Routledge The New Politics of Unemployment: Radical Policy Initiatives in Western Europe (Routledge/ECPR Studies in European Political Science)

The problem of mass unemployment in western Europe has persisted since the early 1980s. Clearly the policies implemented by national governments and the EU have not been successful in adequately tackling this important social, economic and political issue. The New Politics of Unemployment provides a thorough comparative analysis of the present situation. It looks at how the orthodox unemployment policies of contemporary governments have failed and what new policies might be introduced. A number of radical unemployment policies, from Germany, France, Italy, Britain, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and the EU, are outlined. These are investigated with a view to identifying the conditions under which they might become standard components of national and EU strategies to bring down unemployment. This book is the first comparative study of the politics of policy innovation in the area of unemployment. It will be an important addition to the literature of European public policy and important reading for students of comparative European politics and economics. From the Back Cover In this innovative study radical unemployment policies from Germany, France, Italy, Britain, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and the EU are laid out and evaluated with respect to their political acceptability in order to determine under what conditions they would receive a sufficient level of support to be accepted as government policy and implemented on a large scale. In order to make systematic comparison possible, all the contributions use a common definition of 'radical unemployment policy', a common chapter format, and provide especially detailed analyses of a particular common policy - work-sharing. The final chapter builds on this by using a comparative perspective to test a number of current theories about policy innovation.