ISBN-13: 9780415299770 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 300 str.
This text offers a comparative analysis of the changes in ideology and policy programmes on economic policy of the British Labour party and the German SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands). Using an historical institutional approach, Knut Roder focuses on labour market policies - particularly labour market policies - and explains the process of policy change. It reveals the labour party's and the SPD's search for an alternative economic policy approach during their long spell in opposition in the 1980s and 1990s, and illuminates how both parties arrived at the current third way / Neue Mitte rhetoric. Their search for new policies was highly problematic, and led eventually to a delayed, incremental adoption of neo-liberal inspired economic policies. There was fundamental paradigm shift in the 1980s from Keynesianism to neo-liberalism, and the parties slowness to adjust to this shift, Knut Roder argues, was largely responsible for their electoral failure. Similarly, their eventual adjustment to the new paradigm explains their electoral success in the 1990s.