Conclusions

Abstract

It has been argued here that predominant political theories of the welfare state – namely, the parties matter thesis of power-resources theory, the party competition approach, the functionalist argument of globalisation and orthodox institutionalist approaches – encounter difficulties in fully understanding and explaining the paradig matic change labour market policy in Germany experienced under Red-Green rule (see Chapter 1, Section 1). This is not to argue that these approaches have lost their explanatory capacity for welfare state research. However, according to common wisdom in the literature, the reforms of the Red-Green government – accelerating the departure from conservative–corporatist welfare involving retrenchment and comprehensive measures of workfare – should not have happened. Instead, the government of the Social Democrats and the Green party should have ended the policy trajectory of its predecessor. It appears that the ‘conventional’ treatment of political parties, following the parties matter thesis, seems to have exhausted the study of the German welfare state and its labour market policy. The scrutiny of Red-Green labour market reforms in the preceding chapters has shown that political parties can change fundamentally.