Who’s Afraid of the Welfare State Now?

This book primarily explores the welfare-policy responses to the Great Recession, reform trajectories that swept across Europe over the last decade, with a final chapter that focuses on Covid-19 welfare management. The 2008 crash marked a critical stress test for European welfare states with dramatic repercussions, including a massive surge in unemployment, a widening in wage and income disparities, and rising poverty. Hikes in fiscal deficits and public debt, required to pre-empt an economic meltdown, forced policymakers to make painful cuts in welfare services to shore up public finances, thereby jeopardizing welfare support for vulnerable groups. The overall scope of welfare-policy responses is heterogeneous, disparate, and uneven. In some cases, the response to the Great Recession was accompanied by deep social conflicts, while in others unpopular crisis-management measures received broad consent from opposition parties, trade unions, and employer organizations. Alongside serious retrenchments, there have been assertive attempts to rebuild social programmes and institutions, to accommodate policy repertoires-not merely domestically but also at the EU level-to the new realities of the knowledge economy and an ageing society. Overall, the long 2010s showed that the future of work and welfare is in our hands: it is perfectly possible to shape this future in such a way as to provide inclusive social security, achieve high employment, advance and maintain human capabilities across the life-course, and fight poverty and inequality.

Anton Hemerijck, Professor of Political Science and Sociology, European University Institute (EUI), Manos Matsaganis, Professor of Public Finance, Polytechnic University of Milan

Anton Hemerijck is Professor of Political Science and Sociology in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute (EUI). He has previously held positions at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam and the London School of Economics and Political Science, and was Director of the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), the principal think tank in the Netherlands. More recently, he was a member of the European Commission High-Level Group on the Future of Social Protection and of the Welfare State in the EU (2021 - 2023). He is the author of Changing Welfare States (OUP, 2013) and editor of The Uses of Social Investment (OUP, 2017).

Manos Matsaganis is Professor of Public Finance at Polytechnic University of Milan. Prior to this, he worked at the Athens University of Economics and Business, in the Office of the Greek Prime Minister, and at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has been Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University and University of California Berkeley, and is currently Senior Researcher at the Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) in Athens, and a member of the Scientific Committee of the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation in Milan.