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.

This paper is a step towards an explanation of the redistributive impact of ruling parties. It proposes a new theoretical interpretation regarding some changes in the social security systemt that could have affected inequality trends in Britain in the 1980s. I control the validity of this...

The Spanish welfare state incorporates elements of both Bismarckian and Beveridgean traditions, and can be labelled as a via media with respect to other existing regimes of social protection. It also represents a middle way of decommodification and gendering, and of universal and means-tested...

In this paper, the authors look at trends in social security reform activity in all of the Nordic countries with the exception of Iceland. They shall first briefly compare the status of the welfare state around 1990 with that of 1997; to be followed by an account of the economic and political...