Gender Equality Policies and Practices in Croatia – The Interplay of Transition and Late Europeanization

This article contributes to understanding change in gender regimes in post‐communist countries. Using Croatia as a case, it juxtaposes the observed change in key indicators of the position of women in various walks of life with the context of the European gender agenda and the positions of actors involved in the national political arena and policies introduced throughout the transition period. The article reviews the previous enlargement waves and indicates that the gender agenda was added to the negotiation process rather late – primarily via the EU accession conditionality requirement. Although narrow in scope and often limited in impact to just ‘paper compliance’ with EU legislation, it opened discussions in the gender equality area in post‐communist countries and empowered women's organizations. In all the countries, the implementation of the European agenda was heavily influenced by the power and discourses of the main actors involved. The article provides a map of social actors involved, together with gender‐related policies as they have changed in three distinct periods in Croatia. The final analysis of observed practices and structures indicates very slow change and the crucial impact of structural and institutional developments as well as economic cycles, but little association of observed developments with dominant discourses or policies implemented over the past two decades.     

EU Integration and the Transformation of Post‐communist Welfare: Traversing a ‘Quantum Leap’?

While many academic accounts treat post‐communist Europe as just another site of Europeanization with an emphasis on ‘adaptation’ and ‘learning’, this article argues that EU integration and the transformation of post‐communist Europe is a much more complex, volatile and uncertain process; not so much one of adaptation but more a ‘quantum leap’, apparently bypassing the stage of a Keynesian regime. Post‐communist Europe is asked to join an EU agenda that has many features of what Jessop calls the ‘Schumpeterian Workfare Postnational Regime’ (SWPR). In that sense, EU integration of post‐communist welfare is not simply a ‘catch‐up’, it is a complex transformation process whereby, rather than EU Enlargement and Eastern Europe being seen as a threat to ‘Social Europe’, the EU imposes its own ‘social deficit’ and economic hegemony onto Eastern Europe.     

Democracy and poverty: The implementation of social reforms in the countries of central and eastern Europe

Why has the political and economic transformation in Russia and central and eastern Europe been accompanied by deteriorating living standards? Many of the reform programmes have contained social elements, but these have been neglected in the implementation process. Certain barriers to change – mental, cultural, political and economic – have made the implementation difficult. Russia and central and eastern Europe have to pass through a problematic dual transformation, from authoritarianism to democracy and from centrally planned economies to market economies. Experiences from Latin America show that such transitions are virtually impossible. The social results from the transformations in central and eastern Europe have been disappointing, which has been documented by scholars in this field. Nevertheless, if the political and economic transformation processes continue, the prospectes for the future are relatively bright. But there is also a negative scenario with authoritarianism and civil war as endpoints. A more cautious transition to a market economy might improve social welfare and living standards.     

The impact of adverse initial conditions and the resulting speed and sequence of reforms in determining the delayed EU membership of Bulgaria

The subject of the paper is the analysis of the speed, sequence and path of a formerly centrally administered economy, Bulgaria, to a market economy. Comparing the macroeconomic developments and transition reforms of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries, Bulgaria is lagging behind. It is concluded that the stop-and-go nature of the conducted Bulgarian reforms and the lack of commitment to deep-seated reforms by successive governments were due to the adverse initial economic conditions that the country experienced during transition, as well as the intense external shocks the country endured. These factors were the main barriers to attaining sustained growth, and contributed to Bulgaria's delayed entrance to the EU.     

From Austerity to Austerity: The Political Economy of Public Pension Reforms in Romania and Bulgaria

This article discusses the trajectories of pension system reforms in two of the latecomers to the EU: Bulgaria and Romania. It finds that over the past two decades, the two countries pursued increasingly dissimilar public pension reforms for managing their respective public pay‐as‐you‐go pension systems. Using a political institutionalist theoretical framework, I argue that the divergence between the two cases is attributable to multiple factors. First, different temporary political compromises between national and international actors generated reforms that retrenched public pensions and introduced mandatory private accounts. Second, pension reforms often had unintended consequences that limited their intended impact. Third, incremental adjustments introduced by governments in response to political pressures caused alternating phases of austerity and generosity that catered to different constituencies in each country. In Romania, reform outcomes amounted to a moderately generous pension system, financed through relatively high contribution rates with a small funded component, while in the case of Bulgaria, the pension system evolved into a meagre programme, financed through low contribution rates and a larger private pillar.     

The Revenge of History – The Institutional Roots of Post‐Communist Family Policy in the Czech Republic,Hungary and Poland

The authors combine historical and sociological institutional analysis to show that despite the political and socio‐economic transformation in 1990s, the institutional development during and before the communist era provides the best explanation for current childcare policies in Central Europe. While most authors have concentrated on policy changes that have taken place in the region since 1989, this article concentrates on the historical roots of these policies and shows that today's policies are highly influenced by a certain dynamics that had already emerged under communist rule. It shows that a historical institutional approach, which analyses the ‘gendered logic of appropriateness’ and policy legacies at various critical junctures, can explain why family policies in Central Europe had already begun to differ during the communist era, why these main differences continue and why even the changes that have taken place follow logically from historical‐institutional developments.     

Gender,work, and childcare in Kazakhstan,Mongolia, and Russia

The current study seeks to understand the nature of gender relations within a post‐Soviet welfare model in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Russia. On the basis of the analysis of key labour market indicators, parental leave, and childcare policies, it finds that the welfare models in the three countries are hybrid, and neither authoritarianism in Kazakhstan and Russia nor democracy in Mongolia lead to substantive gender equality outcomes. Persistent gender inequality in these countries is underpinned by the neo‐liberal approach to welfare provision, conservative social norms, and limited agency of civil society to influence the policy agenda. Nonetheless, these states have distributed to the population with an emphasis on working mothers, and this policy choice has been driven by economic, demographic, and political considerations, which ultimately serve to support, rather than transform, the patriarchal power structure in these societies.     

When the Export of Social Problems Is No Longer Possible: Immigration Policies and Unemployment in Switzerland

Throughout the twentieth century, Switzerland has been one of the OECD countries with the highest proportion of immigrants in its population. The aim of this article is to show how institutional factors have shaped the opportunities for change in immigration and immigrant‐employment‐related policies there in the 1990s. Whereas unemployment had remained low in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a marked increase at the beginning of the 1990s. Existing migration policies were considered a central cause of this increase, since the great majority of foreigners who had come and settled in Switzerland in the periods of economic expansion were low‐skilled, and were now over‐represented among the unemployed. The reforms undertaken in the field of immigration and integration policy to respond to these new problems have been determined by specific institutional factors: direct democracy, a defensive migration regime, the development of immigrant rights and the weak autonomy of the central state. These factors account to a large extent for the limited scope and specific pathways of policy reforms in these two domains.     

The Decoupling of Social Policy Reforms in Romania

Social reforms in Romania have been, from the beginning of the 1990s and throughout the EU post‐accession phase, the battlefield for many domestic and international actors. The article identifies, from an historical institutionalist perspective, the international actors who decisively influenced reforms of social protection in Romania during the transition, with a special emphasis on the EU pre‐ and post‐accession stages. Further, the article attempts to understand the impact of the various external influences on the sustainability and effectiveness of domestic reforms, by assessing the convergence, or the decoupling, between the rationales – i.e. ideologies and values – that explicitly grounded social reforms in Romania and the domestic public rhetoric on social risks and values. Answers to these questions can provide important insights in regard to both the impact of the EU upon new member states and the challenges of EU enlargement for the EU and its core member states.     

Social Insurance Expansion and Political Regime Dynamics in Europe, 1880–1945*

Objectives. This article analyzes the causal relationship between political regime dynamics and social insurance expansion. I theorize that the social insurance expansion is the result of the ruling elites' strategic decision about regime change to dispel revolutionary motives. The key testable implication is that social insurance expansion is more likely to happen under a democratic regime, which, in turn, is influenced by the threat of social revolution evinced by strike activities. Methods. Using historical data on social insurance coverage from 12 European countries from 1880 to 1945, I test the hypothesis employing a treatment‐effects model that endogenizes democratization. Results. I find a positive association between social insurance expansion and democracy, controlling for other political mechanisms. Furthermore, I find that democratic transition is greatly influenced by the duration and intensity of strikes. Conclusion. This study suggests that social insurance expansion requires a link between a threat of revolution and democratization.     

New challenges for the welfare state: The emergence of youth unemployment regimes in Europe?

In this article we discuss the emergence of ‘youth unemployment regimes’ in Europe, that is, a set of coherent measures and policies aimed at providing state responses to the problem of unemployment and, more specifically, youth unemployment. We classify these measures and policies along two main dimensions: unemployment regulations and labour market regulations. Using original data, we show how seven European countries locate on these two dimensions as well as within the conceptual space resulting from the combination of the two dimensions. Our findings show cross‐national variations that do not fit the traditional typologies of comparative welfare studies. At the same time, however, the findings allow for reflecting upon possible patterns of convergence across European countries. In particular, we show some important similarities in terms of flexible labour market regulations. In this regard, the recent years have witnessed a trend towards a flexibilisation of the labour market, regardless of the prevailing welfare regime.     

Latin America and the crisis (points for the balance of a decade)

The decade of the 1980s was catastrophic for the countries of Latin America because of profound transformations in the world economy, which started in the 1970s, the wilting of the state development programs that were imposed after World War II, and the collapse of socialism with the incipient transition to market economies. The crisis started because of the erosion of the world economic system as constituted under the Bretton Woods agreement; the drastic drop in the economic growth of market economies; the increased costs of living and the deterioration of the environment; the decrease in industrial capacity; and the emergence of transnationalization of production. In Latin America, the economic models that had been in place without solving underdevelopment became even more obsolete (import substitution, internal trade, and the role of the state). The crisis of socialism and the rapprochement of eastern European countries to western Europe also affected Latin America (e.g., Germany cancelled 30 mine exploration projects in Bolivia due to investments in East Germany). The structural readjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank resulted in currency devaluations, redistribution of government funds, elimination of various subsidies, reduction of public debt and social expenditures, reduction of public employment, and payment of external debt. The result was more inflation (in Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, and Argentina, inflation rates were 683.7%, 157.1%, 100.1%, and 326.2%, respectively, between 1980 and 1986), unemployment, and poverty in the lost decade of the 1980s. After 1982, state expenditures on roads, education, hospitals, and nutrition declined by 40% in Mexico. Even though most countries returned to democracy in the region, this was at the cost of the increased role of the military and the transnationals. The grand parties collapsed and in Venezuela, Mexico, and Colombia authoritarian tendencies survived into the 1970s degrading democracy. The states' socioeconomic regulatory role has to be redefined.     

Retrenchment, Expansion and the Transformation of Mexican Social Protection Policies

Social protection policies in Mexico have been transformed since 1988 through partial retrenchment of social insurance and significant expansion of targeted or means-tested social assistance. These changes reflect a substantial redefinition of social protection through incremental changes in policy. The changes reflect the abandonment of the goal of developing an employment-based, universal welfare regime, which had been pursued by Mexican governments as late as the 1970s. Instead, recent administrations have moved towards the redefinition of Mexico's welfare regime into a residual, means-tested model with significant private provision of benefits and services. This shift in social protection is consistent with the change in Mexico's overall economic development strategy and increasing political competition in the process of democratization.     

Who Wants to Redistribute? An Analysis of 14 Post‐Soviet Nations

We investigate population groups' attitude regarding inequality reduction in post‐Soviet transitional countries of the Baltic, Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as the Slavic countries and Moldova. Empirical evidence presented in this article demonstrates that despite skyrocketing inequality, erosion of social provisions and efforts to introduce an individualistic market economy ideology during the last 15 years, overall support for redistribution and welfare state efforts to counterbalance rising inequality remained strongly legitimized among citizens in all post‐Soviet countries. Nevertheless, there are differences between population groups in attitude: the older, the less educated, the poor and women express more support for redistribution; while the younger, the better educated, the rich and men tend to not support redistribution. Populations in transitional countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia that face higher inequality and less effective redistribution policies expressed a strong desire for more redistribution and more active social welfare policies.     

Nordic Employment Policies – Change and Continuity Before and During the Financial Crisis

The Nordic countries serve as models for successful employment and labour market policies. In this article, Nordic employment and labour market policies are analyzed from a comparative point of view. It is argued that Nordic employment and labour market policies have lost some of their distinctive features. Active labour market policies, for example, are now at the centre of policy priorities in many countries of the EU. And in some other respects, the Nordic countries have converged towards political patterns characteristic for states in central Europe, for example, de‐centralized patterns of wage bargaining and the partial lack of corporatist concertation. During the current financial crisis, specific patterns of crisis management can be observed in Scandinavia that make these countries distinct from many other countries in Europe.     

The economic consequences of divorce in six OECD countries

This article uses longitudinal data to estimate the short‐ and medium‐term economic effects of divorce in the USA, the UK, Switzerland, Korea, Germany and Australia during the first decade of the 21st century. Based on the data collected during the 2000s, in all of the countries studied, divorce had, on average, negative effects on the equivalised household incomes of women. However, the extent and duration of the negative effects of divorce differed markedly between countries. In all of the countries, the effects of divorce on the equivalised household income of men were smaller than for women. Although, using the available data, it is not possible to definitely explain the differences between countries, the analysis presented in this article has demonstrated that the average economic effects of divorce, particularly for women, are heavily influenced by the social security system, the labour market, family models and the family law system of each country. While the social security system and institutional arrangements such as child support and spousal maintenance do influence women's post‐divorce economic outcomes, what is most important in explaining cross‐country differences is women's labour market earnings and the extent to which re‐partnering occurs.     

The Workfare Illusion: Re-examining the Concept and the British Case

This article contends that workfare programmes pursued by various OECD countries since the mid‐1990s do not amount to a fundamental change in policy. The limited potential of workfare is due to the fact that it fails to transcend the constraints of earlier forms of ‘active’ responses to unemployment. Furthermore, it suffers from specific policy‐making disadvantages not shared by these responses. The article opens with a survey of relevant academic debates on the subject. It then places workfare in a broader context by identifying its functional reach, as compared to other active policy responses to unemployment such as active labour market policy (ALMP). The third section analyses workfare policies in the United Kingdom, as developed since 1997, by re‐examining the British New Deal employment programme. That review demonstrates that workfare policies either depend on their ‘fit’ with the existing policy‐making heritage, or that they remain merely symbolic. The article concludes by suggesting that the potential of workfare to effect change in responses to unemployment continues to be of limited significance. In other words, capitalist employment and welfare systems continue to be characterized by incremental adaptation rather than by fundamental regime change as suggested by the critics of workfare.     

Privatization and some economic and social consequences: Higher incomes,greater inequalities

The past 14 years have witnessed profound political, social, and economic changes in the various countries that previously comprised the “Soviet bloc.” The antecedents to and the process of Hungarian privatization are examined in the present study, followed by an evaluation of some of the economic and social consequences of the systemic change. The change from one-party rule to a pluralistic democracy and from “goulash communism” to a market economy has been successful overall, but the necessary rationalization of production also resulted in growing inequalities in income and wealth and the appearance of social conflict.     

The divergent logics of labour market reforms in times of permanent austerity

In an age of ‘permanent austerity’, growing economic insecurity may increase the demand for protection against labour market risks. At the same time, economic pressures may push governments to scale down on the provision of social protection. In this article, this contradiction is examined by focusing on reforms of two labour market institutions: unemployment benefits and employment protection legislation. It is argued that the incidence of reforms of both institutions follows a different set of logics, depending on the type of economic pressures as well as the political and institutional settings. The article makes use of a new data set on labour market reforms in 14 European countries over the period of 1980–2007. Results from discrete‐time logit‐regression analysis support the main hypotheses that (1) reforming unemployment benefits (UBs) does not follow the same logic as reforming employment protection legislation (EPL), and (2) factors that contribute to expansion/regulation are not the reverse of those that lead to retrenchment/deregulation.     

Changing Welfare Regimes in East and Southeast Asia: Crisis, Change and Challenge

The Asia‐Pacific region is a latecomer to the development of the welfare state. However, in some countries, governments have implemented ambitious programmes to extend social security systems and to enlarge the institutional structure of their welfare states. Comparative study of the welfare systems in East and Southeast Asia is, however, underdeveloped and there still is a relative lack of accurate knowledge about welfare systems in the region. Since the Asian financial crisis, more attention has been paid to the social policies of the countries. This paper examines features of welfare regimes in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, and undertakes a systematic review of the development, levels and patterns of welfare regimes in the region. Two core questions are answered: can the existing welfare systems help mitigate the social impact of the financial and economic crisis? What are the needs, challenges and developmental perspectives that inform the future of welfare regimes in this region?