Hans-Michael Heitmuller The financing of public funds has become a strongly competitive business. Within the EU, national boundaries for this sphere have been formally removed as well as important hindrances to the trade of goods and services. Deregulation and technological innovations have...

Education is the main resource of young people entering the labour market for securing employment, in competing for adequate employment contracts and to fulfill their occupational aspirations. As European countries differ widely in the institutional structure of their education and training...

During the early post-war period, Western trade union movements grew in membership and achieved an institutionalized role in industrial relations and politics. However, during the last decades, many trade unions have seen their membership decline as they came increasingly under pressures due to...

Self-employment still forms an important element in the social structure of modern societies. However, the group of the self-employed has experienced an enormous economic and social change. After a long term decline until the beginning of the 1970s in almost all industrialised countries,...

Political interest of citizens usually is depicted as an individual attribute that can be explained by referring to the resources and skills of the people concerned. The analyses presented here are based on a critical assessment of the explanatory power of these approaches in cross-national and...