Activating the Unemployed — Directions and Divisions in Europe
| Author | Patrizia Aurich |
| DOI | 10.1177/138826271101300301 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
294 Intersentia
ACTIVATING THE UNEMPLOYED
DIRECTIONS AND DIVISIONS IN EUROPE
P A*
Abstract
One of the cont inuously disputed issues of research on welfare state reform is the
question of convergence or divergence. Desp ite much reform in the direc tion of an
activating kind of unemployment policy, for example, dierences between thes e
unemployment policies remain. ese dierences are oen attributed to dierent
types of welfare regimes. is a rticle departs from th e assumption that policy
changes have brought about changes in diversity. It proposes a two-dimensional
model of activation, putting for ward a new type of ‘coercive welfare’ in addition to
the di stinction between generous and strict activation. e study c ompares policy
development in three European count ries, Denmark, Germany and the United
Kingdom, and applies a fuzzy-set methodol ogy (Ragin 2000). e ndings show that
by re-conceptualising indica tors commonly used in research on activation policies, a
puzzle of opposite reform direct ions emerges.
Keywords: act ivation policy; unemployment; welfare state reform; welfare regime s;
fuzzy sets .
1. INTRODUCTION
Over the last 30 years, the focus in the ght again st u nemployment has shi ed
from stimulating the demand side of labou r, towards questions of labour supply.
Especially in the 1990s, many countries began to t ransform t heir u nemploy ment
policies i nto policies that were supposed to ‘activate’ bene t recipients. It was
assumed that unemployment policies made individuals too passive with regard to
* Research Fellow, Centre for Globa lisation and Gover nance, University of Ham burg. Address:
Institute of Sociology/Centre for Globalisation and Governance, Faculty of Business Administration,
University of Hamburg, Allende-Plat z 1, 20146 Hamburg; tel : +40– 42838–6396; e-mail: p atrizia.
aurich@uni-h amburg.de.
Activating t he Unemployed – Directions and D ivisions in Europe
European Jour nal of Social Secu rity, Volume 13 (2011), No. 3 295
labour market participation (Layard a nd Philpot t 1991, Nickell 1998). In order to
avoid this, indiv iduals should not be allowed to receive benet s in a passive way, but,
rather, benets should be dependent on act ively seeki ng work (OECD 1994, Sinn
2002, Streeck and Heinze 1999). But as employment in t he labour market i s oen
a signi cant problem for benet recipients, what constituted ‘actively seeki ng work’
remained ambiguous. Apart from part icipation in tr aining or other measures of
personal improvement, work-like activities and behav ioural requirements, backed up
by sanctions, were introduced in s ome countries.
e literatu re diverges on the question of whether t his trend towa rds activation
policy results in convergence bet ween dierent welfare st ates. Whi le some assume
dierences in kind, others see dierences only in the degree of reform. e rst
approach a ssumes that social and polit ical inst itutions exert a st abilising eec t on
policy development, so t hat new policies mainly reect the struct ure of policy sets
already present in a country. Based on this assumption, at least two t ypes of activation
policy have be en distinguished (Barbier 2005, Bruttel a nd Sol 2006, Dingelde y 2007,
Kahl 20 05, Lødemel and Trickey 2001, Serra no Pascual 2007). e se cond approach,
on the other hand, assumes that the logic of activation concern s all u nemploy ment
policies equally, independently of thei r inst itutional contex t (Gilbert 2002, Jessop
1993). More recently, it has been stated t hat continuously ongoing reforms lead to
‘contingent convergence’, implying an ‘obsolescence of es tablished typologies of
activation st yles’ (Eichhorst and Konle-Seidl 2008: 432). Bot h approaches have their
weaknesses: wh ile the assumption of gradual convergence tends to ignore the h istory
of quite dierent policy schemes, the assumption of persistent diversity is rather static
and seems to rule out real cha nge.
Rather than adopti ng one of these polar positions , this paper assu mes that the
shi towards activation has resulted in new dierences between welfare st ates. e
assumption is t hat countries with d ierent policy legacies have di erent possibilities
for policy learning. In that sens e, the direction of reform is important (i.e. comparing
policies over time), as is an understanding of policy elements that might change
within the overall composition (i.e. the dependent v ariable). In this article, I rst
discuss conceptual cha llenges in comparing activ ation policies, before presenting a
framework that attempts to tackle these chal lenges. I then apply this framework to
measuring change in th ree countries (Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom).
Fuzzy-set methodology will be used to determine the degree of change and dierences
between countries in a s ystematic fashion.
2. CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES
In this section I rst discuss competing views of policy change in greater depth. I then
show how previous typologies have come to favour one of these models in t he way
they operationalis e the dependent variable of activation policy.
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