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The outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020 created dangerous public health conditions which pressured governments and health systems to respond in a rapid and effective manner. However, this type of rapid response required many governments to bypass standing; bureaucratic structures of health sector administration and political governance to quickly take; essential measures against a rapidly evolving public health threat. Each government's particular; configuration of governmental and health system decision-making created specific structural and functional challenges to these necessary centrally developed and coordinated strategies. Most East Asian governments (except Japan) succeeded relatively quickly in centralizing essential disease control and treatment initiatives in a timely manner. In contrast, a number of European countries, especially those with predominantly tax-based financing and politically managed health delivery systems, had greater difficulty in escaping bureaucratic governance and management constraints. Drawing on data about these governments' early stage COVID-19 control experiences, this article suggests that structural changes will be necessary if low-performing governments are to better respond to a pandemic. This paper also summarizes other relatively successful strategies. By adopting such strategies, nations can help overcome structural bureaucratic and administrative obstacles in responding to further waves of COVID-19 or similar future pandemic events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on Western European parliaments has long pointed to an increase in non-legislative activities, including questions to the minister and interpellations; however, it has struggled to explain this development. This paper argues that the explanation ought to be sought in the increased importance of issue competition among political parties in Western Europe. Political parties are increasingly competing over which issues should dominate politics. In issue competition, non-legislative activities are attractive for opposition parties, because governments must respond to the issues the opposition wants to focus on. The paper thus argues that the key to understanding the development of activities in Western European parliaments is to bring parties and theories of party competition into the study of these activities. The argument is tested and supported by showing that the growth in non-legislative activities in Western Europe is universal as well as by demonstrating how the content of questions to the minister in Denmark reveals a clear issue competition pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines COVID-19 and residential care for older people during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, comparing a range of countries – Denmark, England, Germany, Italy and Spain – to identify the policy approaches taken to the virus in care homes and set these in institutional and policy context. Pandemic policies towards care homes are compared in terms of lockdown, testing and the supply of personal protective equipment. The comparative analysis shows a clear cross-national clustering: Denmark and Germany group together by virtue of the proactive approach adopted, whereas England, Italy and Spain had major weaknesses resulting in delayed and generally inadequate responses. The article goes on to show that these outcomes and country clustering are embedded in particular long-term care (LTC) policy systems. The factors that we highlight as especially important in differentiating the countries are the resourcing of the sector, the regulation of LTC and care homes, and the degree of vertical (and to a lesser extent horizontal) coordination in the sector and between it and the health sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: This article describes and discusses the extension of performance measurement using an episode-based approach so that the measurement includes primary care, and social and long-term-care services. By using data on incident stroke patients from the capital areas of four Nordic countries, this pilot study: (a) extended the disease-based performance analysis to include new indicators that better describe patient care pathways at different levels of care; (b) described and compared the performance of care given in the four areas; (c) evaluated how additional information changed the rankings of performance between the areas; and (d) described the trends in performance in the capital areas. Methods: The construction of data was based on a common protocol that used routinely collected national registers and statistics linked with local municipal registers. We created new variables describing the timing of discharge to home and institutionalisation, as well as describing the use and cost of primary and social hospital services. Risk adjustment was performed with four different sets of confounders. Results: Differences existed in various performance indicators between the four metropolitan areas. The ranking was sensitive to the risk-adjustment method. The study showed that for stroke patients a performance comparison with data that are only from secondary and tertiary care, and without a valid severity measure, is not sufficient for international comparisons. Conclusions: Extending and deepening international performance analysis in order to cover patient pathways, including primary care and social services, is very useful for benchmarking activities when focusing on diseases affecting older people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: To describe the early experiences of a Nordic multidisciplinary cerebral palsy (CP) registry research program combining data from national medical quality registries, follow-up programs and cohort data, in addition to data from other national registries; to explore the scientific and practical uses of such research, and provide recommendations for facilitating similar work in the future. Methods : The work was divided into three themes: medical outcomes, social and public health outcomes, and health economics; and three cross-cutting teams: a reference team, a challenge team, and a communication and dissemination team. Initially each country will perform domestic research, and in the second stage data will be merged across all Nordic countries. Data from national registries with vital statistics, education and work, social benefits, and healthcare will be used. Comparisons will be matched for both the individuals with CP and their parents. Results : Initial work has been done on agreeing which variables to request from the respective agencies and planning the correct procedures and steps required to acquire the data. As of 2018, Sweden, Norway, and Finland have received approved ethics board applications. Iceland and Denmark are waiting for their approvals. A webpage and a platform for internal communication have been created. Conclusions : Nordic register research has great potential. Linking national CP quality registries and follow-up programs with other large national registries holds particular promise because problems identified through research can be applied at a population level. It is imperative that ethical clearance and data delivery processes are streamlined and transparent, and that data variables are measured the same way in the different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts contemporary debates about the relationship between immigration policy and the welfare state in historical perspective. Relying on new historical data, the article examines the relationship between immigration policy and social policy in Western Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the modern welfare state emerged. Germany already had comparably strict immigration policies when the German Empire introduced the world's first national social insurances in the 1880s. Denmark, another early social-policy adopter, also pursued restrictive immigration policies early on. Almost all other countries in Western Europe started out with more liberal immigration policies than Germany's and Denmark's, but then adopted more restrictive immigration policies and more generous social policies concurrently. There are two exceptions, Belgium and Italy, which are discussed in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: There is evidence that young people are less satisfied with their lives when they are unemployed or working in precarious conditions. This study aims to shed light on how the life satisfaction of unemployed and precariously employed young people varies across welfare states with different labour market policies and levels of social protection. Methods: The analyses are based on representative cross-sectional survey data from five European countries (Denmark, the UK, Germany, Spain and the Czech Republic), corresponding to five different welfare state regimes. For economically active young adults (N =6681), the prevalence ratios of low life satisfaction were estimated through multivariate logistic regressions. Results: In all five countries, unemployed young adults presented a higher prevalence of low life satisfaction. When we compared employees with people with permanent and temporary contracts, the former were more satisfied with their lives only in Germany and the UK, examples of conservative and liberal welfare regimes, respectively. Experience of unemployment decreased young adults' life satisfaction only in Germany and the Czech Republic, examples of a conservative and an eastern European welfare regime, respectively. In almost all countries, young adults with low economic self-sufficiency presented a higher prevalence of low life satisfaction. Conclusions: There are nuanced patterns of employment type and life satisfaction across European states that hint at welfare state regimes as possible moderators in this relationship. The results suggest that the psychological burdens of unemployment or work uncertainty cannot be overlooked and should be addressed according to different types of social provisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patient and public involvement (PPI) in health research is of increasing interest internationally, as well as being a means to enhance the quality and relevance of research. PPI was one of the main themes and parallel sessions at The Nordic Health Research and Innovation Networks in Oslo in 2017. In this short comment/debate article, we outline some of the experiences from the event. Importantly, there are many common challenges. More collaboration across the borders could ensure a broader range of experience in the field and provide better ways of developing and evaluating PPI in health research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the storytelling tradition and analyses of conference material, this article provides an overview of the evolving Nordic Health Promotion Research Network (NHPRN) and its conferences over the last 20 years. The story goes from the planning of the first conference in Bergen, Norway, back in 1996 to the eighth conference in Jyväskylä, Finland, in 2016. There have been three phases of development. During the first phase, 1996–2007, the five first conferences were initiated and implemented by departments of public health in the Nordic countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) collaborative centres of Health Promotion in Bergen University and a group at Karolinska Institute, Department of Social Medicine, creating supportive environments for health in Stockholm played key roles in initiating and supporting NHPRN. During the second phase, 2007–2014, the network was strengthened and supported by the Nordic School of Public Health (NHV) in Gothenburg. The third phase started when NHV closed down in 2015 and networking activities were transferred to the European Office of WHO in Copenhagen. The Nordic Health Promotion Research Conference series has served several purposes and will continue to do so. They are important Nordic meeting places, stimulating Health Promotion research, as well as explicitly managing ongoing concerns in the international Health Promotion community. This is reflected in the shift of foci over time. The content of the conferences has been highly responsive to whatever challenges are particularly relevant at different points in time, while also contributing to developing Health Promotion as a discipline, given that every conference has built on the previous ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: This study aimed to identify applied definitions and measurements of economic poverty and to explore the proportions and characteristics of children and adolescents living in economic poverty in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden during the last decade and to compare various statistics between the Nordic countries. Methods: Official data from central national authorities on statistics, national reports and European Union Statistics of income and living conditions data were collected and analysed during 2015–2016. Results: The proportion of Nordic children living in economic poverty in 2014 ranged from 9.4% in Norway to 18.5% in Sweden. Compared with the European Union average, from 2004 to 2014 Nordic families with dependent children experienced fewer difficulties in making their money last, even though Icelandic families reported considerable difficulties. The characteristics of children living in economic poverty proved to be similar in the five countries and were related to their parents’ level of education and employment, single-parent households and – in Denmark, Norway and Sweden – to immigrant background. In Finland, poverty among children was linked in particular to low income in employed households. Conclusions:This study showed that economic poverty among Nordic families with dependent children has increased during the latest decade, but it also showed that poverty rates are not necessarily connected to families’ ability to make their money last. Therefore additional studies are needed to explore existing policies and political commitments in the Nordic countries to compensate families with dependent children living in poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses three theoretical approaches to the study of coordinated collective bargaining, each positing different causal mechanisms: rational choice, rationalist institutionalism and discursive institutionalism. Each approach involves a different view of the exercise of power and distributional consequences. The three approaches are applied to the critical cases of Sweden and Denmark. The conclusion drawn is that coordination is not purely cooperative, and that cooperation is itself conditioned by power relations. Thus power must be placed at the heart of coordination studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the special issue, we review the various debates spurred by Esping-Andersen’s The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Tracing its impact since the book’s publication in 1990, we show that Three Worlds continues to be the point of reference for comparative welfare state research. A content analysis of articles in the Journal of European Social Policy citing the book indicates that Three Worlds may even have obtained a paradigmatic status and that its claims and findings are often taken for granted rather than challenged. We conclude that Three Worlds has become a classic that is likely to continue to have a major influence on welfare state research in its next 25 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the existing literature, the need for a distinctive approach to the analysis of foreign policy in Europe is usually seen as a uniform requirement applying across policy areas. At the same time, the criteria for judging the need for a new approach are underspecified. The article puts forward the argument that the approach to analysis of the national foreign policies of EU member states ought to vary according to the policy area under study. On the basis of an empirical study of Danish foreign policy, the article presents a comprehensive framework for the analysis of national foreign policy in an EU context which takes account of differing issue areas. The framework includes three analytical lenses: traditional FPA, transformed FPA and postmodern FPA. These lenses are derived from the strength of the EU policy and the national understandings of agency in the area concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the modern state and the European states system limned the inside of a state different from its outside. Inside the state, peace and progress could be furthered by means of disciplinary power, while outside the state, anarchy reigned. Academic disciplines such as political theory, International Relations and International History treat this divide as foundational, and so the knowledge they produce contributes to its reproduction. The article traces the emergence of the divide where Norway and Denmark are concerned through a reading of the concept of 'realm' (rike), and asks when Norway evolved a foreign policy (as distinct from a non-discriminating foreign/domestic one). There are two extant views. A legal view starts from sovereignty and fixes the date at 1905, whereas a nationalistic view popular with historians treats it as originary to the political entity of Norway, which means that it may be dated back some thousand years or so. Treating discriminating institutions such as foreign ministries as preconditions for the existence of a permanent divide between inside and outside, the article suggests the end of the eighteenth century. One may speculate that the firming of the divide is related to the rise of nationalism, in which case it is not surprising that the two phenomena fade concurrently. Since Nordic cooperation stood out as a special phenomenon in international relations because of the particular way in which it handled the domestic/foreign divide, Nordic cooperation will lose its role as special in the degree to which the domestic/foreign divide becomes less foundational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]