Small Steps or Giant Leaps?

In the early 1990s, one million of the Netherlands's 16 million people were receiving disability benefits. Not only did disability insurance allow (and, arguably, generate) inactivity, the Dutch also faced the predicament of further benefit-dependency growth. At the same time, Belgium faced an even larger problem: over one million beneficiaries (out of 10 million Belgians) were dependent on unemployment insurance as their means of survival. Despite very similar circumstances in the two nations, different reforms resulted from the Dutch and Belgian governments’ attempts to fight their respective welfare state problems.

This study sheds light on the striking differences in the scope and extent of social policy reform in Belgium and the Netherlands, which are commonly portrayed as very similar polities and welfare states. I argue that the best way to explain these differences is to look at how the construction of a crisis by change-oriented politicians affected institutionally constrained possibilities to reform. The crisis perspective explains why drastic change quite suddenly became possible in the Netherlands in the early 1990s, and why almost nothing changed in Belgium. The empirical chapters of this book probed deeply into the policy-making processes in both the Netherlands and Belgium. Why did Belgium incrementally reform its unemployment policy, while the Netherlands engineered such a drastic change in its disability policies? How did the countries’ respective institutional structures affect the policy processes and yield very different outcomes? These questions drove the analytical ambition of this study: to explore the value of an institutional crisis perspective to explain policy change.

This concluding chapter discusses the explanatory power of the crisis perspective on welfare state change. Section 8.2 outlines the primary findings of this study: the conditions under which a crisis narrative affords political actors leeway to instigate change. Section 8.3 looks back at the developments in order to briefly assess the reform outcomes in terms of effects: was it worth a crisis? The balance of lessons learned comprises section 8.4. We conclude with a discussion of implications for future research.

The Crisis Stratagem

Policymakers who perceive drastic reform as a necessary way to resolve policy contradictions encounter an enormous challenge: how to break the conservative influence of established institutions and their advocates?