The 2008 financial market crisis, followed by the Great Recession and sovereign debt crises in several EU countries have triggered drastic reforms of old-age security systems. They were supposed to ensure the financial viability of public pension schemes in the short and long run and/or to...

Der Beitrag analysiert die sozialpolitischen Krisenreaktionen in Deutschland auf die Finanzkrise von 2008 im Licht der historischen Entwicklung und der Befunde der international vergleichenden Wohlfahrtsstaatsforschung. Vier aufeinanderfolgende Konjunkturpakete enthielten eine Reihe wichtiger...

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...

Politics takes place in public communication and is part of public communication. Today, public communication is substantially determined by the media. This is also the case for the field of global social policy. The following study addresses the question of how global social policy and, in...

Due to increasing scholarly interest in social policy reforms and processes of policy diffusion, comprehensive datasets on social security systems are all the more necessary. As such, this paper provides an overview of existing datasets on social security and discusses their strengths and...

Welfare state governance reforms are established by new constellations of actors and experimental organizational structures. This paper analyses two most similar cases of governance reforms in two welfare state domains: (1) services for children and teens at risk; and (2) employment services and...

Concepts of retirement and related moral arguments play an important role in debates around pension reform. What retirement is - or should be - varies according to the surrounding welfare culture and an actor's general interests and beliefs. In this paper, we study the meaning that specific...

Aufgrund bestehender und sich weiter verstärkender Altersarmut steht der Reformbedarf der Leistungsseite der Gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung (GRV) im Zentrum der wissenschaftlichen und politischen Diskussion. Im Fokus stehen dabei Personen mit lückenhaften Erwerbsbiographien und niedrigen...

Die Finanzmarktkrise von 2008 und in deren Gefolge die Große Rezession sowie Staatsschuldenkrisen in verschiedenen EU-Ländern haben einschneidende Reformen der Alterssicherungssysteme ausgelöst, die die Finanzierung der Renten kurz- und langfristig sicherstellen, fiskalischen...

Public policy shapes the lives of individuals, and even more so if they depend on state support. But to what extent can well-being differences between individuals living in different European states be traced back to the specific national public policy designs? This paper tests the intervening...