The Reconfiguration of the Welfare State in Europe

Welfare systems characterize both European capitalisms and the way such capitalisms are governed politically. In recent years that relationship has been reconfigured as policymakers have become more aware of the economic externalities of welfare expenditure and have come increasingly to demand an economic return on the social investment that it represents. It is the general and regime type-specific reconfigurations that this has led to which this chapter seeks to describe and account for. It detects a transition from a demand-side to a supply-side oriented conception of the role of welfare within the workings of European capitalism; this it associates with the rise of the social investment state. Yet this tendency has been embraced more or less fully to produce a complex pattern of within-regime-type convergence and between-regime-type divergence