Preface and Acknowledgments

Like most books, this one has been quite some time in the making. The idea for writing it was born in 2006, when Gøsta Esping-Andersen asked one of us (Kees) to (co-)teach a course on comparative social policy at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). Many thanks to Gøsta for his suggestion to structure the course around “big” questions, which subsequently shaped the book’s composition. The course was adapted as a PhD course on the political opportunities and constraints in welfare state reform, taught at the Oslo Summer School in Comparative Social Science Studies in 2009. We would like to thank the MA students in Barcelona and the PhD students at the Oslo Summer School for their many questions and critical comments.

The field of comparative welfare state studies is rich with books on welfare state reform in specific countries and in specific policy fields, but there was no book that asked, let alone answered, the “big” questions about the politics of welfare state development and reform in a single volume. Why did we need a welfare state in the first place? How did we get it? Why did we get different worlds of welfare and do we still have them? What does the welfare state actually do? Why do we need to reform the welfare state? Why is reform so difficult, but why does it nevertheless happen? Can and will the welfare state survive the Great Recession (which, at the time we began thinking about these questions, was “just” a financial crisis)? We decided that it was time for a book that answered these questions, could be used in teaching, and would be of value to scholars generally interested in the politics of welfare state reform. To this end, we wished to bring together the existing vast, varied, and rich knowledge on welfare state reform, but also to add our own theoretical approach and empirical analyses. The result is a distinctive cross between a textbook and a research monograph.