ABSTRACT
The variety of policy approaches available to political actors to enhance the performance of labour markets and to tackle unemployment reflect different degrees of state interventionism, de/regulation and levels of commitment to spending state resources on programmes. This corresponds to the wide scale of political and economic interests and convictions held by different political actors. In order to account for this, this chapter deals with the development of domestic LMP strategies and how they conditioned the development of Labour’s and the SPD’s LMPs during the 1980s and 1990s. For this, we must, furthermore, investigate in the second part of this chapter how during the second half of the 1980s both parties engaged in major policy review exercises that were aimed at altering and modernizing the parties’ overall policy outlook.
