Path dependency and convergence of three worlds of welfare policy during the Great Recession: UK, Germany and Sweden

Abstract

This paper investigates policy responses to the Great Recession in Sweden, the United Kingdom and Germany. Faced with the global financial crisis in 2007, responses in the respective countries differed considerably and followed the “old” paths of their institutional legacies. We focus on labour market and social welfare policies and demonstrate how these differing responses were shaped by path-dependent ideational paradigms. Since these paradigms are first and foremost carried by policy communities, the analysis does not, in contrast to prior studies, only rely on policy documents but outlines the process as seen from the perspective of key public officials and experts in the respective fields. The paper shows how the crisis was perceived and which kinds of arguments were used for explaining the liberal (UK), conservative (Germany) and social–democratic (Sweden) responses to crisis.

Keywords:

• welfare state
• policy change
• economic crisis
• labour policy
• path dependency
• convergence

Notes on contributors

Johannes Kiess is researcher at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Siegen. He has previously been guest researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, and Georgetown University, Washington, DC. He was a researcher in the EU-funded project LIVEWHAT and is currently conducting research in the project EURYKA.

Ludvig Norman is Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Government, Uppsala University. He has previously been guest researcher at the Centre for European Policy Studies and 2016–2017 Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley, Institute of European Studies. He is the author of the book The Mechanisms of Institutional Conflict in the European Union (2016 Routledge) as well as recent articles in European Journal of Social Theory, European Journal of International Relations and Journal of European Public Policy.

Luke Temple is a Teaching Assistant at the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield. He previously worked as a Research Associate for the LIVEWHAT project at the Sheffield Department of Politics. His research interests include political participation and democratic theory, alongside narrative and policy responses to economic crises.

Katrin Uba is Associate Professor at the Department of Government, Uppsala University. Her research interests are protest mobilisation, social movement outcomes and labour movement in Sweden and beyond. She has studied outcomes of protests against school closures in Sweden (RJ); compiled the Swedish Protest Database 1980–2011 (FAS) and worked on citizens’ resilience at times of economic crisis (LIVEWHAT). She is currently involved in three projects: Labor Movement Gone Digital (RJ), and two Horizon 2020-financed projects – EURYKA (youth political activism) and REMINDER (citizens’ free movement in the EU).

Notes

1 The empirical material for this article was retrieved in the framework of the international collaborative project LIVEWHAT (Living with hard times), funded by the EU FP7. All examined documents, as well as summaries of the interview material, are available in a form of two deliverables of the project. See project’s website: http://www.livewhat.unige.ch/

2 A full list of respondents can be found in the appendix of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Seventh Framework Programme [grant number 613237].