There is a huge body of literature in the social sciences that deals with the privatization of public enterprises in developed OECD countries after World War II. In the first part of this article, we present and critically examine empirical findings of comparative inquiries on the factors...

Dieser Aufsatz untersucht sozioökonomische und politisch-institutionelle Determinanten der Konsolidierung und Expansion des Wohlfahrtsstaates im OECD-Vergleich. Im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung stehen die Einführungszeitpunkte zentraler Sozialschutzprogramme vor 1945 sowie die Entwicklung der...

Streng dem Gesetz nach gilt in der Schweiz als reichstem westeuropäischen Land eine der restriktivsten Regelungsformen zum Schwangerschaftsabbruch in den OECD-Staaten. Gemäß dem Strafgesetzbuch vom 1. Januar 1942 ist die Unterbrechung einer Schwangerschaft grundsätzlich untersagt. Eine...

Obwohl es keine reinen direktdemokratischen politischen Systeme gibt, weisen doch einige politische Gemeinwesen mehr direktdemokratische Elemente in ihrer Verfassung auf als andere, wie etwa die Schweiz und Kalifornien. Auf der Basis der sozialpolitischen und fiskalwirksamen Volksabstimmungen in...

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...

For many years, comparative welfare state research has been afflicted with a sort of methodological nationalism in the sense that countries were treated as independent units. In line with the recent spatial turn in comparative public policy studies, this paper examines with regard to three...

This paper describes welfare state transformation in OECD countries since the 1970s against the background of the post-war settlement. Relying on quantitative macro-data and qualitative information from the literature, we show that welfare states have converged, especially regarding various...

The question whether and how warfare has influenced the development of advanced Western welfare states is contested. So far, scholarly work either focused on the trade-off between military and social spending or on case studies of individual countries. What is missing, however, is a systematic...

The 1990s have witnessed unprecedented attempts at privatizing state owned enterprises in virtually all OECD democracies. This contribution analyzes the differences in the privatization proceeds raised by EU- and OECD-countries between 1990 and 2000. It turns out that privatizations are part of...

This paper uses the findings of a very recent major international research collaboration on the impact of federal arrangements on the development of the welfare state to explore the possibilities of progress beyond Europe's present diversity of nation-state welfare standards. These findings -...