Want. Disease. Ignorance. Squalor. Idleness. These were the five evil giants of society which Sir William Beveridge ambitiously intended to slay with his vision of the future welfare state. Since then, his ideas – and those of many other ‘founders’ of the welfare state – have relieved the hardship of many Europeans who suffer from unemployment, illness or other social hazards. But in our current time, the solutions that modern welfare states offer for the ‘evil giants’ are increasingly considered as part of the problem themselves. Support for social policies is said to be declining. The fragmented, complex and bureaucratic machineries that deliver support are increasingly considered ineffective and inefficient. According to some, generous benefits create rather than solve idleness. And the interests of those who depend on or work in social security systems block all efforts to change them.

In this book we analyse in depth the trajectories of institutional change in three domains of the welfare state: social assistance, labour migration and sheltered work. In doing so, we shed new light on the way these policies have adjusted to changes in their environments. The core theme of this book is responsiveness: the idea that the institutions of the modern welfare state have to fit in with the socioeconomic environment and public preferences. How, when and why social policies are responsive, is the issue that we will discuss in detail in this book.

This book is indirectly rooted in a research project on the legitimacy of the welfare state commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment (see Fenger et al, 2011). Roughly stated, the research hypothesis in that project was that the lack of responsiveness of social policies explained the diminishing support for the welfare state in the Netherlands and in other European countries. While we could only tentatively reject this hypothesis in the context of that project, it did offer a lot of theoretical, methodological and empirical insights in the issue of responsiveness. In this volume we have tried to transfer these theoretical, methodological and empirical insights to a European level. A large proportion of the information in these chapters builds upon the interviews, expert meetings and document analysis that we conducted for the Dutch research project. We would like to thank all the people who dedicated their time to participate in this research.