Toward a post‐neoliberal social citizenship?

Abstract

Since the financial and economic crisis started in 2008, the acceptability of neoliberalism is increasingly challenged. Arguably, the current situation can be described in Gramscian terms (Gramsci, 1971) as the hegemonic crisis of neoliberalism (Caruso, 2016; Stahl, 2019). Thus, while remaining dominant, neoliberalism has lost its legitimacy: The ruling classes still rule, but they no longer enjoy the consensus of the ruled. This rupture between the “people” and the economic and political elites is visible in citizens’ abstention in political elections and low membership rates in political parties (Mair, 2006), in the rise of “populism” (D'Eramo, 2013; Mouffe, 2005; Streeck, 2017; Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014) and in the emergence of social movements for justice and democracy (della Porta, 2015; Glasius & Pleyers, 2013; Kaldor & Selchow, 2013; Tejerina et al., 2013). Thus, like in Gramsci's times, we face today a “crisis of politics,” which produces a “new crossroads” between “authoritarianism”—represented by nationalist and xenophobic populism—and “democratization” (Caruso, 2016, p. 156; Fraser, 2017; Rehmann, 2016). Against this background, the ideal of social citizenship may be especially important for building progressive alternatives to neoliberalism (Revi, 2014). The scholarly literature has emphasized that in the neoliberal context, social citizenship is under pressure (e.g., Kurachanis, 2020; Taylor-Gooby, 2008). In particular, given the substantive evidence that welfare retrenchment and austerity erode social citizenship (Edmiston, 2017), contemporary efforts to develop progressive alternatives to neoliberalism have focused on improving social policy generosity, most notably through the “social investment” agenda. This new welfare model seems to enable the reinforcement of social citizenship in a post-industrial, globalized, knowledge-based economy (Evers & Guillemard, 2013). Social investment aims to rebuild social policy around the enhancement of individuals” human capital and their inclusion in the labor market, emphasizing both the social and economic returns of social policy. This agenda has now emerged as one of the dominant frameworks for welfare reform at the global level, being highly influential among the EU and international organizations, such as the OECD and the World Bank, as well as among social policy scholars (Deeming & Smyth, 2019; Esping-Andersen, 2002; Hemerijck, 2018; Jenson, 2010, 2017a; Mahon, 2010; Young Jun et al., 2021). In this context, the debate on the relationship between social investment and neoliberalism focuses on the degree of social policy generosity: Social investment provides an alternative to neoliberalism because it promotes social policy rather than implementing austerity measures (Abrahamson, 2010; Deeming & Smyth, 2015; Ferrera, 2013; Hemerijck, 2018; Jenson, 2010; Morel et al., 2012; Perkins et al., 2005). In the same vein, distinct versions of social investment are differentiated on the basis of their generosity degree: While the social–democratic version combines compensatory policies (social protection) with social investment policies centered on human capital enhancement, the “Third Way” version partially replaces the former with the latter, thereby providing a weaker break with neoliberalism (Deeming & Smyth, 2015; Morel et al., 2012). However, framing the debate in this manner overlooks the logics and the normative–epistemological assumptions that inform social policy promotion. Indeed, while enhancing social policy generosity constitutes an indispensable step for overcoming neoliberalism, it may be insufficient. In this paper, I argue that the view that equates a post-neoliberal social citizenship with the promotion of social policy is problematic because it involves a rather limited understanding of both social citizenship—which is identified with welfare benefits and services—and neoliberalism, which is defined as welfare retrenchment. Drawing from the normative literature on the ideal of social citizenship and the literature on neoliberalism, this paper thus contributes to the debate on how theorizing social citizenship after neoliberalism. The paper is organized as follows. The next section builds on various normative theories of social citizenship for emphasizing the importance of its political–democratic dimension. The third section, drawing from the literature on neoliberalism, provides a refined interpretation of the latter that goes beyond its narrow identification with austerity and welfare retrenchment. In particular, I argue that neoliberalism does not necessarily involve a “quantitative” reduction of social policy generosity and that it is also important to interrogate the “qualitative” dimension of social policy, i.e., the logic that informs the promotion of social policies, the goals that these policies pursue as well as the social–political processes that generate them. From this viewpoint, neoliberalism entails the marginalization of the political–democratic dimension of social citizenship. Using this framework, the fourth and fifth sections propose a theory of social–inclusive versions of neoliberalism, distinguishing them from alternatives to neoliberalism. Finally, the conclusion elaborates on some implications of this framework for the work of social policy scholars. It is always valuable and intensely practical to consider where our conduct stands in relation to an ideal, since in that way we can try to improve. It is essential to take this approach … rather than the more common one, which is to scale down definitions of the ideal so that they conform to what we easily achieve. That way lies complacency, self-congratulation, and an absence of concern to identify ways in which democracy is being weakened. Arguably, the ideal of social citizenship represents more than just a set of welfare benefits and services. For example, the fact that social policy has often been promoted by authoritarian regimes (Mares & Carnes, 2009) suggests that the ideal of social citizenship should involve something different than the mere provision of services and benefits. Indeed, social citizenship implies a specific way in which “welfare provision ought to be viewed” (King & Waldron, 1988, p. 422, emphasis in original). In particular, from a normative perspective, social citizenship involves two aspects: It is both an inherent component of democracy and the result of democratic practice. Before going into the details of these two dimensions, let me emphasize here that the ideal of social citizenship presented below embraces a “radical” understanding of democracy (Cohen & Fung, 2004). While internally heterogenous,11 I do not have the space here to discuss the different conceptions of democracy that broadly share this normative ideal—and the tensions between them. For different theories of “participatory,” “deliberative,” and “radical” democracy, see, e.g., Barber (1984), Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Habermas (1994), Wolin (1994), Benhabib (1996), Elster (1998), Dryzek (2000), Young (2002), Parkinson and Mansbridge (2012), and Pateman (2012). this conceptualization of democracy seeks a “fuller realization of democratic values” with respect to the “conventional” and minimalist model of democracy centered on “competitive representation,” whereby citizens advance their private interests by voting for representatives in regular elections in which political parties compete for governing (Cohen & Fung, 2004, p. 23). In particular, radical democracy endorses both participation and deliberation with a view to promoting three goals: reinforcing the accountability of representatives, increasing political equality, and enabling collective self-government for the common good (Cohen & Fung, 2004, pp. 24–27). Hence, in the following the main concern is to highlight how social policy can be conceived as an inherent component of a participatory and deliberative democracy as well as the result of participatory and deliberative practices. In this context, citizens are not only the addressees but also the authors of social policy. This conceptualization of citizens as simultaneously “addressees” and “authors” of laws and policies stems from Habermas and his “co-originality” thesis, which affirms that individuals’ basic rights and liberties are coherently and internally related to citizens’ democratic rights to political participation, i.e., that private and public autonomy are interdependent and require each other (e.g., Habermas, 2001). This perspective is not without problems (e.g., Cooke, 2020), but I do not have the space to address this discussion here. What I believe remains convincing of the co-originality thesis is the insight that both individuals’ rights and binding collective norms are promoted more effectively and more legitimately through the real struggle of social actors in the political arena and actual deliberation/contestation among the affected citizens rather than through top-down governance (Schaffer, 2015). With this premise in mind, I now turn to the two dimensions of the social citizenship ideal. The first dimension involves an understanding of social rights as inherent components of democracy. Hence, social citizenship aims at promoting citizens’ full participation in society and gives substance to civil and political rights that otherwise would be only formally granted, remaining in reality a privilege of the wealthy and well educated. This conception has a long tradition: Safeguarding citizens’ equality of status and their full participation in society is, for example, a central theme in Marshall's conceptualization of social citizenship (Marshall, 1950). The central concern in this first aspect of social citizenship is the establishment of the social preconditions of democracy: The goal is to sustain political equality or “equal citizenship” (Anderson, 1999). In this context, “we ought to associate welfare with citizenship because our concept of citizenship will be radically impoverished if we do not”: citizenship, “demands welfare provision; we cannot have an adequate or attractive notion of citizenship without it” (King & Waldron, 1988, p. 423, emphasis in original). Hence, this first dimension of social citizenship highlights the fact that one of the central aims of social policy is that of redistributing powers rather than only goods and resources (de Leonardis, 1998, p. 86). Another implication of seeing social rights as components of democratic citizenship concerns the rationale of social policy. Thus, “to associate welfare provision with citizenship” is a way of making “a proposal about how welfare should be handled in society”: e.g., people are provided for need without “supplication or stigma” (King & Waldron, 1988, p. 422). In particular, social citizenship involves the principles of solidarity and noncontractual reciprocity, following a rationale beyond the logics of “charity” and “contract” (Fraser & Gordon, 1992). Charity is a “unilateral gift,” on which the recipient has no claim, for which the donor has no obligation and which gives “moral credit” to the giver and stigmatization and disrespect to the “taker,” thereby perpetuating power asymmetries and relationships of dependency between donors and receivers (Fraser & Gordon, 1992, p. 59). In contrast, solidarity involves the rights and mutual obligations of the members of a political community, and it has legal value (Kohn, 2015). Individuals in this perspective are subjects of rights rather than objects of benevolence. Moreover, the logic of social citizenship differs not only from the moral rationale of charity but also from the economic rationale of “contract.” As Marshall (1950, p. 68) argues, social citizenship partially supplants the logic of “contract” that characterizes capitalism with the rationale of social rights and of “status,” replacing “free bargain by the declaration of right.” Hence, a democratic society should be more than a market. Indeed, contracts involve voluntary interactions between individuals within the private sphere rather than obligations based on demands and claims emanating from the public sphere. Moreover, the market—like charity—tends to reproduce inequalities, whereas democracy and political equality require substantive social equality. The second dimension of social citizenship involves less its outcomes in terms of rights and obligations than the processes through which social citizenship comes into being and is implemented. Hence, social citizenship—as citizenship in general—is not only a status or a bundle of rights and duties but also a “practice” with participation representing one of its core dimensions (Bellamy, 2008; Isin et al., 2008). In this view, social citizenship is a “social process,” which belongs to the realm of “agency” and the logic of “acting” rather than to the field of “ownership” and the logic of “having”; individuals are active citizens rather than passive consumers of goods and services; and social rights are closer to political rather than property rights (de Leonardis, 1998, pp. 175—178). From this perspective, social citizenship requires the practice of democracy within “civil society,” whereby ordinary people have the opportunity to participate in shaping the political agenda through self-organized associations and taking part into public deliberation. Following the Gramscian conception of civil society, Fraser (1989, p. 301) defines the “social” as the arena—noncoincident with the family, the economy and the state—in which “successfully politicized runaway needs get translated into claims for government provision.” The “social” is thus the sphere in which discourses about needs take place and demands on government are developed. The focus is on citizens’ effective possibility to take part in the collective definition of the common “problems” and “solutions,” participating at the co-construction of society (de Leonardis, 1998). The point here is not only that rights—even “human rights”—are artifacts rather than naturally given and thus necessarily require political struggle and claim-making (Dean, 2015) but also that social policy has a “political function” as “multiplier of democracy”: What matters is not only the satisfaction of needs and the realization of rights but the “public discourse on needs and rights,” i.e., the discussion on the kind of society we want to build (de Leonardis, 1999, pp. 33–34). Hence, instead of focusing only on the role that social policy plays in improving the quality of life of individuals and families within the private sphere through the distribution of goods and the provision of services that respond to these individual and private needs, this perspective highlights the potential contribution of welfare states to the quality of public life and the practice of citizenship (de Leonardis, 1998). Social citizenship then implies a “deliberative welfare,” which institutionalizes debates “about well-being and the good life” (Fitzpatrick, 2002, p. 167). Taken together, the two aspects described above imply a “reflexive” model of social citizenship (Olson, 2006). On the one hand, welfare states establish the social preconditions of political equality, guaranteeing that citizens are equally equipped for taking part in democratic deliberation (i.e., social rights are an inherent and necessary component of democratic citizenship). On the other hand, citizens actively participate in the politics of welfare so that they can conceive themselves as the coauthors of social citizenship. Articulating “redistribution,” “recognition,” and “participation,” social policies conceive individuals as citizens rather than beneficiaries, i.e., “subjects” rather than “objects” of policies (Lister, 2001, 2007). Indeed, social policies—at the level of both their actual functioning and their discursive frame—shape citizens’ identity and the relationship between them and the state, thereby either reinforcing or undermining democratic citizenship (Dósa, 2018). This two-dimensional conception of social citizenship also partly reflects the historical development of welfare states, which often emerged from struggles for social justice and democracy by a politicized civil society composed of associations, social movements, cooperatives, mutual societies, trade unions and workers’ parties (Powell, 2009). In this context, the terms “social policy” and “welfare state” should be understood broadly. For example, social rights also include labor rights. Thus, social citizenship involves not only the provision of services and benefits by the state “outside” the economy but also the regulation of the latter in the public interest. In this respect, the postwar international order of “embedded liberalism” (Ruggie, 1982) implied the regulation of international trade and especially capital control, which provided national states with relative autonomy in pursuing social and economic policies. In this context, the labor movement (esp. trade unions and mass parties) gave a political voice to ordinary people, promoting the democratization of state policies (Crouch, 2004). Crucially, despite its merits and approximations, the historical concretization of social citizenship in the postwar welfare state does not realize the ideal of social citizenship outlined above. As Fraser (2013, pp. 127–128) makes it clear, postwar welfare arrangements often treated their beneficiaries as clients rather than citizens, and they excluded women, minorities, and postcolonial peoples. Hence, while the remainder of this paper is concerned with studying the ways in which neoliberalism undermines the ideal of social citizenship, this critique should not be confused with a nostalgic view of the postwar compromise as a “golden age of democracy and social justice”—a view that would turn “a blind eye to some of the serious gender- and race-based oppressions that sustained that order” (Cahill & Konings, 2017, p. 120). Thus, as Crouch (2004) does for democracy, it is possible to interpret social citizenship as a continuum in which its concrete historical realizations are more or less distant from the normative ideal. Although postwar welfare states do not represent the ideal of social and political justice, the end of the social–democratic compromise and the emergence of neoliberalism implied processes of “dedemocratization” (Brown, 2006; Freeman, 2018; Kiely, 2017) and thus an even greater departure from this ideal. Indeed, given the difficulties in finding an alternative social base to the working class for representing the general interest of society and for promoting democratization, the decline of the working class is strongly connected not only with the erosion of the welfare state but also with the emergence of “post-democracy,” whereby economic and political inequalities return to levels similar to pre-democratic times (Crouch, 2004). While it is beyond the scope of the paper to provide an exhaustive definition of neoliberalism, scholars have proposed two different interpretations of neoliberalism that are relevant for the argument that follows. A first strand of the literature defines neoliberalism as the ideology of the dominant class and as the political project aimed at reaffirming capitalist class power after the postwar social–democratic compromise (Duménil & Lévy, 2004; Harvey, 2005). In this perspective, neoliberalism is associated with the promotion of the interests of the economic elites (especially big corporations) and thus with the concentration not only of income and wealth but also of political power (Crouch, 2011). Importantly, neoliberalism does not entail the minimal state but its subordination to capitalist interests (Howell, 2015). With the liberalization of international (especially financial) markets, national states lose their autonomy in social and economic policies and are compelled to compete for attracting capital and investments: democratically responsive welfare states are transformed into “competition states” (Cerny, 1997; Jessop, 1993) more accountable to global (financial) markets than to citizens (Streeck, 2014). A second group of scholars, following Foucault (2008), identifies neoliberalism with a governmental rationality based on technologies of the self and technocratic modes of governance, which aims at reconstructing subjects and institutions in market terms and at maximizing economic efficiency (Burchell, 1993; Dardot & Laval, 2014; Donzelot, 2008; Lemke, 2001; ). In this second perspective, neoliberalism is associated with processes of “economization of the social,” whereby the economic analysis is applied to noneconomic areas and the utilitarian calculus is extended to the whole society: Neoliberalism is, thus, a technocratic project that adopts economic principles for governing human behavior in all areas of social life. Crucially, the fact that this project is largely a technocratic one does not imply that it has no political consequences: Governments are invited “to think like economists” (Zuidhof, 2014), scrutinizing all governmental actions in terms of efficiency through the application of the cost–benefit logic (Foucault, 2008, pp. 246–247). Moreover, this “pro-efficiency” position should not be confused with a “pro-market” view. Indeed, mainstream economics recognizes the relevance of market failures (Lapavitsas, 2005), which call for state interventions as long as they are economically efficient (Madra & Adaman, 2014). Thus, also in this case, neoliberalism does not involve the retreat of the state but rather the promotion of an “economic state” (Foucault, 2008, p. 86), which complements—and governs for—the market and as an enterprise itself, imposing the economic logic and its principles of competition, utility maximization and efficiency to all areas of human activity, thereby transforming the entire social world into a market-friendly environment (Burchell, 1993, pp. 274–275). For the purpose of this paper, it is important to highlight two points. First, neither the “pro-elites” nor the “pro-efficiency” dimensions of neoliberalism necessarily imply welfare retrenchment: Social policy can be promoted with a view to advancing the interests of the dominant classes while following the normative–epistemological assumptions inherent to the “economization” project. As Foucault (2008, p. 133) argues, state intervention in neoliberalism can be as important as in a planned economy; it is the nature of the intervention (e.g., its purposes and logics) that differs. Second, both in its “pro-elites” and “pro-efficiency” dimensions, neoliberalism is associated with the weakening of democracy (on the tension between neoliberalism and democracy, see also Ayers & Saad-Filho, 2015; Biebricher, 2015; Kiely, 2017; Mirowski, 2009; Vázquez-Arroyo, 2008). Although Crouch (2004) uses the concept of “post-democracy” mainly for highlighting the marginalization of democratic politics triggered by the increase in political power of the economic elites and big corporations, it can also be used to indicate the decline of democracy caused by the spread and intensification of technocratic governance and by processes of depoliticization that insulate important political decisions from democratic accountability. Indeed, for Ritzi (2014, p. 181), “post-democratization” processes inherent to neoliberalism imply not only the promotion of the interests of powerful economic actors but also the depoliticization of politics. The concept of depoliticization refers to the “denial of political contingency” (Flinders & Wood, 2014, p. 135), i.e., of the possibility of choice. Depoliticization entails the marginalization of democratic governance both at the discursive and at the institutional levels. At the discursive level, political options are foreclosed making any opposition appear irrational: The debate becomes “technocratic” and “managerial,” pushing social issues in the realm of necessity or fate (Wood & Flinders, 2014, pp. 161–162). At the institutional level, depoliticization implies that decision-making processes are insulated from democratic pressures and delegated to technocratic agencies (Flinders & Wood, 2014, p. 135). In particular, neoliberalism promotes the depoliticization of the “social” through its economization (Madra & Adaman, 2014):Installing managerial discourse as the dominant frameworks for decision-making and submitting all aspects of society to mere economic calculation, neoliberal modes of governance translate political choices into economic issues to be solved through technical means, thereby insulating crucial public issues from democratic deliberation and impeding the formulation of political opposition (Brown, 2003; Clarke, 2004). While the social policy literature has highlighted the consequences of neoliberalism on the erosion of social policy generosity, it has largely neglected its impact on the political–democratic aspects of social citizenship. In the next section, I thus use a framework that assesses the effects of neoliberalism on social citizenship, including in those cases in which neoliberalization occurs in spite of an increase in the generosity of social policies. In this context, the object of analysis is not the degree of social policy generosity in quantitative terms, but the impact of social policy on the practice of citizenship—including the democratic quality of the public discourse on welfare reform. This framework thus interrogates the qualitative dimension of welfare interventions, i.e. their nature, purposes, and logics. In this section, I refer to the concept of “social” or “inclusive” neoliberalism (Amable, 2011; Craig & Porter, 2005; Crouch, 1997; Dorlach, 2015; Ruckert, 2006) for describing those political efforts that aim to promote social goals but that do not challenge the post-democratic core of neoliberalism. In contrast to austerity, these policy agendas generally improve individuals’ socioeconomic conditions, reducing disadvantage and marginalization. However, despite their contribution in combating poverty and exclusion, these efforts to promote social goals tend—in continuity with neoliberalism—to undermine the political–democratic nature of social citizenship. This can be seen in the rationality informing these approaches: in the policy processes and in the goals pursued. At the level of the rationality informing contemporary attempts to promote social policy, it can be argued that the political–democratic logic is marginalized in favor of a mixture of moral and economic logics. This mixture is a key feature of “philanthrocapitalism,” whereby economic criteria are applied even to charitable activities (McGoey, 2012). In this context, “socio–moral practices” are reframed as a “business opportunity” whereby values converge with “value creation” (Shamir, 2008, pp. 11–12). Indeed, one of the central features of the promotion of social policy in the actual situation is the assumption that the state systematically lacks the resources to do that, which makes necessary involving private actors in social policy delivery and financing appealing either to their moral attitudes or to their economic interests—or both. For example, the for-profit financial sector should be mobilized for financing social policy through social impact bonds (SIBs). The latter allow financial actors to invest in social policy interventions aimed at reducing costly social problems such as homelessness, unemployment, and recidivism. The improvement of social outcomes generates savings for the public budget, enabling governments to use a portion of these savings to pay back with an interest the private investors (OECD, 2016, p. 3). Thus, SIBs translate socially desirable goals into economic returns (WEF, 2013, p. 19). The emergence of SIBs can be directly linked to the social investment perspective on welfare reform, which reinterprets social policies as investments that deliver (also) economic returns. At least in principle, SIBs-investors are repaid only when the outcomes defined by the commissioner are achieved. However, because in this way the risk would be too high (if the social outcome is not reached the investor loses its investment), in order to attract investments, SIBs are generally (at least partly) guaranteed. For example, the Goldman Sachs investment in “Rikers Island SIB,” which aimed at reducing recidivism, was guaranteed at 75% by the Bloomberg Philanthropies so that when the SIB failed to achieve its target, the guarantee fund repaid the investment (OECD, 2016, p. 18). Thus, charitable foundations and other philanthropic funders are essential actors in developing social investment markets. Moreover, the service providers financed through SIBs are often nonprofit social enterprises and charities. Hence, nonprofit and for-profit organizations interact in innovative ways for financing and providing social policy. Crucially, connecting welfare interventions to global capital markets amounts to “much more than a simple provision of funding” and influences the very logic of these interventions (Dowling, 2017, pp. 305–306). Thus, transforming social problems into investment opportunities and rendering the social profitable (Dowling & Harvie, 2014, p. 880) are not neutral moves. As it is argued in the literature on SIBs (Bryan & Rafferty, 2014; Chiapello & Knoll, 2020; Cooper et al., 2016; Dowling, 2017; Joy & Shields, 2018; McHugh et al., 2013; Sinclair et al., 2019), despite their various forms, these financial instruments tend to: encourage focusing public action on those interventions that produce quantifiable results; incite to simplify complex problems for the sake of establishing performance indicators; legitimize those interventions that are cost-reducing; endorse a pro-market ideology and an entrepreneurial culture, encouraging also nonprofit organizations delivering social services to adopt business-like attitudes