Recent welfare reforms across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have sought to make social policies more “employment friendly.” Although “old” social policies of the Golden Age (namely, unemployment protection and old-age security, which were typically geared toward the male breadwinner model) were subject to comprehensive retrenchment, “new” social policies, especially family policies facilitating work–family reconciliation and female employment participation, experienced substantial expansion. Following the Swedish “pioneer,” strong male breadwinner countries have expanded employment-oriented family policies since the late 1990s. Against the case of early family policy expansion in Sweden (typically associated with social democracy and an organized women’s movement), they examine whether the drivers of employment-oriented family policy have changed since the end of the Golden Age. The authors highlight party competition as key political driver in policy expansion in “latecomer” countries, whereas postindustrialization (in particular the rise of the new social risk of work–family conflicts, as well as wider changes in the skills profile and needs of postindustrial economies) provides the functional underpinnings for these policies.

This review article provides an overview of the scholarship on the establishment and reform of East Asian welfare capitalism. The developmental welfare state theory and the related productivist welfare regime approach have dominated the study of welfare states in the region. This essay, however, shows that a growing body of research challenges the dominant literature. We identify two key driving factors of welfare reform in East Asia, namely democratization and post-industrialization; and discuss how these two drivers have undermined the political and functional underpinnings of the post-war equilibrium of the East Asian welfare/production regime. Its unfolding transformation and the new politics of social policy in the region challenge the notion of "East Asian exceptionalism", and we suggest that recent welfare reforms call for a better integration of the region into the literature of advanced political economies to allow for cross-fertilization between Eastern and Western literatures.Keywords: Democratization, Post-Industrialization, Welfare Capitalism, Developmentalism, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan.East Asian welfare states have experienced comprehensive reforms in the last two decades.Following the regional "pioneer" of Japan, the neighbouring South Korea and Taiwan have introduced unemployment protection schemes, and have universalized health-care provision and old-age security. Also observed has been increased state intervention in child and longterm care in the region, including Japan. Welfare state expansion in the three countries, with the rise of social citizenship, challenges perceived wisdom in the literature. According to de-3 velopmental welfare state theory, and the related productivist welfare regime approach, social policy (driven by technocrats) is strictly subordinated to the primary policy goal of economic development, and therefore social welfare provision is confined to "productive" parts of the population (in particular, regular workers in key industries). However, recent policy expansion benefited presumably "non-productive" parts of the population as well (such as the unemployed, women, children, and the elderly), whilst the deregulation of employment protection undermined the developmentalist "welfare-through-work" system. This article reviews the literature on the establishment and reform of East Asian welfare capitalism. In so doing, we focus on the research examining the political and socio-economic drivers of the unfolding transformation of East Asian welfare capitalism; with a focus on Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. We show how democratization (that is, the end of authoritarianism in Korea and Taiwan, and the end of one-party dominance in Japan) and post-industrialization (that is, both labour market and family changes, such as the rise in female employment and the decline of traditional families) have undermined the post-war equilibrium of the East Asian welfare/production regime. Democratization has allowed the rise of political parties and societal actors in social policy-maki...

Political-economic analyses of trade unions in post-industrial societies have shifted away from traditional class-analytic approaches to embrace insider/outsider and producer coalition arguments based on the assumption that unions hold on to the defence of their core constituencies in the face of labour market deregulation and dualisation. Challenging this conventional wisdom, we provide an analysis of union strategies in Italy and South Korea, two most-different union movements perceived as unlikely cases for the pursuit of broader social solidarity, and we argue that in both countries unions have successively moved away from insider-focussed strategies. We show a movement towards "solidarity for all" in the industrial relations arena as well as in their social policy preferences. Furthermore, unions also explored new avenues of political agency, often in alliance with civil society organisations. We ascribe this convergent trend towards a social model of unionism to a response of unions to a "double crisis"; that is a socioeconomic crisis, which takes the form of a growing periphery of the labour market associated with growing social exclusion, and a socio-political crisis, which takes the form of a increasing marginalisation of the unions from the political process pursued by right-and left-wing parties alike.

Abstract:Since the 1990s, coordinated welfare capitalism has been subject to comprehensive change, with workfare measures and the deregulation of employment protection at the heart of labor market reforms. Developments in Sweden, Germany, and South Korea not only challenge the assumption of relative stability that is commonly associated with the study of coordinated market economies, but also the assertion that this stability is associated with the persistence of established political coalitions. Instead, we contend a collapse of old welfare state coalitions as key political driver of labor market reform, with the withdrawal of employers from previous welfare settlements at the center of this development.

Family policy addresses some of the important challenges of post-industrial societies, and it presents an important dimension of the recent transformation of advanced welfare capitalism. This article analyses the development of family policy in the two East Asian latecomer countries of Japan and South Korea, where we witness significant policy expansion starting in the 1990s with the latter displaying much bolder expansion and defamilisation. Explaining the difference in policy expansion, we show that the Korean electorate displays a much stronger pro-welfare orientation, which produced an environment for much fiercer party competition on the grounds of social and family policy.