Authors:

  • Peter Hall

Excerpt

Social Policy-Making for the Long Term. Peter A. Hall, April 2015, Paper. "Dismantling the Welfare State is a classic work, as fresh and stimulating today as when it was first written. Many of the insights in it are central to the study of policy making today. One is the core thesis, stated on the opening page, that 'retrenchment is a distinctive and difficult political enterprise…in no sense a simple mirror image of welfare state expansion.' Paul Pierson was the fi rst scholar to show that theories about how welfare states were built are inadequate for understanding the politics of how they were sustained or reformed in the context of lower growth rates during the 1980s and 1990s. For that purpose, we need a new analysis of the 'politics of retrenchment' that the book provides..." Link