Welfare State Institutions and Welfare State Outcomes
The TRALEG workshop in Mannheim, organized by Joakim Palme (SOFI) and Claus Wendt (MZES), focused on the increasing external and internal pressures that European welfare states are facing. These challenges are related to the processes of globalisation and demographic change: on the one hand, the dependency on welfare state transfers has increased for certain population groups; on the other hand, the financial scope for social policy intervention has become more limited, thus reopening the political debate on the extent of state responsibility for citizens’ welfare. As an answer to this challenge, controversial institutional reforms have been introduced throughout Europe during the last decade.
The question is if and how these reforms have changed national redistributional outcomes across different branches of the welfare state, affecting poverty, inequality, social security and thus the life chances of different population groups. Emerging new inequalities may deeply influence how institutional arrangements are perceived and assessed by the public, this link being crucial for the long-term legitimacy of welfare states.
As a result of the workshop the research team “welfare state institutions and welfare state outcomes” will concentrate on three main topics:
- Developing conceptual frameworks for analyzing institutional change; working on empirical studies that focus on the change of institutional characteristics of specific programs; concentrating for instance on the question whether the institutional liability and legitimacy is based on the outcomes they produce (Jelle Visser, Joakim Palme, Walter Korpi, Bernhard Ebbinghaus, Jürgen Kohl, Karl Hinrichs, Claus Wendt, Johan De Deken, Ingalill Montanari, Nadine Reibling, Mareike Gronwald, Monika Ewa Kaminska).
- Analyzing Minimum Income Protection programs in Europe; developing and collecting institutional indicators of Minimum Income Protection; investigating income packaging as well as accompanying policies, e.g. counselling, training and sanctions; establishing a link between MIP and poverty from a longitudinal perspective (Ive Marx, Bertrand Maître, Chris Whelan, Thomas Bahle, Michaela Pfeifer, Olof Bäckmann, Kenneth Nelson).
- Measuring attitudes towards mothers’ employment and family policy measures; analyzing institutional characteristics of family policy profiles and exploring the relationship between institutional measures and attitudes and the impact of family policy institutions on welfare outcomes like for instance labour market inequalities between men and women or inequalities between different types of families (Agnes Blome, Tommy Ferrarini, Eva Lefevere, Monika Mischke, Ingallil Montanari, Ola Sjöberg).