| Over the past twenty years European policymakers have enacted the most substantial reforms to social and employment policies seen since the institutionalization of the European welfare state. Vocational training has increasingly replaced unemployment, social assistance, and other transfer payments, and labor market participation has begun to displace citizenship as the basis for certain rights and entitlements. What explains this general shift from passive to active social policies and the rise of new ideas about the proper relationship among the individual, the state, and the market? How can we account for this break with a durable feature of postwar European politics? And what explains differences in the conceptualization and implementation of new welfare policies from one country to the next?;The dissertation addresses these questions through a discourse-theoretic approach that focuses on the manner in which elites construct and frame a compelling set of reform ideas, engage the public, and reshape existing patterns of institutions and interests. It argues that social policy reform was most centrally a process of renegotiating key cultural values and principles within European societies, and that an adequate explanation of institutional change requires attention to the framework of ideas and beliefs within which they are embedded and from which they gain their legitimacy. Empirical support for the argument is drawn from fieldwork conducted in Germany, Great Britain, and Denmark. The study outlines and illustrates a new approach to policy and institutional change relevant to other social, economic, and cultural policy areas within Europe and beyond. |
