The long-voiced claim of a family wage became a reality in the form of generalized family support after the end of the Second World War. This support has two components: child benefits and support for a dependent spouse, and the marriage subsidy. From a gender-theoretical perspective the marriage subsidy is one of the political means to influence the balance of paid versus unpaid work. The development of the marriage subsidy in 18 OECD countries is here followed from 1950 to 1990 and is compared to the development of child benefits. Since the 1970s there has been a growing divergence among our countries with respect to the marriage subsidy. Reinforcement or gradual decrease of this policy is here taken to indicate a general political support for the single breadwinner family model or its opposite, the dual-earner family model. Empirical analyses indicate that partisan politics have been of relevance to the development of the different forms of family support. Since marriage subsidies predominantly take the form of tax allowances which are always regressive in character, the class dimension is here intermingled with the gender dimension, which may account for some of the unexpected results.

In this paper the hypotheses on differences among welfare state sectors with regard to decline and convergence are subject to comparative empirical tests focusing on healthcare. A diachronical cross-national analysis of healthcare services is performed, comparing developments with that of cash benefits. Contrary to previous claims we find that European healthcare systems are not particularly hit by retrenchment and that convergence is absent in key healthcare dimensions, namely coverage and provision. Convergence appears mainly in terms of the increased reliance on private healthcare financing. Our examination is based on Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Health Data and institutional data on entitlement levels of major cash benefit programmes, providing both a descriptive analysis and multi-level regressions.

Convergence of policies and institutions across countries has been a recurrent theme within social sciences. 'Old' and 'new' convergence hypotheses have been associated with changing concepts and catchwords, such as modernization, logic of industrialism, post-industrialism, post-Fordism and globalization, but share some underlying theoretical perspectives. The purpose of this paper is to analyse tendencies towards convergence of social insurance systems in 18 OECD countries between 1930 and 1990, a period which has seen our sample of countries develop from predominantly agricultural societies to industrial or post-industrial market democracies. Data from the Social Citizenship Indicator Program (SCIP) are used to examine the development of institutional variables within the various national social insurance systems. Sub-samples of larger and smaller countries are examined separately, in order to test the open-economy hypothesis that smaller countries, being more exposed to international pressures than larger ones, could be expected to show higher degrees of social protection and also more convergence. Hypotheses on differentiated institutional barriers against pressures from the processes of transnationalization of the economy, as well as possible convergence effects of the supra-national policy making within the European Union, are discussed in the last section.

Abstract. The development of the European Community entails harmonization of policies in many areas. This paper analyses to what extent harmonization has taken place in the traditional fields of social policy. Interventions by the EC authorities in the social policy area, here termed direct harmonization, are examined. Indirect harmonization, resulting from common economic policies and the internationalization of the economy, is used as a key concept in an empirical study of the development of coverage, benefit levels and methods of financing in the main social insurance systems within the EC countries, since 1955. The corresponding development in the EFTA countries is here used as a baseline for comparison. The results are discussed in light of the thesis that also in the social field EC policies may fruitfully be interpreted in terms of the EC's main objective of economic integration. Some criteria for the consideration of future developments are suggested.