Education is the main resource of young people entering the labour market for securing employment, in competing for adequate employment contracts and to fulfill their occupational aspirations. As European countries differ widely in the institutional structure of their education and training...

During the early post-war period, Western trade union movements grew in membership and achieved an institutionalized role in industrial relations and politics. However, during the last decades, many trade unions have seen their membership decline as they came increasingly under pressures due to...

Self-employment still forms an important element in the social structure of modern societies. However, the group of the self-employed has experienced an enormous economic and social change. After a long term decline until the beginning of the 1970s in almost all industrialised countries,...

Political interest of citizens usually is depicted as an individual attribute that can be explained by referring to the resources and skills of the people concerned. The analyses presented here are based on a critical assessment of the explanatory power of these approaches in cross-national and...

The paper addresses the issue of the driving forces behind recent changes in labour market entry outcomes in Europe. Based on data for 12 European countries from the 1988-1997 European Community Labour Force Survey, the empirical analyses estimate panel data models to assess the effects of...

Social services are a relatively new field of comparative welfare state research. Though comparative studies on the whole area of social services are still rare, good studies and data are available on services for elderly people and children. In almost all European countries services for the...

The nature of the linkage of education and training systems to the labour market is often claimed to crucially affect labour market integration in modern economies. More specifically, most current comparative research assumes a more strongly qualification-based allocation in training systems...

The network metaphor abounds in the fields of regional development studies and of research on forms of subnational government. Unlike the analysis of strategic networks (Powell; Sydow; Staber), of policy networks (Mayntz/ Marin; Kenis/ Schneider) and of policy domain networks (Knoke/ Pappi/...

Northern and Southern welfare states form different families of nations, and it is claimed that the families typical of each nation are profoundly different. Family structure in Northern nations is described as modern and deinstitutionalised, whereas the Southern family structure is traditional...