Gerben Korthouwer

Gerben Korthouwer (1978) studied political science at the University of Amsterdam. Graduating in 2003 with distinction, his MA thesis combined qualitative and quantitative research methods to examine the (im)possibilities to pursue a left-progressive approach to pension reform in four mature welfare states.

His current PhD project at the ASSR builds on this research and aims at putting it on a more solid theoretical as well as empirical footing. The ‘new politics’ perspective holds that in the present era of austerity, class-based parties and organised labour once driving welfare state expansion have been superseded by powerful new client-based groups particularly responsive to big, expensive welfare programmes. However, others argue that existing welfare state expansion research is not as ill equipped to explain reform dynamics and outcomes as suggested above, that important reforms are more or less possible because of 'classic' involvement of social actors and Left-Right party balances. Moreover, another perspective contends that reform paths stem from different kinds of social learning rooted in governance arrangements - horizontally through power- and policy-sharing agreements with social partners and vertically through international arrangements based on benchmarking, mutual monitoring, peer review and the use of ‘soft law’.

This study attempts to analyse to what extent ‘old’ class politics matters in relation to new politics and institutional conditions for policy making and learning in explaining reforms of Western European pensions and family policy. The key objective is to identify the roles and involvement of different (private and public) actors and the institutional context in which they operate, and to specify how these influence the pattern and extent of reform.

In short, do progressive approaches to reform exist, and if so what if anything do the traditional champions of progressive politics have to do with them?