This thesis examines the effects of the so-called Hartz IV reform on the German labour market development, with special emphasis on unemployment reduction. To determine the causal link, a variety of tools are used, namely macroeconomic studies, worker flow analysis, surveys and comparison with competing arguments. Preponderance of evidence suggests, that Hartz IV played a significant role in unemployment rate reduction in the period following its implementation. Size of this effects is hard to discern exactly, but an estimate in the range of 1,5-2 percentage points should be quite accurate. Contrary to popular belief, this reduction did not occur to the detriment of general job quality, such as by splitting of old jobs or by dilution of their working hours. Furthermore, the issue of relative poverty is investigated. The thesis concludes that the increase in relative poverty was not caused primarily by Hartz IV, nor is it a good measure of actual living standard. The increase seems to be to a large degree driven by demographic changes, mainly the decreasing size of German households.

“National security” is one of the most powerful terms in the American vocabulary. It commands wide deference and almost unlimited resources, and what counts as a national security matter determines many of the government’s priorities and responsibilities. It is surprising, therefore, that we know so little about how national security came to be defined in the way Americans have understood it for the last 75 years. The problem is one of perspective. Almost everything written about the history of national security approaches the topic with a present-day understanding of the term’s meaning in mind and uses the term instrumentally to explain something else—most often some aspect of American foreign policy. Most of these works assume that national security refers principally to physical security, that national security policymaking is a foreign policy matter, and that it has always been thus. This dissertation historicizes the term national security. Rather than tracing the present-day conception of national security backwards in time, as has been the norm, it looks forward from the past. This shift in perspective reveals a history of national security that challenges the prevailing assumption that national security has always been a matter of physical security and foreign policy. When Franklin Roosevelt first put national security at the center of American political discourse in the 1930s, he equated it with individual economic security and considered domestic policy the primary domain for national security policymaking. Roosevelt also articulated a broad vision for the government’s national security responsibilities in the final years of his presidency that included economic, social, and physical security to be delivered through a mix of domestic and foreign policy. These findings raise a big question about American political development: why did the United States end up with separate “national security” and “welfare” states rather than the comprehensive national security state Roosevelt envisioned? To answer that question, this dissertation focuses on the interactions between political language, public opinion, and the institutional development of the American state. Combining traditional historical research methods with text mining, network analysis, and data visualization, this dissertation charts the movement of policy areas into and out of the national security frame. Franklin Roosevelt succeeded in placing domestic policy into the national security frame in the mid-1930s, thereby justifying the expansion of the government’s domestic responsibilities. But this success catalyzed the nascent conservative movement, which launched a public persuasion campaign to limit the further expansion of the government’s domestic responsibilities by removing domestic policy from the national security frame. Roosevelt’s subsequent success putting foreign policy into the national security frame at the end of the 1930s created a powerful foreign policy establishment that claimed the mantle of national security exclusively for its work. The exclusion of domestic policy from the purview of national security policymaking was therefore largely an ironic result of Roosevelt’s two successes using the language of security to expand the government’s responsibilities.

The problem of the sustainability of the welfare state became over several last years one of the most important political, medial and social topics in the Czech republic. Recent experience from countries of southern Europe are showing, that large welfare states are in their current size economically unsustainable, because they significantly participate on creating public budget's deficits and on the growth of government debt. In this master's thesis I deal with exploring the possibility, that political parties in the Czech republic conduct a reduction of the Czech welfare state's size. The thesis draws on the economic theory of democracy developed by Joseph Schumpeter and Anthony Downs and the argumentation builds on its assumption that political parties are rational actors motivated purely by gaining votes and winning elections. Based on this assumption, I develop an economic model of partisan decision-making and conclude conditions, that allow political parties to decide rationally in accordance with their assumed motivation to conduct the reduction of the welfare state. The fulfillment of these conditions is consequently being empirically analyzed for the specific case of the Czech republic. The results of my analysis show, that none of these conditions is fulfilled in the Czech republic - by...

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The aim of this thesis is to contribute with knowledge about if and how attitudes towards the welfare state in Sweden differ between people who live in sparsely populated areas and people in densely populated areas. We argue that the different conditions for welfare services to operate in different places, where cities have greater access to e.g. schools and health care from both public and private actors, while municipals in sparsely populated areas are characterized by fewer options and challenges in the upkeep of the existing services, could be of significance in people’s differing attitudes toward the welfare state. A quantitative study is implemented using data from the 2018 round of the Swedish Welfare State Survey, where five hypotheses are investigated by multivariate regression analyses. The result suggests that there are no significant differences in people’s attitudes toward the welfare state depending on where you live. Other factors, such as perceived risk, class, gender and age seem to explain differences in welfare state attitudes better. We conclude, however, that the performance of and attitudes towards welfare state services is a subject of interest for future research due to the potential consequences of an escalating urban-rural divide, as seen in other parts of the world.

This dissertation examines the fiscal and ideological deployments of community in publicly-funded yet independent nonprofit social service and healthcare provision. As at-risk youth leave families-of-origin in two American cities, they encounter a network of nonprofit providers conducting tailored and targeted outreach and managing access to benefits, services, and housing. Clients and outreach workers describe the ways they are monetized in an interconnected system of welfare and service provision and point to an expanding, entrapping, and extractive public health, housing, and benefits structure where community-building is the nonprofit profit mechanism. Following recent work on the “grow and hide” model of the American health care state (Grogan 2023), this fieldwork investigates on-the-ground impacts of hidden public funding and financing routed through private industry for nonprofit hospitals, clinics, community-based outreach arms, and public health-funded housing that has increased out of sight and without accountability to the public. Through fieldwork inside hospital-based clinics, nonprofit-adjacent “grassroots” campaigns, trade associations, and interviews with agency officials, bankers, nonprofit consultants, executives, and providers, this research untangles a skein of legislation and benefits policies that traps clients in proliferating categories of vulnerability. The material and psychological consequences of these policies for clients and their providers unspool inside nonprofit hospitals and clinics and their outreach arms—the site of public health intervention research, benefits navigation, and primary care provision in youth public health programs across the country. Within funding eddies enabled by municipal, state, and federal agency contracts with nonprofit service providers across healthcare and housing, a certain kind of client-subject is made who must either perform community or embrace mercenariness in policy-related underground economies. The municipal Community-Based Organization (CBO) and not the family (Cooper 2017) emerges as the unit propped up in the late devolutionary structure of welfare and service provision. State-funded independent nonprofits and their trade associations emerge as key architects from below of an expansive, hidden, and extractive healthcare-welfare state.

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In dieser Studie werden Einstellungen zu sozialer Ungleichheit bzw. Gerechtigkeitseinstellungen und die Wahrnehmung von Einkommensungerechtigkeit durch die Bevölkerung in postkommunistischen und westlich-kapitalistischen Ländern zu verschiedenen Zeitpunkten untersucht. Im Zentrum stehen vor allem die Determinanten dieser subjektiven Bewertungen und Wahrnehmungen auf der Makro-Ebene. Wie lassen sich Unterschiede in den Einstellungen und Wahrnehmungen zwischen Ländern erklären? Für westliche Länder wird davon ausgegangen, dass im Wesentlichen der Wohlfahrtsstaat als zentrales Verteilungsarrangement jeweils prägend wirkt. Um den Einfluss des Wohlfahrtsstaates zu überprüfen, wird einerseits eine Typologie wohlfahrtsstaatlicher Regime herangezogen. Andererseits wird auch der Einfluss wohlfahrtsstaatsbezogener Makroindikatoren als nähere Charakterisierung der ausgewählten Länder getestet, was in der international vergleichenden Einstellungsforschung bislang vernachlässigt wurde. In postkommunistischen Ländern, die seit dem Systemwechsel im Vergleich zu westlichen Ländern nicht durch lange wohlfahrtsstaatliche Traditionen geprägt wurden, stehen eher die unterschiedlichen Transformationsverläufe als Erklärungshintergrund von Einstellungs- und Wahrnehmungsunterschieden auf Makro-Ebene zur Verfügung. Da die objektiven Strukturen, Institutionen und individuellen Lagen in postkommunistischen Ländern einem stärkeren sozialen Wandel unterlagen, ist hier im Gegensatz zu westlichen Ländern auch mit einem entsprechend stärkeren Wandel der Gerechtigkeitseinstellungen und Bewertungen zu rechnen. Die Daten für diese Studie stammen aus zwei internationalen Umfrageprojekten, dem ''International Social Justice Project'' (ISJP) von 1991, 1996 und 2000 sowie dem ''International Social Survey Programme'' (ISSP) von 1987, 1992 und 1999. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sich Gerechtigkeitseinstellungen, die als normative Grundhaltungen von Menschen eher prinzipieller Art sind, besser durch wohlfahrtsstaatliche Regimes erklären lassen, die diese Grundhaltungen institutionell inkorporieren und strukturell transportieren, während subjektive Wahrnehmungen von Einkommensungerechtigkeit besser durch konkretere wohlfahrtsstaatliche Makroindikatoren beeinflusst werden. / This study analyzes attitudes towards social inequality, justice ideologies and the perceived amount of injustice with respect to the distribution of income in post-communist and western-capitalist countries at different times, with a specific focus on the macro level determinants of subjective judgements and perceptions. How can country differences with respect to subjective judgements and perceptions be explained? One can assume that, for western countries, the welfare state is the main distribution arrangement shaping these subjective aspects. In order to analyze the influence of the welfare state, a typology of welfare state regimes is developed. In addition, the effects of macro indicators of the welfare state, conceptualized as more specific characteristics of the selected countries, are tested, which has been previously neglected in cross-national attitude research. In post-communist countries, which were not shaped by long national welfare state traditions as much as in western countries, the different transformation processes and their success are more suitable for explaining divergent macro-level attitudes and perceptions. As objective structures, institutions and the individual situations in post-communist countries have gone through a stronger process of social change than in western countries, a stronger change in justice attitudes, evaluations and perceptions can be accounted here accordingly. Data for this study come from two international survey projects, the ''International Social Justice Project'' (ISJP) 1991, 1996 and 2000 and the ''International Social Survey Programme'' (ISSP) 1987, 1992 and 1999. The results demonstrate that justice attitudes, which are rather basic normative attitudes, can be better explained by welfare state regimes which incorporate these basic attitudes institutionally and transport them structurally, whereas subjective perceptions, such as the perception of social injustice with respect to the income distribution, are affected by more concrete welfare related macro indicators.

The welfare state is ideally about guaranteeing citizens welfare and social security. This thesis describes how the embodied experience of austerity politics and reforms of national health insurance in Sweden is lived along the links of what I call “the chain of precarity”. In 2008 the duration of the entitlement to sickness benefit was limited to 2.5 years. The majority of people on sick leave and passing the benefit limit were women. Using qualitative in-depth interviews and drawing on feminist phenomenology, theories of recognition and crip perspectives, the analysis shows that the chain of precarity orients women with long-term illness towards increased vulnerability and risk. This (dis)orientation is the result of a lack of recognition and respect within the fields of social insurance, health care, work life, discourse and politics as well as close relations.