Flexicurity in tijden van crisis in Nederland en Europa: Een vergelijkende analyse van sociale modellen

The purpose of the article is to highlight the consequences of the recent economic crises for the way European welfare states and notably the Dutch
one dealt with the challenge to maintain the balance between flexibility and
security goals with regard to the labour market. This will be pursued against
the background of the theory of social models in which social models are
conceived as ideal-typical configurations of labour market and social security
institutions which reflect different ideas about the functioning of the labour
market. We distinguish three models among which the flexicurity model, that
is assumed to bridge the two opposite poles of the broad spectrum of social
models, i.e. the liberal Anglophone variant and the Classical welfare state
variant. The European Labour Force Survey of 2008 is used to analyse the
effects of various labour market institutions on the employment performance
of countries and regions before the crisis whereas the European Social Survey
is used to research the differential impact of the crisis along the broad
spectrum of European welfare states on the employment insecurity of various
groups such as the youngsters, elderly and the low-skilled.