The course explores the politics of social policy in advanced political economies. In the first part of the course, the main analytical approaches for the cross-national analysis of welfare states are introduced (such as the industrialism thesis, the power resources model, new institutionalism, feminist theory and the globalisation thesis). These will be examined in the context of the rise of modern welfare states and their transformations since the end of the 'Golden Age' in the mid-1970s. These analyses and the theoretical approaches to cross-national study of welfare states will be harnessed in the second part of the course when the focus shifts towards more recent policy developments since the 1990s. The empirical focus is on the welfare-and-work nexus. The course analyses the development of labour market and family policies in Nordic countries, Continental Europe, Anglo-phone countries and East Asia.