Journal of European Public Policy ISSN 1350-1763 print/ISSN 1466-4429 online © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tf/13501763.htm l Journal of European Public Policy 7:1 March 2000: 44Ð 62 Striking deals: concertation in the reform of continental European welfare states Bernhard Ebbinghaus and Anke Hassel ABSTRACT The reform of the welfare state entails changes in interdependent policy fields stretching from social policies to employment and wage policies. These linked policy fields are often governed by varying sets of corporate actors and involve different decision-making procedures. Adaptation in one policy field is often unco-ordinated with other policies, and can work at cross-purposes, produce negative externalities, or fail owing to the lack of supporting conditions. The article has two objectives. First, it argues that the renewed emergence of tripartite concertation is due to the need to co-ordinate policies across policy fields. Second, it evaluates the institutional factors which have facilitated concertation in some cases, but not in others. Using a similar country design, the article compares four continental European countries with similar reform pressures but different reform trajectories: France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. KEY WORDS Collective bargaining; concertation; governance; reform process; social partners; welfare states. The reform of the welfare state is on the political agenda in Europe. Given the challenge of high unemployment, economic internationalization and socio- demographic changes, more and more governments are seeking to adapt social and employment policies. The reform pressures are relatively similar in continental European welfare states, since they all suffer from the same ills of the ‘welfare with- out work’ syndrome (Esping-Andersen 1996). Yet while some governments have unilaterally pushed for reforms against vested interests, others have sought concer- tation in order to co-ordinate adaptation and achieve a broad social consensus for change. Our goal is to provide an explanation for the apparent divergences of national reform approaches in four continental European welfare states which otherwise share similar reform pressures: the Netherlands, Italy, France and Germany. The Netherlands have lately been noted as a success story of concertation (Visser and Hemerijck 1997). Also Italy’s recent experience of government–union agreements on the reform of wage bargaining and pension policies can be seen as an example of concerted reform (Regini 1997). On the other hand, Germany serves as a case where concertation has thus far not been successful despite the initiatives of two different governments (Bispinck 1997). Moreover, the French example shows