Author Description

This is the first political science book to focus on new social risks and their implication for politics and policy-making. The welfare states that exist today in most industrial countries were conceived and developed during the post-war years, with the objective of protecting the income of wage-earners against risks such as sickness, unemployment, invalidity or old age. These social risks are still present in today's societies, but they have been supplemented by new social risks, especially in the labour market and family sphere, such as lone parenthood, difficulties in reconciling work and family life, low pay, or long-term unemployment. In general, however, the welfare states that we have inherited from the post-war years provide only limited coverage against these new risks. This book concentrates on the process of adapting welfare states to changing structures of social risk. First, it looks at how those who are most exposed to the new risks (women, the young, low-skilled workers) mobilise in the political arena and at their demands, then moves on to analyse specific instances of welfare state adaptation in the fields of care policy, pensions and labour market policies. This is a coherent collection of comparative chapters which cover either all, or a sample of, advanced industrial democracies. Together, they show how difficult the adaptation process is, and in particular because of the existence of strong competing claims for public resources by those political actors who fight for the preservation of the traditional welfare state programmes. "This volume will be of great interest to political scientists working on the EU or OECD countries, focusing on social policy and welfare."--BOOK JACKET.