Blame avoidance behaviour (BAB) has become an increasingly popular topic in political
science. However, the preconditions of BAB, its presence and consequences in various …

" This book is the final product of a five-year project funded by the European Research
Council (ERC) entitled" Investing in Education in Europe: Attitudes, Politics and …

Governments have great difficulties designing politically sustainable responses to rising
public debt. These difficulties are grounded in a limited understanding of the popular …

Welfare state reform in times of austerity is notoriously difficult because most citizens oppose
retrenchment of social benefits. Governments, thus, tend to combine cutbacks with selective …

This article takes stock of and reviews the comparative literature on blame avoidance
strategies in social policy reform to identify the conditions under which blame avoidance …

A core, but so far untested, proposition of the new politics perspective, originally introduced
by Paul Pierson, is that welfare state cutbacks will be implemented using so-called …

Support for universal basic income is one of the key conundrums of the politics of welfare
reform. Research shows that the predictors of UBI favourability also explain support for other …

Support for sustainability activities among citizens will also increase the probability of more
sustainable choices being made by governments. In this study, we investigate the …

Recent findings about the electoral cost of welfare state retrenchment challenge the view of
the 'New Politics' literature that cutting welfare state entitlements is electorally risky. In fact …

There has been a clear trend toward greater conditionality and coercion in labour market
and social policy in recent decades, a key part of which is tougher sanctions for …