This article examines the effect of two different social housing systems on housing-market characteristics and affordability using a case study of Berlin and Vienna. Despite comparable framework conditions, both cities pursued very different social housing policies. While both cities are currently challenged by growing populations and rising house prices, we show that Vienna is more successful in providing affordable housing as it has created effective institutions to attract and retain private actors in this sector. In Berlin, in contrast, the current crisis reveals the lack of institutional capacity to actively pursue housing policy. We argue that different housing market outcomes can be attributed to fundamental differences in the organisation of social housing provision reflecting divergent state-market relations. While in Berlin social housing has been seen as a provisional measure to correct temporary market imbalances, Vienna's continuous state participation in the housing market has created a framework of balanced rights and responsibilities for social and private actors to achieve social policy goals. Differences in funding arrangements and institutional embeddedness influence not only housing outcomes but also feedback on the state's capacity to intervene successfully in housing markets.

Rich democracies exhibit vast cross-national and historical variation in the socialization of health care. Yet, cross-national analyses remain relatively rare in the health policy literature and health care remains relatively neglected in the welfare state literature. We analyze pooled time series models of the public share of total health spending for eighteen rich democracies from 1960 to 2010. Building on path dependency theory, we present a strategy for modeling the relationship between the initial 1960 public share and the current public share. We also examine two contrasting accounts for how the 1960 public share interacts with conventional welfare state predictors: the self-reinforcing hypothesis expecting positive feedbacks and the counteracting hypothesis expecting negative feedbacks. We demonstrate that most of the variation from 1960 to 2010 in the public share can be explained by a country's initial value in 1960. This 1960 value has a large significant effect in models of 1961-2010, and including the 1960 value alters the coefficients of conventional welfare state predictors. To investigate the mechanism whereby prior social policy influences public opinion about current social policy, we use the 2006 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). This analysis confirms that the 1960 values predict individual preferences for government spending on health. Returning to the pooled time series, we demonstrate that the 1960 values interact significantly with several conventional welfare state predictors. Some interactions support the self-reinforcing hypothesis, while others support the counteracting hypothesis. Ultimately, this study illustrates how historical legacies of social policy exert substantial influence on the subsequent politics of social policy.

Comparing four groups of post-communist transition countriesthose which became EU members, those with candidate status, and two groups which are considered mere partners with or without a future membership perspective-the authors examine to what extent there are visible accession effects. The basic assumption is that countries which were under the pressure of the Copenhagen criteria and under constant EU supervision should have developed more favourably than the others with respect to good governance, dynamic market economy growth, and public policies in line with the idea of a European social model. The empirical analysis seeks to clarify to what extent there were selection effects prior to EU candidacy, to what extent countries with and without a membership option diverged, and to what extent there was convergence within the groups of member states, of candidate countries and of other post-socialist countries. Accession effects are found to be more discernible in the fi elds of economic growth and of political democracy than in the fi elds of social cohesion and quality of life.

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