Welfare state support during the COVID-19 pandemic: Change and continuity in public attitudes towards social policies in Germany.

Our analysis asks whether the pandemic situation affects welfare state support in Germany. The pandemic has increased the health and income risks calling for welfare state intervention. While increased needs, more deservingness, and higher state responsibility during such a crisis would suggest augmented support generally and among those at risk, this might be a short-term effect and cost considerations could reverse this trend. We study public attitudes towards four key social policy areas based on the German Internet Panel (GIP). We use three waves prior and further three waves since the pandemic had been declared in March 2020. The analysis shows both continuity in the popularity of social policies, in particular health and pensions, and some short-term increase in support for unemployment and family policies. The results after nearly 2 years suggest rather continuation with some thermostatic short-term boosts in support instead of any long-lasting change.

Nuestro análisis investiga si la situación de la pandemia afecta al apoyo del estado de bienestar en Alemania. La pandemia ha aumentado los riesgos para la salud y los ingresos, lo que requiere una mayor intervención del estado de bienestar. Si bien una mayor necesidad, más merecimiento y una mayor responsabilidad del estado durante una crisis de este tipo sugerirían un mayor apoyo en general y entre aquellos en riesgo, esto podría ser un efecto a corto plazo y las consideraciones de costos podrían revertir esta tendencia. Estudiamos las actitudes públicas hacia cuatro áreas clave de política social basadas en el Panel de Internet alemán, utilizando tres encuestas GIP anteriores y tres oleadas posteriores desde que se declaró la pandemia en marzo de 2020. El análisis muestra tanto la continuidad en la popularidad de las políticas sociales, en en particular, salud y pensiones, y algún aumento a corto plazo en el apoyo al desempleo y las políticas familiares. Nuestros resultados después de casi dos años sugieren más bien una continuación con algunos aumentos termostáticos a corto plazo en el soporte en lugar de un cambio duradero.

Readjusting unemployment protection in Europe: how crises reshape varieties of labour market regimes

The labour movement has long fought for the social protection of unemployed workers as a major social right in capitalist economies across Europe. Employers, on the other hand, have often been reluctant to accept such intervention in the labour market. Hence, scholars explaining differences in the evolution of unemployment benefit systems need to consider the power distribution of labour relations, the context of the welfare state and the variety of capitalism in which they are embedded. This article makes three contributions. First, it offers a heuristic that systematically identifies the analytical affinities between unemployment protection and its institutional context. Second, it offers a succinct overview with a focus on major crises and subsequent adaptations in labour market regimes, ranging from the oil shocks in the 1970s to the Great Recession and the current COVID-19 pandemic. And third, it discusses whether European economies have adjusted their unemployment protection to recent crises and assesses the effects on labour market regimes.

Cui bono – business or labour? Job retention policies during the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe

Europe has been faced with multiple challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the problem of how to secure jobs and earnings. In our comparative analysis, we explore to what degree European welfare states were capable of responding to this crisis by stabilising employment and workers? incomes. While short-time work was a policy tool already partly used in the 2008/2009 Great Recession, job retention policies were further expanded or newly introduced across Europe in 2020 in the wake of the pandemic. However, cross-national variations persist in the way in which these schemes were designed and implemented across European welfare states, aiming more or less to hoard labour and thereby avoid mass dismissals throughout the employment crisis. We distinguish between business support and labour support logics in explaining the variation in job retention policies across Europe. Our finding is that Continental, Mediterranean and liberal welfare states did more to foster labour hoarding using short-time work than Nordic or Central and Eastern European countries.