The global financial crisis of 2007-08 produced a sudden change in the economic policy of the United Kingdom (UK). Prior to the crisis, the government preached the gospel of price stability, fiscal prudence and light-touch financial regulation. In the wake of the crisis, the government countenanced unconventional monetary policies, a surge in public-sector borrowing and the need for a rethink of financial supervision. This article seeks to understand the significance of these changes using Peter Hall's theory of policy paradigms. Its central argument is that, contrary to appearances, the UK has not yet experienced a fundamental reordering of the instruments, institutions and aims of economic policy. Third-order change cannot be ruled out as the crisis unfolds but the economic ideas underpinning UK economic policy have, for better or worse, demonstrated remarkable resilience thus far. IntroductionThe UK has been among the European economies hardest hit by the global financial crisis. The worldwide financial turmoil that began in 2007 triggered the first run on a British bank since 1866 and a near meltdown in the banking system 12 months later. The credit crunch, the effects of which have been amplified by the bursting of the UK's decade-old house price bubble, has taken a severe toll on the economy. According to the latest data, which are * Thanks to three anonymous referees for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.

This article examines the development of non-discrimination rights in the EU, with particular reference to disability. It outlines the origins of Article 13 TEC, which extended the competence of the Community institutions to combat discrimination, and traces the history of other initiatives in the disability policy area. Programmatic and juridical methods of promoting equality are described and compared. The analysis considers both the different institutional obstacles to programmatic and juridical methods, and the different consequences for the substantive content of policy of pursuing programmatic and juridical approaches.

The Lisbon Strategy supports reform of Member States' tax‐benefit systems while the ‘fiscal philosophy’ of the EMU postulates that governments should allow only automatic stabilizers, built into tax‐benefit systems, to smooth aggregate income. We ask whether these two pillars of EU economic governance are compatible. By exploring how structural reforms affect fiscal stabilization, we complement a political economy literature that asks whether fiscal consolidation fosters or hinders structural reforms. Using EUROMOD, a tax‐benefit model for the EU‐15, we identify the connections between specific tax and benefit reforms and the size of the stabilizers. We conclude that Lisbon‐type reforms may worsen the stabilizing capacity of tax‐benefit systems.

A statutory minimum wage has been introduced in Germany, in the face of business opposition but abetted by union support. The political coalition in favour of minimum wage regulation brought together the centre-left and the centre-right with the argument that regulation is needed to prevent disfunctional interaction between low wages and the social security system. Thus the dualization which characterises Germany's inegalitarian form of coordinated capitalism has provoked a corrective political response. The paper traces the long path to government intervention and assesses why employers were unable, or unwilling, to pre-empt intervention by maintaining the coverage of collective bargaining. It is argued that market liberalization has had a paradoxical effect on employer power: intense domestic as well as international competition has reduced employers' capacity to act strategically to fend off regulation by the government. Acknowledgements I am very grateful for helpful comments from

The regulatory state and the welfare state can be described in terms of contrasting pairs of 'types of policies' and 'types of politics' following Lowi (1972). The paradigmatic regulatory type of policy is market coordination, and its type of politics is nonmajoritarian, technical and supranational. The welfare state has redistribution as its paradigmatic type of policy, and the dominant type of politics is majoritarian, party-political and national. This paper dissects these distinctions. Public sector reforms mean that regulatory types of policy can increasingly be found within welfare service provision. Different arrangements for labour market coordination are integral to different welfare state regimes, and at the same time these regulatory arrangements are concerned with combating market failure and promoting efficiency. There are abundant examples of technical, expertocratic policy-making within the welfare state and a high level of supranational policy exchange. Delegation is important to the institutionalisation of the welfare state, as are nonmajoritarian commitments to social rights, secured for example for migrants. These findings cast doubt on the characterisation of welfare state policy-making as political and partisan. It is suggested that the interpenetration of regulatory politics enhances the robustness of the welfare state in the face of international market integration, while at the same time biasing policy towards the promotion of efficiency and suppressing the importance of solidaristic political values.