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Pension policy is a highly political issue across Latin America. Since the mid-2000s, several countries have re-reformed their pension systems with a general trend toward more state involvement, yet with significant variation. This article contends that policy legacies and the institutional political setting are key to understanding such variation. Analyzing the cases of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, this article shows that where a weak legacy, characterized by low coverage and savings rates, a weakly organized pension industry, and strong societal groups that oppose the private system, combines with a strong institutional setting, characterized by a government with large support in Congress and where the president concentrates decisionmaking, re-reform outcomes may lead to the outright elimination of the private pillar. Conversely, where a strong legacy combines with a weak institutional setting, re-reform outcomes will tend to maintain the private pillar and expand only the role of the public one.

Pension reform is one of the top public policy priorities in advanced industrialized countries due to population ageing and the significant weight of pension spending in governments’ budgets. As a result of these concerns European countries have engaged in varying degrees of pension reforms over the last three decades. The extant literature on pension reform focuses on structural, institutional and blame avoidance theories to explain how pension reform take place. Yet, how do different conditions combine to lead to significant pension reform outcomes? To answer this question we analyze a set of 48 pension reform cases in eight European countries since the late 1980s up until 2014 by using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Our main finding is that institutional, structural or blame avoidance theories cannot account by themselves for instances of significant pension reform. Rather, we find three pathways that combine structural and institutional conditions to lead to significant pension reform.

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The extensive and radical reforms introduced in Greece's pension and health systems following the recent economic crisis provide a compelling case for the study of continuity and change in social policy. The article argues that a simple focus on retrenchment -as observed in pension and health in Greece in the aftermath of the crisis -provides only a partial understanding of the transformations taking place in the two sectors under study and their implications for the future structure of the two systems. While retrenchment has been the dominant feature associated with the fiscal consolidation effort undertaken in the context of the bailout agreements, other transformative processes have also taken place. In the case of pensions, a shift towards a more unified structure is observed, accompanied by a hesitant shift to a multi-pillar system characterized by a reduction in public provision which is nonetheless not compensated by a strengthening of the second pillar. In the case of health, recent reforms attest to the gradual withering away of the public system through its shift to residualism. These changes have been made possible through the changes observed in the policymaking process characterized by an unprecedented increase of the EU intrusiveness and the parallel decrease of the role and influence of social partners.

<p>The launch of the Lisbon Strategy (original and revised) and the introduction of the Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) mark a new phase in the Europeanization of social policy, characterized by a non-binding form of collaboration between member states. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the Europeanization debate by analyzing and assessing the Greek response to the OMC in the field of pensions. This will be done by focusing on the elaboration of the National Strategy Reports (NSRs), the participation of Greek representatives in European Committees and the mutual learning of the potential process in an attempt to identify the interaction of the administrative system with different elements of the OMC process. The empirical evidence reveals its isolated character and its failure to stimulate a reflection on existing policies, which in turn is explained by Greece’s inability to come to terms with decentralized and participative processes.</p>

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