Digitalization and the Future of the Democratic Welfare State
Marius R. Busemeyer, Achim Kemmerling, Paul Marx, Kees van Kersbergen · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022
This concluding chapter summarizes the main take-away point from the chapters of this volume, focusing on the core research questions identified in the introduction: How does digitalization affect the changing policy space as well as the political space of contemporary welfare states? The chapters provide multifaceted and differentiated responses to these questions, which are summarized here. We also discuss the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for our findings. In the second part of the concluding chapter, we turn towards the future by identifying a number of dilemmas that policy-makers are likely to confront in the coming years as well as various scenarios about the future of the democratic welfare state in the age of digitalization.