Red-Green Labour Market Policy-Making: An Overview

Abstract

It has been shown that the labour market reforms of the Red-Green government involved paradigmatic policy changes, with which labour market policy departed from the conservative–corporatist path of welfare. For elaborating the significance of policy learning in this process, the structures of labour market policy-making, in which actual learning would have been embedded, need to be scrutinised. Here, the analysis begins with presenting the basic policy-making structures of Red-Green labour market policy-making, focusing on policy formulation of the ministerial bureaucracy and Red-Green parliamentary experts. Predominantly referring to the Job-AQTIV Law of the first Schröder government, this investigation is complemented with the first concise account of the reasons and reference models for the paradigm shift towards activation. The Job-AQTIV Law was restricted to measures of positive activation (Section 1).