European labour markets are often described as rigid with comparatively high levels of job protection that do not allow for the flexible adjustment of employment to economic fluctuations. This interpretation overlooks important sources of flexibility, however. Research has shown that recent labour market policy reforms have allowed for the creation of two‐tier labour markets consisting of insiders in standard employment relationships and outsiders in non‐standard employment. This outcome has typically been explained by pointing to the representational interests of unions or social‐democratic parties. It has been argued that rather than protecting all labour market participants, unions and social‐democratic parties focus on the interests of their members and their core constituency, respectively, most of whom are in standard employment relationships. In contrast, it is argued here that unions' institutional power resources are the crucial variable explaining this outcome. In difficult economic times, when unions are asked to make concessions, they will assent to labour market reforms, but only to those that do not fundamentally threaten to undermine their organisational interests. In the context of job security legislation, this means that unions defend the protection of permanent contracts while they compromise on the regulation of temporary employment. This ‘second best solution’ allows them to protect their organisational interests, both by retaining their institutional role in the administration of dismissals and by living up to their institutional role as one of the organisations responsible for the direction of labour market policy reform. Using fsQCA this article shows that unions' institutional power resources are more apt to explain the observed two‐tier reform pattern than the unions' or the social‐democratic parties' representational interests.

The Working Papers on the Reconciliation of Work and Welfare in Europe series seeks to promote the diffusion of research and research integration activities taking place within the network and being produced by other researchers working on issues of work and welfare in Europe. Working papers are published either within the framework of a series of closed calls, which follow the different stages in the life-cycle of the network's activities, or as part of an open call, which aims to privilege both research focussed on cross-national comparative analysis of the various tensions between work and welfare and research focussed on the role of the European level in addressing these tensions. All papers are peer-reviewed.

Welfare state research tends to assume strong and enduring public support for welfare state institutions. We challenge this assumption and show that in times of economic crisis, positive welfare state attitudes are confronted with conflicting preferences for improvement of labour market performance. We argue that such movements in public opinion have led to issue competition among major political parties and subsequent radical reform of unemployment insurance in two least-likely cases. In both Germany and Sweden, incumbent governments were losing voters' confidence as a result of high and persistent unemployment. In Germany, the social democratic government saw falling competence ratings at the same time as the issue of unemployment was highly salient among voters. In order to win back confidence, the party shifted its policy stance and introduced reforms which reshaped the unemployment insurance system. In Sweden, the situation was similar with falling ratings for the social democratic government and high levels of salience for the issue of unemployment among voters. When the government did not introduce reforms, the opposition moved in and won issue ownership, and subsequently the election, on an agenda of radical reform.Public opinion and how political parties respond to it have received less attention in welfare state research than in other fields of political science. In particular, dynamic approaches stressing the malleability of parties' ideological positions in response to public opinion shifts (e.g. Stimson et al., 1995) have rarely been used to analyse social policy developments. Welfare state literature often assumes that parties of different families express distinctive class interests with regard to the welfare state (e.g. Hibbs, 1977;Korpi, 1983). Hence, their ideological position is seen as rather stable across time (Allan and Scruggs, 2004;Korpi and Palme, 2003). Approaches stressing ideological change within parties typically refer to long-term processes of convergence rather than to responsiveness to short-term electoral incentives.A second widespread view holds that the resilience of the welfare state to radical reform can be explained, inter alia, by its enduring and strong public support (e.g. Brooks and Manza, 2006;Pierson, 1994). The literature acknowledges that retrenchment occurs from time to time, but explanations are usually embedded in a framework designed to explain resilience. Accordingly, actors challenging the welfare state (typically conservative parties) have to exploit windows of opportunity (e.g. economic crises) or pursue less salient strategies of change in order not to be punished by the welfare-supporting public (Hacker,

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Are female politicians less likely to be promoted to specific ministerial posts, and is it important for them to toe the party line? This article focuses on whether the selection of ministers has a gender-specific dimension. Building on role congruity theory and research showing that female and male politicians are evaluated in a different manner in leadership positions, we present some original hypotheses. For example, we hypothesize that female politicians are less likely to be appointed to cabinet when they have held gender-incongruent committee positions in parliament. We also hypothesize that women are less likely to be appointed to cabinet posts when they have previously deviated from the party line. In an empirical analysis of Swedish ministerial appointments in six cabinets, we find that female politicians were less likely to be appointed to cabinet posts when they have held positions in ‘masculine’ parliamentary committees and when they deviated from the party line in their parliamentary speeches. These results suggest that women are more harshly judged when holding positions that are not in line with traditional gender stereotypes and have important implications for our understanding of gender and political leadership.