Sunday, March 16, 2014
Congressional B (Omni Shoreham)
In Esping-Anderson´s ‘Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’, the ability of a jobseeker to access unemployment benefits depends on her work history, specifically weeks of previous employment. We contend that access is additionally determined by the extent to which she is forced to actively seek new employment and to accept jobs she might refuse otherwise. We label such instruments ‘conditionality requirements’. Such requirements have been implemented in all countries in our study and often increasingly so over the past few decades. Therefore, ignoring the influence of conditionality requirements stands to grossly exaggerate the level of welfare state generosity over time and mask differences between countries. Our new and unique dataset on conditionality requirements allows for a reassessment of welfare state generosity in the case of unemployment benefits. Our paper has two goals: First, we construct an index for conditionality requirements and compare countries over time with the aim of identifying ‘worlds of conditionality’; Second, we take stock of how values for a country’s conditionality requirements align with their unemployment benefit generosity scores in order to gauge whether and if so how conditionality requirements dampen the actual generosity of unemployment benefits. Our results show that while there are some regime effects in terms of the extent and nature of countries’ conditionality requirements, important anomalies arise. Moreover, our results show that existing measures of unemployment benefit generosity exaggerate the actual generosity of such programs.
