The involvement of social partners in active labour market policy - do the patterns fit expectations from regimes theories?

Paper by Mikkel Mailand 

This paper analyses the involvement of the social partners in active labour market policies (ALMP) in countries representing different welfare state and employment regimes - Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK. The aim of the paper is to 1) describe the extent of the involvement in this policy area; 2) analyse if the patterns of this involvement fits regime theories, when permanent national tri- and multipartite arrangements as well as the regional and local levels are included in the analysis.

It is argued, that focusing not only on ad hoc social pacts or welfare and labour market re-forms - as is common practice in Industrial Relations research - but including permanent bod-ies for involvement of social partners in the analysis, changes the picture of how intensively the social partners are involved in at least some of the countries.

Further, the paper argues that even though the state of involvement roughly fits expectations from different forms of regime theory, the directions of change of the involvement do not. Convergence can be seen in the form of a movement towards a hybrid model of governance, mixing strong state regulation with involvement of social partners as well as marketization.

Paper in T. Bredgaard & F. Larsen (eds.): Employment policy from different angels, p. 135-155, DJØF Publishing, Copenhagen, September 2005.