Party politics as we knew it? Failure to dominate government, intraparty dynamics and welfare reforms in continental Europe

‘Party politics as we knew it?’ is an investigation of welfare state reforms in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands from the early 1980s to 2006. In the post-World War II era, social democrats and Christian democrats played a central role in building and expanding welfare states. This book argues that these parties still have room for policy choices but, especially since the 1990s, choices are different than predicted and explained by current dominant theories on the politics of welfare state reform. Their main weakness seems to be that they fail to pay attention to changes of dominant coalitions within social democratic and Christian democratic parties. Against a background of contextual challenges (fiscal austerity and changing constituencies), the catalyst for such internal change is a situation of failure to dominate government.