From Safety Net To Trampoline: Labor Market Activation in the Netherlands and Denmark

In recent years Denmark and the Netherlands have made dramatic shifts from passive to active labor market policies. Though often portrayed as a necessary response to high levels of structural unemployment, such changes are more than a mere technical adjustment of welfare programs to a changing economic climate. They represent new ideas about the goals of public policy and the social rights of citizenship. This article surveys the politics of labor market policies in the two countries to demonstrate that the recent activation programs reflect a departure from the ideas and goals of the postwar welfare state.     

ANZUS — Alive and Well after Fifty Years

Marking its fiftieth anniversary in late 2001, the ANZUS alliance remains Australia's primary security relationship and one of the United States' most important defence arrangements in the Asia-Pacific region. It is argued here that ANZUS has defied many common suppositions advanced by international relations theorists on how alliances work. It thus represents an important refutation of arguments that they are short-term instruments of mere policy expediency and are largely interest-dependent. Cultural and normative factors are powerful, if often underrated, determinants for ANZUS's perpetuation. ANZUS may thus constitute an important test case for expanding our understanding of alliance politics beyond the usual preconditions and prerogatives normally associated with such a relationship.     

A Problem of Politics of Technique? Insights from Waste-Management Strategies in Sweden and France

Sweden and France are in many respects in the vanguard of high-level radioactive waste disposal efforts, and they offer sharp contrasts regarding basic strategies and underlying philosophies for waste management. We compare their waste disposal programs for insight into the dilemma of siting and developing a permanent waste repository. We find that technical decisions, as well as the more obvious sociopolitical decisions about repository development, are shaped by deep-seated social and political forces in each nation.     

Corporatism and the Microeconomic Foundations of Swedish Social Democracy: The Swedish Model Revisited*

The aim of this paper is to advance the research into the workings of ‘corporatist’ societies by adding a microeconomic dimension and outlining how such a revised model is applicable to recent Swedish experience. Sweden is often regarded as a corporatist society., that is, one in which policy is the outcome of a ‘social partnership’ between encompassing groups coordinated by government. This corporatist approach, resting on the existence of a macro-economic social contract between peak organizations, is complemented here by an analysis of the micro-level incentives and mechanisms conducive to operating within the corporatist cooperative framework. These characteristics are seen as together constituting what I term the solidaristic market economy, a system of economic relations different in fundamental respects from the two with which we are familiar. While Swedish reality docs not correspond exactly to the economic model set out, the case is made that it is as reasonable to extrapolate from Swedish experience to the solidaristic market economy (and vice versa) as to learn from U.S. experience about the competitive market economy and from the Soviet Union about the command economy. Complemented by these micro-characteristics, corporatist analysis of economic relations under social-democratic regimes is thus seen as explaining the resilience of the ‘Swedish model’. Rather than in constant peril as critics suggest, the encompassing interest organizations and the patterns of relations among them are characterized by continued solidity in keeping with the operating principles of the solidaristic market economy.     

Australian Federalism: Developments and Prospects

This article discusses the principal recent developments in,and future prospects for, constitutional change, judicial review,fiscal arrangements, local government, public policy, and intergovernmentalrelations since the 1977 Publius issue on Australian federalism,taking into account the arguments presented in the other contributionsto this volume. It highlights the continuing vertical imbalanceof Australian fiscal federalism, and the Hawke Labor government'srecent initiative for a closer working partnership with thestates for reforming intergovernmental arrangements. It arguesthat while there is scope for the latter, there is greater needfor the former. Nevertheless, the 1980s was significant as adecade of predominantly Labor governments working with the federalConstitution, while the 1990s promises to be a decade of celebratingthe centenary of the Australian Constitution and working towardimproving the functioning of its federal system.