The Social Rights of Citizenship

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reviews the welfare state literature which conceives of welfare state entitlements as ‘social rights of citizenship’, following the conceptualization of T. H. Marshall in his 1950 essay on citizenship. Beginning with Marshall’s influential essay, the first section of the chapter discusses how social rights of citizenship have been defined in the literature on comparative welfare states. Marshall argues that the defining feature of the social rights of citizenship is that they entail a claim for public transfers, goods, and services ‘which is not proportionate to the market value of the claimant’. Early quantitative studies of welfare state development measured welfare state effort with social expenditure, which was seen as a proxy for the variables of real interest, social rights, or welfare state redistribution. In the 1980s, ambitious efforts to measure social rights through time and across countries were initiated, though these measures did not find their way into the public domain until after 2000. These measures focus on rights to welfare state transfers and thus neglect services. The chapter ends with reviews of the literature on the causes of variations in social rights across countries and through time and on the outcomes of variations in social rights.