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Activating Labor Market and Social Policies in Germany: From Status Protection to Basic Income Support

This paper provides an overview of the sequential shift towards activating labor market and social policy in Germany. It not only shows the changes in the instruments of active and passive labor market policies but also analyzes the implications of this change for the political economy and the legal structure of a "Bismarckian" welfare state. Our study points at the changes in Germany's status- and occupation-oriented unemployment benefit regime that has been relinquished for a larger share o...

Towards Institutional Gridlock? The Limitations of Germany's Consensus Democracy

The September 2005 general election forced Germany's two largest political parties, CDU/CSU and SPD, to form the second grand coalition government in the country's post-war history. The election result was widely regarded as an expression of the view amongst the electorate that neither of the two main political camps could offer adequate solutions to the urgent political, social and economic challenges which the larger Germany has been facing since reunification in 1990. This article argues t...

Introduction: Farewell to Bismarck or Moving Forward Back to Bismarck? Transformations of the German Welfare State

A couple of years ago, drawing on recent pension reforms, the authors described the German welfare state as being in a state of transition towards an uncertain something else. They argued that the German welfare state is beginning to lose its distinctive features as a conservative type of welfare state. The authors of this issue on the policies of the German welfare state provide pieces of the puzzle. They provide empirical evidence not only for the theoretical argument of recombinant welfare...

Farewell to the Family As We Know It: Family Policy Change in Germany

German unification merged two contrasting family models: the East German dual-worker model and the West German male breadwinner model. Since 2002, Germany has been essentially changing directions towards a third model called "sustainable family policy." The new policy model conceives of children as society's future assets, seeks to encourage childbearing by supporting parents to be workers and attempts to reduce families' poverty by boosting mothers' employment. By increasing childcare facili...

German Pension Policies: The Transformation of a Defined Benefit System Into ... What?

Over the past twenty years or so the German pension system has undergone an almost endless series of reforms. Both the time spans for the respective reform processes themselves and the time spans between the reforms have diminished progressively, and they seem to have been more easily carried out each time. While the 1992 reform, which introduced the net adjustment formula and some other changes, took about ten years of preparation, the most recent reforms have been much less problematic. The...

Implications of the Activation Paradigm On Poverty and Social Exclusion in Germany: Facts, Hypotheses, Uncertainties

This article is an overview of how poverty experiences have developed during the last decade in Germany. It reviews how the related discourse has changed from the focus on monetary poverty to the issue of social integration and recapitulates the related changes in social policy design. The question to answer is how the underlying activation paradigm of the social policy reforms has influenced the poverty risk throughout society. Was it successful in bringing people back to work and diminishin...

Health Care Reform in Germany

German health care policy is characterized by a paradigm shift initiated by the enactment of the Health Care Structure Act in 1992. This fundamental change is both affecting in its care structures and its financial and regulatory mechanisms. This transformation is an expression of a paradigm change in health policy initiated during the first half of the 1990s. This paradigm change in health policy increasingly favours the goal of adapting the health care system to the perceived requirements o...