Commissioned Book Review: Carsten Jensen and Georg Wenzelburger, Reforming the Welfare State
| Author | Barbara Vis |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211052908 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(4) NP13 –NP14
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1052908PSW0010.1177/14789299211052908Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2021
Commissioned Book Review
Reforming the Welfare State by Carsten
Jensen and Georg Wenzelburger. London and
New York: Routledge, 2020, 134pp., 120 pound
(hardback); 33.29 pound (e-book),
ISBN 9781138482227.
Welfare state reforms are a continuously
reemerging area of debate in the media, by
politicians and the general population. Such
debates are usually about reforms like a higher
pension age or lower benefit levels: reforms
that are easy to detect, or visible. Conversely,
there is hardly ever debate about largely invis-
ible reforms, like changes in indexation rules
(e.g. abolishing the link between nominal ben-
efits and the minimum wage) or in qualifica-
tion periods (e.g. extending how long it takes
for someone to be eligible). These are all
examples of the different legislative measures
by which governments can, and do, change
social policies: the policy instruments.
Different instruments adversely affect different
groups, so their choice matters.
While perhaps not using this terminology,
the welfare state literature has long acknowl-
edged the use of different instruments in welfare
reforms (e.g. Pierson, 1994). There is also no
dearth of comparative data about welfare
reforms in general (e.g. OECD, 2020; Scruggs
et al., 2017). However, the field lacked system-
atic, comparative data on policy instruments.
With Carsten Jensen and Georg Wenzelburger’s
Reforming the Welfare State, this has changed.
This book introduces the Welfare State Reform
Dataset: an original dataset with > 1500 reform
events for 13 policy instruments in an institu-
tionally diverse set of five countries (Finland,
France, Germany, the UK and Demark) in the
domains of old age pensions and unemployment
protection over a 40-year period (1974–2014).
This new dataset – presented informatively
in Ch. 3 – enables Jensen and Wenzelburger to
revisit three sets of still unresolved questions
from Pierson’s (1994) classic and the ensuing
so-called new politics debate (identified in Ch.
2). First: how much and what sort of welfare
state change has there been in the past decades?
The authors demonstrate in Ch. 4 that, contra
the notion of permanent austerity, the entire
40-year period has seen cutbacks as well as
expansions in all five countries. The reform pat-
tern was one of stability punctuated by radical
change, contra path dependency and in line
with punctuated equilibrium theory. The reper-
toire of policy instruments in all countries is
wide (Ch. 5).
The second question is whether govern-
ments – in line with the notion of blame avoid-
ance – use different policy instruments for
expansion than they do for cutbacks. Ch. 6
shows that the answer is yes. The findings help
solve a conundrum in the literature, namely why
at least some governments are not electorally
punished for cutbacks. Jensen and Wenzelburger
indicate that governments strategically select
policy instruments so that blame for cutbacks is
minimized and credit for expansions is maxi-
mized. Another question about the visibility of
reforms is its timing. Ch. 7 shows that govern-
ments time cutbacks and expansions strategi-
cally in the electoral cycle, albeit differently for
governments that have pledged to expand the
welfare state (a U-shaped trajectory, with expan-
sions early in the election cycle, then some lev-
elling off, and again expansions late in the cycle)
and those that have pledged to retrench it (cut-
backs early in the cycle, expansions late).
The third question is whether partisan dif-
ferences matter for welfare state reforms – a
seminal question – and for specific policy
instruments also a novel one. Ch. 8’s analyses
show that the answer to both questions is no.
These questions are answered in a concise
book. The authors’ choice to concentrate on
presenting the new dataset and demonstrating
its value by revisiting core questions is effec-
tive and useful. However, this choice also
means that the book’s contribution is mainly
empirical. Readers interested in new theories
or who look for a study bringing together eve-
rything about welfare state reform should thus
turn to one of the many monographs in the
field or consult a handbook. While its concise-
ness and focus generally is one of the book’s
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