The Local Welfare State: Two Strategies for Social Domination in Urban Imperial Germany

Abstract

Poor relief and unemployment insurance were two social policies that provided aid to jobless workers in urban Imperial Germany (1871-1914). What determined the marked variation in poor relief spending by German cities? Why did some urban elites adopt aform of subsidized unemployment insurance that strengthened socialist trade unions? The local welfare state is interpreted as an object of social conflict and an instrument of elite social domination. The social-political efforts of local elites are seen as embedded within three different, coexisting images of society: (1) an older social discourse that depicted the state and elites as confronting an undifferentiated mass of disorderly poor; (2) a paradigm emerging during the second half of the nineteenth century that focused on the worker question while discouraging workers from organizing and participating in social policy; and (3) aforward-looking, proto-corporatist discourse in which organized labor is brought into social administration in exchange for social peace. Because elites viewed poor-relief policy within the older social framework, relief spending increased in response to violent protests. Situated within the emergent proto-corporatistframework, municipal unemployment insurance was more likely to be introduced where the Social Democratic Party participated in local government but was not an extraparliamentary threat. The analysis also suggests that state capacities, such as the size and complexity of the bureaucracy, are not independent causal factors, but instead mediate the impact of other causal variables.