A Common Legacy, Divergent Paths: Understanding the Transformation of Post-Yugoslav Welfare States

Four countries that had once been embedded in a common welfare state, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, have espoused different paths of institutional welfare transformation following Yugoslavia's dissolution. The author's PhD dissertation aims to understand the nature of the changes that have occurred in two welfare sectors (employment policy and family policy) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia and Serbia, over the last two decades, by looking at changes in the characteristics of welfare programs and their implications on the capabilities of beneficiaries, as well as the levels of stratification they yield within these societies. Moreover, its other aim is to understand why such differences in welfare transformation came about. To that end, the dissertation applies Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) to identify important conditions that have contributed to streams converging and the opening of policy windows that resulted in agenda change