The New Politics of Unemployment

In this innovative study radical unemployment policies from Germany, France, Italy, Britain, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and the EU are laid out and evaluated with respect to their political acceptability in order to determine under what conditions they would receive a sufficient level of support to be accepted as government policy and implemented on a large scale.

In order to make systematic comparison possible, all the contributions use a common definition of 'radical unemployment policy', a common chapter format, and provide especially detailed analyses of a particular common policy - work-sharing. The final chapter builds on this by using a comparative perspective to test a number of current theories about policy innovation.