What is the impact of norms enacted by international organizations on the rights of foreigners in comtemporary Western Europe? In this article, I trace the process of the incorporation of European Court of Human Rights and European Court of Justice legal norms in the jurisprudence and policies...

Trade unions are understood to be losing a great part of their capacity of pressure and influence in post-fordist economies. This paper shows how the role played by the Spanish trade unions in the process of reform of the pension system has been very significant.

The turbolent 1990s have been a successful decade for Italy. Through an impressive sequence of reforms, this country has been able to put in order its battered public finances, to start an incisive modernization of its backward bureaucratic apparatus, its rigid labour market and its unbalanced...

The fundamental question of this contribution is : "How do citizenship systems increase the risks of social exclusion?" .

The "new politics of the welfare state", the term coined by Pierson (1996) to differentiate between the popular politics of welfare expansion and the unpopular politics of retrenchment, emphasizes a number of factors that distinguish countries in their capacity to pursue contentious measures and...

The paper constitutes the first detailed comparative study of Southern health care systems. It begins by analysing the reforms they underwent during the seventies and eighties, that is, the introduction of national health services in Italy, Portugal, Greece, and Spain. The second section of the...