Comparative welfare state policies

Central questions include: 

What policies make up the welfare state?

How can welfare states be conceptualized and explained? 

How can the role of women and households be included in welfare state analysis?

What consequences do welfare states policies have on economic and social dimensions at the micro or macro-level? 

What are the challenges facing European countries?

What can countries learn from each other? 

Learning from best practice is a chief rationale for comparative analysis. To learn, monitor and prescribe policies, there is a need for profound knowledge of the rationale and effects of various types of policies and how they interact. There is a need for a systematic and multi-disciplinary approach in policy analysis to capture the rationale and functions of state intervention through welfare policies. Therefore, this course is truly multi-disciplinary with an emphasis on how economic, political science and sociological approaches helt to understand welfare policies at both the macro-level of countries and their consequences at the micro-level of population groups and individuals. 

More formally, the course covers the following broad themes: 

• Comparative analysis of welfare state policies, such as pensions policy, labour market policy, family policy, and social investment;

• Key challenges that the welfare state has been facing since the early 1990s (ie.g. demographic change, social changes related to family development) 

• the analytical reasons for state intervention, including public goods and information asymmetries

The course complements the theories, concepts as well as tools and data taught in ‘Development and reforms of the welfare state,’ thereby enabling the student to use empirical indicators to understand how the different countries have responded to challenges and what the impact has been on social and economic factors.

The course provides the theoretical frameworks for further policy analysis in ‘Politics of Labor Market Change'.

- Why do we have public policies? The economic and sociological explanations for state intervention in the field of welfare

- Policies that matter, including pensions policy, family policy, labour market policies, and social investment 

- Economic and institutional frameworks for policy analysis: Social citizenship and entitlements (scope, eligibility criteria, benefit formulae, obligations, sanctions), organization and financing

- Welfare state functions: redistribution across income and age categories, insurance, safety net, social investment

How to integrate women and families with welfare states, theoretically and empirically

- Contemporary challenges: Demographic (ageing populations, fertility, migration), economic (permanent austerity, labour market change, youth unemploymentand social and family change.

Analysing policy change (institutional perspective, policy learning)

- Costs and benefits of various policies and reforms to these policies at the micro- and macro-level

Analysis of outcome in terms of re-distribution, equality, and poverty

- Describe different welfare state policies, their institutional design, mechanisms and outcomes;

- Understand how economic and social changes that have become more prominent since the 1990s challenge different types of welfare states

- Outline different causal mechanisms of how welfare state policy may affect various outcomes

- Identify scientific issues related to the analysis of welfare state policies

- reflect critically on the causal links between welfare state institutions and outcomes

- assess the explanatory power of various theoretical accounts

- Analysis of how different types of welfare states have responded to these challenges

- Independently design discipline-specific or inter-disciplinary analysis of welfare state policies

- Formulate sociological and economic arguments for and against why and how a given policy reform may serve a given policy objective

Communicate and discuss with peers and non-specialists how a given reform in one of the policy areas covered by the course will serve economic and social objectives

- Barr, Nicholas (2012) Economics of the Welfare State, 5th Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Journal articles, book chapters and policy reports will supplement these readings.

Total number of pages: approx. 1,200.

in conjunction also with the 2*5 exercise lectures in each of the courses ‘Comparative methods and data’ and Development and Reform of the Welfare State.

Confrontational classes (lectures,

team classes)                                       30

Preparation                                         145

Exam preparation                                 50

Exam                                                    45

Total                                                     270

Used examination attempts in the former identical course will be transferred.

Courses that are identical with former courses that are passed according to applied rules cannot be retaken.

The student is automatically registered for the first examination attempt when the student is registered for a course or course element with which one or more examinations are associated. Withdrawal of registration is not possible, and students who fail to participate in an examination have used one examination attempt, unless the University has made an exemption due to special circumstances. 

If a student does not meet the established university prerequisites for taking the exam, he or she has used one examination attempt, unless the University has made an exemption due to special circumstances.