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punctuated by only few structural reforms (reforms that go further than incremental adjust-
ments) since the year 2000. With pensions, the latter resulted in a privately financed and
state-subsidized additional layer: policy-makers had reacted to continuing financial and
demographic pressures besetting the statutory scheme. With unemployment protection, the
Hartz IV reform introduced new benefit structures and a much greater focus on activating
policies, reacting to persistently high rates of unemployment. In the health care sector, I
found a similar pattern of cost-containment, intermingled with elements of more compre-
hensive reforms (introducing an element of competition between sickness funds, widening
the responsibility of patients and of self-governance) during the 1990’s. There, policy-
makers have continuously sought ways of controlling perennial cost pressure and keeping
the scheme’s finances under control, usually with short-term success only.
Subsequently, I have considered the various types of structures which are commonly held
responsible for Germany’s (relative) policy immobility. These include the political-
institutional context of the fragmented political system, where a bicameral parliament, a
federal state structure, a strong judiciary and well-developed channels for interest interme-
diation and influence on policy outcomes interact to make policy-making a rather complex
undertaking with plenty of opportunities for the derailing of reform processes. Moreover,
they also comprise sources of resilience attached to welfare institutions. The statutory pen-
sion scheme was found to be ‘sticky’ because of its financing mode, its social insurance
character that creates rights to benefits, a high degree of system maturation, and the pres-
ence of influential (self-governing) corporatist actors who strive to defend pensioners’ in-
terests. Unemployment protection is characterized by a high degree of institutionalization,
which fosters path-dependent effects. In other words, the social insurance character of pro-
vision and especially the strong role of corporatist actors, in particular the social partners
(and their contrary preferences) work in favour of the status quo. Health care policy counts
on two main sources of resilience: firstly, as with pensions, the scheme’s contribution-based
financing mode locks in the current system, and secondly, the strength of (self-governing)
interest groups and their interaction with political institutions leads to strong obstacles to
change.
The preceding analysis has confirmed the essence of arguments found in historical institu-
tionalist and regime theoretical approaches about welfare state stability. These arguments
provide ample grounds to assume that Germany, as the prototype of Continental welfare
states, is rarely capable of any significant change. However, the review of German social
policy developments since 1970 provides us with two contrasting observations. Firstly,
most changes to major programmes since the 1970s have been incremental (representing a
level of policy change, which the aforementioned theories would allow for under the condi-
tion of overall policy stability) and often related to cost containment rather than restructur-
ing policy arrangements. This suggests that German social policy-makers have for a long
time reacted to reform pressures by trying to cut back on the costs of social benefits and
services (for instance, by restricting access and cutting benefit levels). Secondly, some in-
stances show that policy-makers have adopted reforms going beyond incremental adjust-
ments, constituting genuine structural policy shifts. True, these more comprehensive re-