Abstract
In recent decades, advanced democracies have experienced important transformations in their welfare states. However, social policy scholars have not reached a shared view on how we should characterize the sea change in social policy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. On the one hand, some scholars describe these changes in social and labor policies as "neoliberalism" because recent workfare reforms require social benefit recipients to enter the labor market or training, and tighten rules on eligibility for various benefits. On the other hand, Takada (2012) characterizes recent changes in social policy as "merit-free egalitarianism" since these changes, such as the Hartz IV reform (Germany) and RSA (France), decouple - not tighten - the linkage between paid work and an autonomous, decent life. This paper derives observable implications from these two confronting claims and evaluates their validity with empirical data. Specifically, it analyzes household data in 6 European countries - the U. K., Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Italy - by using data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS).
