Welfare state governance reforms are established by new constellations of actors and experimental organizational structures. This paper analyses two most similar cases of governance reforms in two welfare state domains: (1) services for children and teens at risk; and (2) employment services and...

New data makes it possible to measure the evolution of social program generosity over the roughly three decades since the affluent democracies entered the "era of austerity." Compared with plausible expectations derived from power resource theory, as well as prior historical experience, these...

This article reflects on the important lecture "The Welfare State Over the Very Long Run", delivered by Paul Pierson, at the London School of Economics on 8 November 2010, on the occasion of the launch of Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State. Pierson's explanation for what he sees as the...

The paper examines the claim that international migration and increased ethnic diversity challenge the sustainability and legitimacy of redistributive welfare states. Immigration might potentially lessen pressures related to demographic ageing, labour shortages in welfare services and the...

This paper offers a critique and analysis of recent OECD research by Adema and Ladaique identifying the impact of taxes and private benefits on social spending. Using the techniques of multivariate modelling, we show that both gross public and net private expenditures are strongly influenced by...