Crisis and Welfare State Change in the Netherlands

The current economic crisis is assumed to create new pressures for the welfare state. In this article we investigate to what extent the crisis leads to changes in Dutch welfare state policies and institutions. Usually these changes are operationalized in terms of retrenchment (cost reduction) or restructuring (institutions). We focus, however, on developments in social rights in the hope of gaining better insight into the content and extent of policy change. This perspective combines attention for costs and institutional structure with attention for the content and substance of social rights. We start by analyzing the development of social rights in the Dutch welfare state as a reaction to the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Consequently, we will analyze current perceptions of social risks and social rights as well as how we think these perceptions will be affected by the pressures brought on by the economic crisis of 2008–09. Using an institutional perspective, we examine the consequences of the current economic crisis for perceptions of social citizenship and entitlement to social risk protection within the welfare state.