Introduction

In the opening sentences of this book we articulated the difficult challenge to welfare states in the era of ‘the Great Recession’: matching increasing needs, decreasing resources and heterogeneous public preferences. The previous chapters have illustrated, virtually without exception, the complexity, multicausality and tensions that go with this task. Three cases were studied in detail, each with its own ‘story’ and dynamics. From these three stories, this chapter aims to draw some lessons from the way the Dutch Government has dealt with these incompatible developments and tries to generalise these lessons to the European level.

Let us first revisit the theoretical and practical framework that this study departs from. As we indicated in Chapter One and discussed in Chapter Three, the issue of responsiveness contrasts with the traditional view of social policy as locked-in, highly institutionalised, path-dependent systems. It also contrasts with the perspective of the so-called ‘new politics’ stream, in which smart politicians use political strategies to pursue their own ideological agenda (see Pierson, 2001). As we know from many more recent institutional theorists, institutional change is possible, as we have also seen in the three cases we described. In this final chapter we assess to what extent this change comes from adaptation to changing socioeconomic environments and public preferences and how these policy systems have dealt with the sometimes incompatible demands from these environments.

To do so, we will start by a comparative analysis of our three Dutch cases. Next we address, and offer an explanation for, the main differences and similarities between the ways the cases have developed in the Netherlands. We then draw some overall conclusions from this analysis and also deal with the insights from the exploration of the development of the three domains on the European level. Finally, we formulate lessons that can be drawn from this study for the ways in which European countries may respond to the challenges that our current crisis offers.

A comparison between the three cases

The point of departure for the analysis of the similarities and differences is the conceptual model that we developed in Chapter Three. In that chapter, we showed that policy is ‘caught’ between three logics: the internal logic of the policy system, the logic of the social-economic and social-cultural policy environment, and the logic of public preferences.