Abstract
Studies of the relationship between the welfare and regulatory state have hitherto either focused on the latter displacing the former, or presented regulation as an alternative means for achieving welfare goals. Little is known, however, about their varied mutual interactions. This article addresses that gap by examining the coevolution of workers' compensation and occupational safety regulation in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Drawing on an extensive international analysis of primary documents, secondary literature, and interviews with regulator, insurance, business, and labor representatives, the article identifies strikingly varied but stable national preferences for: (a) the use of financial versus regulatory instruments and (b) the allocation of regulatory responsibilities between state and nonstate actors. The article presents a novel explanation of that variation as dependent on the relative coherence of interactions between the particular cost‐control logics of welfare provision and wider norms and traditions of state action in each country.
Highlights
Celebrating the 125th anniversary of Bismarck establishing the world’s first statutory system for workers’ compensation, the DGUV – the umbrella organization for Public Accident Insurers in Germany – highlighted how much this cornerstone of Germany’s welfare state depends on preventative regulation: “Successes in accident prevention are crucial to ensuring the financial stability of the social insurance system” (DGUV,2010:12)
At the end of the nineteenth-century, regimes for protecting workers against occupational injury through preventative regulation emerged simultaneously across the industrializing economies of Europe and North America alongside parallel welfare regimes for providing social security payments to compensate for injuries and death (Hennock,2007; Mares,2003). This co-evolution makes occupational health and safety (OHS) a crucial case for examining what Levi-Faur (2014) has called the ‘regulatory welfare state’ in which redistributive fiscal transfer regimes condition, and are conditioned by, associated regulatory regimes. To assess these potential interdependencies, the paper starts by reviewing alternative approaches to conceptualizing the relationship between the welfare state and the regulatory state and develops hypotheses about how preventative regulation might vary across countries with different welfare state arrangements
We might likewise hypothesize – as we will explore below – that there is potential for a different type of fit in the British case, where the cost-control logics of its Beveridgean compensation approach do not depend on an ad hoc regulatory style for which welfare cost-control is a happy consequence of case-by-case attempts to address market failure. Such functional complementarities between welfare provision and regulation, are less likely to prevail in countries where the cost-control logics of their welfare states might be expected to depend on regulatory interventions that conflict with their regulatory state traditions
Summary
Celebrating the 125th anniversary of Bismarck establishing the world’s first statutory system for workers’ compensation, the DGUV – the umbrella organization for Public Accident Insurers in Germany – highlighted how much this cornerstone of Germany’s welfare state depends on preventative regulation: “Successes in accident prevention are crucial to ensuring the financial stability of the social insurance system” (DGUV,2010:12). At the end of the nineteenth-century, regimes for protecting workers against occupational injury through preventative regulation emerged simultaneously across the industrializing economies of Europe and North America alongside parallel welfare regimes for providing social security payments to compensate for injuries and death (Hennock,2007; Mares,2003) This co-evolution makes OHS a crucial case for examining what Levi-Faur (2014) has called the ‘regulatory welfare state’ in which redistributive fiscal transfer regimes condition, and are conditioned by, associated regulatory regimes. To assess these potential interdependencies, the paper starts by reviewing alternative approaches to conceptualizing the relationship between the welfare state and the regulatory state and develops hypotheses about how preventative regulation might vary across countries with different welfare state arrangements. The paper finishes by discussing its implications for deeper understanding of the relationship between the regulatory state and the welfare state from a comparative political economy perspective
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
