European Social Policy and the COVID-19 Pandemic Challenges to National Welfare and EU Policy

by Börner, Stefanie; Seeleib-Kaiser, Martin

• ISBN13: 9780197676189
• ISBN10: 0197676189
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-08-22
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This is an open access title available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and select open access locations.

During the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, social policy was one of the most important strategies used by governments to help mitigate the crisis. European Social Policy and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges to National Welfare and EU Policy provides an encompassing and longer-term analysis of the social policy responses of European countries, as well as the European Union (EU), to the challenges of the pandemic. The book asks in which direction the European welfare states, on the one hand, and EU social policy, on the other, are developing as a result of the pandemic with respect to polity, politics, and policy instruments.

European Social Policy and the COVID-19 Pandemic addresses several questions, such as what medium- and long-term effects will the current social policy crisis responses have on the different welfare states? Will the partly improvised, partly only temporary but in every respect diverse and often unprecedented measures lead to novel reform trajectories or even a new welfare state model? What new forms of international cooperation and conflict resolution mechanisms may arise within the social policy domain of the EU?

The questions raised not only concern the future of welfare states in Europe but also EU-level social-policy making and European integration in general. The chapters--written by experts on law, political science, social policy, and sociology--build on various methodological backgrounds and encompass single case studies, comparative policy analyses, and discourse-analytical perspectives.

Author Biography

Stefanie Börner is Junior Professor of European Societies at the Department of Social Sciences at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. Dr. Börner's main fields of research are EU integration, the sociology of social policy, social theory, and welfare state transformation. She is the author of Belonging, Solidarity and Expansion in Social Policy (2013) and the editor of several books.

Martin Seeleib-Kaiser is Professor of Comparative Public Policy at the Institute of Political Science of Eberhard Karls University Tübingen and Associate Fellow at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford. Dr. Seeleib-Kaiser has held appointments at Duke University and Bremen University, and was a visiting scholar at Shizuoka University, Aalborg University, and the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre. He has authored and edited several books, and is an editor of the Journal of European Social Policy.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Stefanie Börner and Martin Seeleib-Kaiser

Part I: National Welfare Regimes during the COVID-19 Pandemic
1. Policy Legacies, Welfare Regimes, and Social Policy Responses to COVID-19 in Europe
Daniel Béland, Bea Cantillon, Rod Hick, Bent Greve, and Amílcar Moreira
2. Austerity and Adjustment from the Great Recession to the Pandemic--and Beyond
Klaus Armingeon and Stefano Sacchi
3. The Territorial Dynamic of Social Policies during COVID-19 Lockdowns
Tatiana Saruis, Eduardo Barberis, and Yuri Kazepov
4. The UK in Search of a New "Imagined Community"? Social Cohesion, Boundary Building, and Social Policy in Crisis Periods
Matthew Donoghue

Part II: Challenges and Responses in Specific Policy Domains
5. From Crisis to Opportunity? Recalibrating Healthcare in Southern Europe in the Wake of the Pandemic
Emmanuele Pavolini, Maria Petmesidou, Rui Branco, and Ana M. Guillén
6. Locked in Transition: Youth Labour Markets during COVID-19 in the UK, Norway, Estonia, and Spain
Jacqueline O'Reilly, Marge Unt, Rune Halvorsen, Mi Ah Schoyen, Rachel Verdin, Triin Roosalu, and Zyab Ibáñez
7. Enforcement of Minimum Labor Standards and Institutionalized Exploitation of Seasonal Agricultural Workers in the EU
Cecilia Bruzelius and Martin Seeleib-Kaiser
8. Is the Recession a "Shecession"? Gender Inequality in the Employment Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Germany
Katja Möhring, Maximiliane Reifenscheid, Andreas Weiland, Klara Kuhn

Part III: EU Social Policy
9. Towards a Real Green Transition? Triple Constraints Holding Back EU Member States' "Greening" Industrial Strategies
Zhen Jie Im, Caroline de la Porte, Elke Heins, Andrea Prontera, Dorota Szelewa
10. COVID-19: An Accelerating Force for EU Activity in Health?
Mary Guy
11. Non-centralized Coordination during a Transboundary Crisis: Examining Coronavirus Pandemic Responses in Four Federal Systems
Natalie Glynn
12. European Integration as Complementary Institution-Building: The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Georg Vobruba

Epilog
Stefanie Börner and Martin Seeleib-Kaiser