Social welfare spending and democratic political context

Abstract

Although most theories and studies of the welfare state focus on advanced industrial, high-income democracies, as did our analyses in the previous chapter, the study of low-and middle-income developing nations may be equally valuable. Developing nations show greater diversity than high-income nations in democracy, trade dependency, and industrial structure. Welfare spending in developing nations rarely reaches the levels in developed nations but still shows a surprising range – from near zero to 5 percent of GNP. Combined with variation in spending, differences in democratic and economic context in developing nations offer the opportunity to test the influence of additional variables and further evaluate the hypotheses. Indeed, studying the developing nations allows us to concentrate on the emergence and early expansion of the welfare state rather than the maturation of systems in high-income nations. The processes determining welfare spending differ in advanced industrial democracies and other nations (Cutright, 1967; Williamson and Pampel, 1986), and the processes in these other nations need study. In this chapter, we use low-and middle-income developing nations to further address two theoretical questions raised in Chapter 1: (1) what are the relative influences of class-based and non-class-based (demographic and industrial) determinants of social welfare spending? and (2) do democratic politics and political environments influence social welfare spending? An important component of class dominance – the dependency of low-income nations on capitalist, core nations – can be studied with these nations.