ABSTRACT

Under strong economic and financial pressures, all welfare states are pushed to reform their inherited regime of social protection. Nevertheless, during the 1980s and 1990s, some countries have been more successful than others in implementing reforms. Studies have demonstrated that the level of resistance varies from country to country as does the capacity to implement reforms. A number of studies have convincingly shown that the politics of restructuring and retrenchment are fundamentally different from the politics of welfare expansion (Pierson 1994, 1996). Institutional constraints that exert a powerful influence on the anticipation of actors, their collective mobilisation capacity, and whether they can exert a ‘veto power’. In others words, institutions make reform and retrenchment policies possible, partially possible, or impossible. To argue that institutions have an impact on political life, is not sufficient.