Many European countries have embraced the choice agenda in welfare arrangements with a view of improving efficiency and/or quality. The motivations range from legitimising public welfare and administrative modernisation, to electoral politics and cost containment. Our research project included...

Social insurance is an established method of social protection in certain European Union (EU) member states and has been introduced more widely as a means of minimising the threats to social welfare expenditure from economic crisis and ageing populations. With the recent global financial crisis,...

The December judgments of the ECJ in Viking and Laval on the compatibility of national collective labour law with European prerogatives have caused a quite heated critical debate. This paper seeks to put this debate in constitutional perspectives. In its first part it reconstructs in legal...

Our aim in this paper is to explore three related trends which have emerged in recent years that are contributing to important changes in the way both social welfare and democratic decision making over its form and content interact. These trends are: growing inequality, an increasing devolution...

The objective of this paper is to study the effects on solidarity, risk, and equity of the introduction of choice and competition into the provision of public services. Many European countries have embraced the choice agenda in welfare arrangements with a view of improving efficiency and/or...

This paper explores the role of the private and voluntary sectors in helping to fill gaps in public sector social welfare provision and considers the extent to which this augments or weakens the democratic process. While the public sector has tended to be the major provider in European social...