The EU and the Domestic Politics of Welfare State Reforms

Does European integration influence national social policies? What is the use of EU laws, orientations and guidelines? Based on a systematic comparison of ten national cases, including both old and new member states, representing all families of welfare regimes, this volume explores and specifies the mechanisms through which the EU plays a role in domestic social policy changes. It focuses on where, when and how national actors use the tools and resources offered by the process of European integration to support them in the national welfare reforms they are engaged in. The comprehensive research design and the systematic comparisons provide a unique opportunity to fully grasp the mechanisms of domestic welfare state change within the context of the European Union multilevel political system. This book proposes both a new step within the Europeanization and the welfare state literatures. It confirms the idea that Europe matters in a differential way since EU social policy will be selectively used by domestic political actors in accordance with their political preferences. It provides a clear explanation of why no EU-induced social policy change can occur without an overall support offered by key domestic decision-makers. (Résumé éditeur)

Multiscale Schemes for the BGK--Vlasov--Poisson System in the Quasi-Neutral and Fluid Limits. Stability Analysis and First Order Schemes

This paper deals with the development and the analysis of asymptotically stable and consistent schemes in the joint quasi-neutral and fluid limits for the collisional Vlasov-Poisson system. In these limits, the classical explicit schemes suffer from time step restrictions due to the small plasma period and Knudsen number. To solve this problem, we propose a new scheme stable for choices of time steps independent from the small scales dynamics and with comparable computational cost with respect to standard explicit schemes. In addition, this scheme reduces automatically to consistent discretizations of the underlying asymptotic systems. In this first work on this subject, we propose a first order in time scheme and we perform a relative linear stability analysis to deal with such problems. The framework we propose permits to extend this approach to high order schemes in the next future. We finally show the capability of the method in dealing with small scales through numerical experiments.