Falling Back on Old Habits? A Comparison of the Social and Unemployment Crisis Reactive Policy Strategies in Germany, the UK and Sweden

Abstract Although long‐term processes of welfare state development have been investigated frequently, there is a surprising gap in knowledge on short‐term reactions of states to sudden events. This article aims to fill this gap by examining the reactive policies, i.e. immediate policy responses to urgent social matters, of governments to the current economic crisis. We focus on social and unemployment policies of the three welfare regime ideal types of Esping‐Andersen's typology, namely Germany, the UK and Sweden. We apply long‐term policy development theories, most notably the convergence and path dependence theories, to understand the choices made in the different reactive policy strategies of these countries. In addition, we scrutinize whether we find similarities between the reactive policies and the converging structural welfare state developments. We use comparable data from various European and national data sources for the two years directly following the recent crisis, namely 2008 and 2009. Our analysis shows that, at least for the three countries under investigation, countries seem to have fallen back on ‘old habits’ by adopting social and unemployment reactive policies that can be identified based on their institutional legacies. This suggests that reactive policy strategies can be explained by different dynamics than the more structural long‐term policy developments, and in our case we find evidence in support for the path dependence theory.