| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥600,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥400,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This research project is aimed at contributing to the development of the comparative anlalyses of the axes of cleavages concerning the social and economic policies in affluent democracies, especially in France, in the 1990s.
The investigator applied the model of the new politics of Welfare State restructuing, proposed by Paul Pierson, to the political process of French welfare state reform in the 1980s and 1990s. According to Pierson, the politics of retrenchment is very different from the old politics, the politics of the welfare expansion. Among the continental welfare states, it seemed to be difficult to restructure French welfare state. In the 1990s, however, one could find that the landscape of French welfare state has been defrosted and the important innovations of the welfare system have launched. Institutions of French welfare system structured these innovations, which are not only the result of the constellation of the economic and societal problems, the conflicts of various so
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cio-economic actors and their policy programmes, but also the conditions of the formation of the new cleavages concerning the social and economic policies. Despite support for the old politics hypothesis in the 1980s, the evidence shows that the new politics perspectives can explain more the political process of the French welfare state restructuring in the 1990s.
In contrast to many prevailing accounts, this comparative and specific country (France) analyses demontrate that the globalization and European integration have not produced the convergence of national social and economic policies, whereas one could not ignore the impact of the globalization and European integration on the changes of the welfare states and social contract in the post-world-war era. But the experiences of the Lisbon strategy, launched by the EU in March 2000 in order to make the European economy more competitive, rebuild the social inclusion and improve the European governance, shows that the relation between the European integration and the national politics is so complicated that national reallocation could be identified with de-Europeanisation of social and economic policies. We must examine the dynamics of the divergence and the convergence at national, regional and global level. Less
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