Changing Ideas on Pensions: Accounting for Differences in the Spread of the Multipillar Paradigm in Five EU Social Insurance Countries

Abstract

The current renegotiation of the welfare state settlement in most OECD countries goes hand-in-hand with substantial changes in the policy beliefs and positions of major actors. The reforms that have been discussed and/or adopted are more than just the execution of economic imperatives or the by-product of changes in government. Already the simple observation that a large part of these reforms have been brought about by social democratic governments suggests that reforms have been guided by new views on the role of state and market and on the goals, possibilities and instruments of social policy.

I would very much like to thank the French, Finno-Swedish and Spanish WRAMSOC teams for providing valuable information on their home countries. I have also benefited from helpful comments by Klaus Deutsch, Karl Hinrichs, Kristine Kern and Hilde Theobald as well as participants in the 2004 WRAMSOC Workshop in Berlin, the 2004 ESPAnet Conference in Oxford and the conference on ‘Erosion oder Transformation des Sozialstaats?’ organised by the Swiss Associations for Sociology and Political Science in Fribourg in October 2004.