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Defence date: 20 October 1995 Examining board: Colin Crouch, European University Institute, Florence ; Klaus Eder, European University Institute, Florence, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin ; Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Supervisor, European University Institute, Florence, Università di Trento ; Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, Universität Bielefeld ; Ivan Szelenyi, University of California at Los Angeles PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020.

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020.

Social policy affects the production of a new, or the reproduction of an existing political power structure in a society. This paper starts by contrasting the ''conservative-corporatist'' and ''social citizenship'' ideal types of social policy regimes of Western Europe with the ''Leninist'' ideal type of post-war Central and Eastern Europe. It interprets these three regimes in terms of three distinct strategies of attaining a different kind of solidarity. It addresses the question of how the respective forms of solidarity induced or reinforced the loyalty of different actors within each regime. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of the ''Leninist'' regime for actors in the current Czechoslovak political scene by examining how the organizational and ideological legacy of forty years of Marxist-Leninist rule constrains the options available to actors who advocate ''social citizenship'' as a model for social policy.

This thesis analyzes the interaction between different levels of government regarding unemployment insurance, social assistance and active labor market policies in two federal countries: the United States and Belgium. It conceptualizes intergovernmental relations as an insurance-relationship. Unemployment in a social risk that is partially insured through income-replacement benefits. Different factors influence this social risk, some are exogenous to individual behavior while others are endogenous to individual behavior. Since the 1990s governments have emphasized endogenous factors through active labor market policies that are intended to incentivize job search. This substantive policy shift towards active labor market policies coincided with more (pronounced) intergovernmental interactions. Active labor market policies are, for example, often implemented by subcentral governments while benefits are typically financed by the federal level. Therefore, subcentral policies increasingly influence the risk of unemployment. And when subcentral governments do not bear the financial consequences of their policies, this thesis speaks of ‘institutional moral hazard’; it identifies different forms of, and different solutions to, this policy problem. In Belgium, the federal government initially tried to remedy institutional moral hazard through stricter minimum requirements for regional policy. In contrast, in the US, states were made to finance a larger share of benefits themselves. Both approaches have had their downsides: stricter minimum requirements restrict the autonomy of subcentral governments, and making subcentral governments finance unemployment benefits leads to a collective action problem. Summing up, institutional moral hazard can be mitigated but to some extent is the unavoidable price of a well-functioning system of unemployment benefits.