Retrenchment and restructuring in an age of austerity: what (if anything) can be learned from the affluent democracies?

• Main Author: Paul Pierson (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz.
• Subjects: article
• Online Access: Connect to this object online.
• Notes: 0102-311X; 1678-4464
• Keywords: bem-estar social; globalização; política social; Medicine; R; Public aspects of medicine; RA1-1270
• Source: Cadernos de Saúde Pública, Vol 18, Iss suppl, Pp S7-S11

The article discusses some difficulties of drawing implications from welfare state reform in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for "middle-income countries", and whose welfare states have been less well institutionalized. It is argued that globalization's role in contemporary social policy dynamics were not unimportant, but social processes occurring within national contexts were probably more important. There is not a single "new politics of the welfare state" but distinct political dynamics in different "regimes" or "configurations", which are characterized by different problem loads and different structures of political opportunity. Different factors are crucial in explaining outcomes in different configurations and there is little reason to expect much convergence in social policy outcomes across regime type. Contemporary welfare state reform is depicted as a process of restructuring rather than dismantling, what can encourage the possibilities for developing coalitions advancing multi-dimensional agendas of welfare state reform.