Since the 1990s (Western) European welfare states have adopted a series of reforms aimed at promoting the return to employment of recipients of social assistance benefits. The economic crisis has prompted welfare states to cut the expenditures on enabling instruments and to opt increasingly for...

Since the rise of the activation paradigm in the 1990s, the duty to work without a wage has become widespread in European social assistance legislation. This paper investigates in a precise way the extent to which the duty to work without a wage follows the legal logic of a contractual...

Using methods that are developed in Discourse Historical Analysis this case-study on Dutch life course policy, suggests that analysis of (the interrelationship between) rhetoric and affect can contribute to a post structuralist explanation of policy change. It is argued that the catachretic act...

Dutch Abstract: In (academische) discussies over de toekomst van de sociale zekerheid wordt steeds vaker ‘de basisbaan' genoemd als het antwoord op een falend activeringsbeleid. Met de gezaghebbende rapporten van de Commissie Borstlap en de WRR in 2020 is dit idee stevig op de politieke agenda...

How do new policy ideas enter the dominant policy discourse and how do they manage to change these discourses and policy practices? Béland and Cox (2010) argue that most ideational analyses of changes are agency-centered, which means that changes result from people’s choices, which are shaped...

The goal of this paper is to assess how recent reforms in social security and labour law have affected individual right claims in the Netherlands. We describe reforms of several welfare state programs such as unemployment, disability and social assistance benefit schemes. The Dutch welfare state...

This paper compares sanctioning policies of 22 different EU member states to the national social policies and national social protection schemes. The comparison focuses on sanctions imposed on recipients of social assistance who do not comply with work-related obligations. For this purpose, this...

Against the background of heightened political tension, Israel is a unique laboratory for the study of conscientious objection in the workforce. The paper outlines the cases where such incidents have reached the courts, and offers a systematic analysis that explains the differences between them,...