s. What
were the core values that social democratic parties and unions sought to defend when faced
with pressures to reform? How did the embeddedness of norms and cognitive understandings
in specific welfare state institutions shape labor’s approach to restructuring?
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