Development Of Welfare State Research Articles

Translating social policy ideas: The Beveridge report, transnational diffusion, andpost‐warwelfare state development in Canada, Denmark, and France

AbstractIn the history of social policy in advanced industrial societies, the 1942 Beveridge Report stands as one of the most influential government‐sponsored reports ever published. In this article, we explore how the principles and the policy proposals formulated in the report diffused to other countries and how domestic actors adapted them to their local context through policy translation processes. The social policy ideas that Beveridge put forward in his 1942 report influenced post‐war policy debates in ways that varied greatly from country to country. To illustrate this claim, we analyse the reception and policy impact of this report over time in three different welfare states: Canada, Denmark, and France. This comparison shows how Beveridge's ideas influenced policy debates in different countries through translation processes that adapted these ideas to each country's institutional and political context.

Social Change and The Greek Welfare State Crisis (2010-2020)

This article attempts to utilize the concept of social change for the study of transformations in the Greek welfare state during the period of the multiple crises it is currently experiencing (2010–2020). This will be done through an analysis of the changes taking place in the Greek social security system, the backbone of social policy in Greece. The main argument is that, although there are fundamental differences in the development of the Greek welfare state compared to the welfare model of Western European countries, in the last decade there has been a convergence towards a neoliberal model of social policy. The elaboration of this claim will examine those theories of social change that attempt to explain the transition from the Keynesian to the neoliberal welfare state both in the period after 1970 and in the period after the Great Recession of 2008. The development of the Greek social security system over time is then examined, with a particular focus on the decade from 2010–2020. This will show that, despite the different context for the development of the social security system in Greece, the reforms imposed by austerity policies in the last decade have led to a convergence with the model of the neoliberal welfare state. The trend towards residualization and privatization of the social security system with a focus solely on the management of extreme poverty can be observed as one of the mechanisms of social change that are being adopted.

Basic Human Values and Attitudes Towards a Universal Basic Income in Europe

Abstract This study contributes to the emerging literature on public opinion on a universal basic income (UBI) not only by investigating the role of basic human values in influencing support for UBI but also by examining the moderating role of welfare state development in the association between basic human values and UBI support. Using the European Social Survey (ESS) Round 8 in 2016, which has an item asking whether to support UBI and the 21-item measure of human values that is based on the Schwartz theory of basic human values, the results show that individual universalism that is a self-transcendence value is positively and significantly associated with support for UBI, while the other self-transcendence value, benevolence, has a negative relationship with that; the two self-enhancement values, power and achievement, are positively linked to support for UBI. Additionally, in advanced welfare states, people who are more inclined towards individual universalism are more likely to support UBI; by contrast, in underdeveloped welfare states, this relationship is not apparent.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Poverty: Culture and Welfare State Development in Britain, Denmark and France

Why did historical anti-poverty programs in Britain, Denmark and France differ so dramatically in theirgoals,beneficiariesandagentsfor addressing poverty? Different cultural views of poverty contributed to how policy makers envisioned anti-poverty reforms. Danish elites articulated social investments in peasants as necessary to economic growth, political stability and societal strength. British elites viewed the lower classes as a challenge to these goals. The French perceived the poor as an opportunity for Christian charity. Fiction writers are overlooked political agents who engage in policy struggles. Collectively, writers contribute to a country's distinctive ‘cultural constraint’, or symbols and narratives, which appears in the national-level aggregation of literature. To assess cross-national variations in cultural depictions of poverty, this article uses historical case studies and quantitative textual analyses of 562 British, 521 Danish and 498 French fictional works from 1770 to 1920.

Longer working lives – what do they mean in practice – a case of the Baltic countries

PurposeThe article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of older people's situation in the labour market in three Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Three Nordic countries are taken as a reference point to compare the countries in order to better understand the situation from a comparative point of view. The article asks the questions: Does a longer working life for older people contribute to their better economic situation? How satisfied are they with a longer working life and their working conditions? Do they experience any discrimination in the labour market because of their age?Design/methodology/approachIn order to understand the situation of older people in the labour market, the authors employ welfare state models and the Active Ageing Index. The welfare state models help us to understand the context in which the working life of older people is taking place. The Active Ageing Index helps to gain a better understanding of the employment domain of active ageing. The analysis is based on several Europe-wide data sources: statistics on earnings from Eurostat database, information on income, job prospects, occupational safety and health, training, working life perspectives from the European Working Conditions Survey as well as a special survey, conducted by the authors, of Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian residents aged 50 years and older.FindingsAnalysis conducted reveals that in the Baltic countries older employees, although actively participating in the labour market, face unfavourable material, physical and psychological situation in the labour market more frequently than their younger colleagues. The findings show that the most important factors influencing older employees' decision to stay longer in the labour market in the Baltic countries are linked mostly to welfare state-related issues, i.e. financial benefits, healthcare, possibility to reconcile work and family obligations. These welfare state-related issues are even more important for those who are going to stay longer in the labour market after reaching the retirement age.Originality/valueThis article contributes to a better understanding of older (50+) people's situation in the labour market. It suggests that, while the increasing employment of older people increases the Active Ageing Index and is generally viewed positively, in some countries with less developed welfare states high employment rates of older employees, although providing them with an additional means of livelihood, do not ensure a higher quality of life and, on the contrary, act as a factor reducing the quality of work and, at the same time, the quality of life.

Measuring the Generosity of Parental Leave Policies

In order to investigate and compare welfare states or specific welfare programmes, scientists, opinion‐makers and politicians rely on indicators. As many of the concepts or objects studied are somewhat abstract, these indicators can often only be approximations. In comparative welfare‐state research, scholars have suggested several approximating indicators to quantitatively measure and compare the generosity of public welfare provision, with a special focus on cash benefits. These indicators include social spending, social rights and benefit receipt. We present these indicators systematically, and critically discuss how suitable they are for comparing the generosity of parenting leave policies in developed welfare states. Subsequently, we illustrate how the operationalisation of leave generosity by means of different indicators can lead to different rankings, interpretations and qualifications of countries. Hence, indicator choices have to be considered carefully and suitably justified, depending on the actual research interest.

The Inclusiveness of Maternity Leave Rights over 120 Years and across Five Continents

Even though paid maternity leave was the earliest form of social protection specifically aimed at women workers and is fundamental in securing their economic independence vis-à-vis employers and spouses, it has received scant scholarly attention. Neither the traditional historical accounts of welfare state emergence nor the more recent gendered analyses of developed welfare states have provided comparative accounts of its beginnings and trajectories. Employing the newly created historical database of maternity leave, we provide the first global and historical perspective on paid maternity leave policies covering 157 countries from the 1880s to 2018. Focusing on eligibility rather than generosity, we construct a measure of inclusiveness of paid maternity leaves to highlight how paid maternity leave has shaped not only gender but also social inequality, which has, until recently, largely been ignored by the literature on leave policies. The analyses of coverage expansion by sector and the development of eligibility rules reveal how paid maternity leave has historically stratified women workers by occupation and labor market position but is slowly evolving into a more universal social right across a broad range of countries. Potential drivers for this development are identified using multivariate analysis, suggesting a pivotal role for the political empowerment of women in the struggle for gender and social equality. However, the prevalence of informal labor combined with insufficient or non-existing maternity benefits outside the systems of social insurance still poses significant obstacles to the protection of women workers in some countries.

Correction to: Mapping Welfare State Development in (post) Neoliberal Latin America

Correction to: Mapping Welfare State Development in (post) Neoliberal Latin America

The complementary roles between clientelism and familism in social policy development

AbstractWhat drives social policy development? Most of the literature addressing this issue focuses on the economic crisis and the increase in left power as its causation. On the basis of the Indonesian case, this paper engages in a debate about the clouts of clientelism and familial ethics in shaping social policy path development. This article claims that the quick replacement of productivist welfare regimes with the more inclusive system after Asian Financial Crisis is motivated by increased elites' interest in repositioning their clientelistic network within a public institution. This is occurring while familial precepts are being used as effective moral politics in encouraging kinship networks to internalize social risks during the regime replacement process. Overall, the case of Indonesia reflects the common characteristic of welfare regimes development in East Asian countries where efforts to modernize social policy are conditioned under a situation where democracy is not well‐established and the post‐modern family structure has not fully matured either. Consequently, the development of social policy to a large extent is still confined within a huge clientelistic influence and implemented under the familial ideology. This situation has ultimately retarded welfare state development.

Revisiting Pension Reform in Sweden: The Role of Corporatism (and Why it Matters)

Defying a trend across the industrialized world, Sweden is one of the few countries to fundamentally restructure its public pension system. This reform has spurred interest in explaining how the Swedish political system accomplished a feat that has eluded so many other nations. Anderson claims it was largely due to politically powerful unions and industrial groups supporting government efforts, while Feltenius counters that Anderson underestimates the influence of smaller, issue‐oriented pressure groups, the pensioners' organizations. The Anderson‐Feltenius dispute reflects disagreement over Pierson's theory of welfare state development and retrenchment, as well as the persistence and influence of corporatism. We re‐examine, in detail, the argument proffered by Feltenius and suggest, as a theoretical matter, both he and Pierson neglect the importance of informal rules in political decision making. We also present additional evidence, ignored by Feltenius, that unions—and by inference corporatism—remained influential during Sweden's reform. We thus argue Sweden's experience is unlikely to be valuable for noncorporatist countries.Related ArticlesAngelaki, Marina, and Leandro N. Carrera. 2015. “Radical Pension Reforms after the Crisis: A Comparative Analysis of Argentina and Greece.” Politics & Policy 43 (3): 378‐400. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12117König, Pascal D. 2015. “Moral Societal Renewal or Getting the Country Back to Work: Welfare State Culture as a Resource and a Constraint for Policy Discourse.” Politics & Policy 43 (5): 647‐678. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12130Pierson, Chris, and Louise Humpage. 2016. “Coming Together or Drifting Apart? Income Maintenance in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.” Politics & Policy 44 (2): 261‐293. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12150

The Crisis is Over but Frugality Must Continue: Post-consolidation Fiscal Policy and the Dualisation of the Swedish Model

Previous research has predominantly analysed the retrenchment of the Swedish welfare state from a long-term perspective, examining restructuring processes from the financial crisis of the early 1990s until recent years. This study instead takes a short-term perspective and focuses on welfare state developments in the post-consolidation phase, after the recovery from the crisis. The aim is to investigate how the fiscal policy reforms introduced during the recovery years forced subsequent governments to continue on the path of "frugality". Specifically, the paper focuses on the effects of austerity politics on two policy domains: income redistribution through the benefit and tax system and the municipalities' role as social service providers and employers. The analysis indicates that the Swedish model is showing increasing signs of dualisation due to the gradual segmentation of prior universalistic welfare programmes and to the worsening of working conditions in the social service sector.

Mapping Welfare State Development in (post) Neoliberal Latin America

Why have some countries in Latin America and the Caribbean developed more comprehensive welfare systems than others? Do political and economic factors help us signal the (un) favourable paths taken by countries with different degrees of welfare state development in the XXI century? This paper addresses limitations of previous comparative research to continue (re) searching the conditions of welfare state development. A composite multidimensional welfare state development index (WeSDI) is constructed for 18 countries between 2000–2015. The four dimensions are the magnitude of social expenditure, the scope of coverage of welfare programmes, quality of the coverage of welfare programmes and outcomes of welfare institutions. The WeSDI uses goalposts (i.e. natural zeros and aspirational targets) to normalise individual indices and avoid the “relativity problems” of results. We use crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to test how necessary and/or sufficient eight political and economic conditions are (alone or in combination) to foster multidimensional welfare state development in the region. The causal conditions are openness to external shocks, debt obligations, revenue-collection capabilities, labour movement strength, strength of the left, policy legacies of welfare institutions, size of the outsider population and quality of democracy. The paper confirms the relevance of democratic strength, and revenue-collection capabilities as sufficient conditions of the highest levels of welfare state development in the (post) neoliberal era. In addition to labour movement strength, these same economic and political factors are relevant to understand the conditions behind very low levels of welfare state development.

Suffering from Suffrage: Welfare State Development and the Politics of Citizenship Disqualification

AbstractFollowing the landmark essay of T. H. Marshall,Citizenship and the Social Class(1949), it has conventionally been assumed that the introduction and expansion of social rights in Europe happened as the final stage of a long process of democratization that included the granting of first civil and then political rights. We present a radically different perspective on the relationship between the extension of suffrage (under meaningful competition for government power) and social rights, that is state-financed entitlements that make citizens’ livelihood independent from the labor market in the instance of events such as unemployment or sickness. First, some countries institutionalized a state-financed poor relief system much before mass democratization. In these countries, the primary effect of suffrage extension was to reduce public social spending, not expand it. Second, the way this retrenchment occurred was partly by creating a negative link between social rights, on the one hand, and civil and political rights, on the other. We test our argument with case studies of nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century England, Denmark, Norway, and Prussia, all of which are paradigmatic cases that represent the variation in welfare state types.

Features of the Development of the Social Welfare State and the Risks of its Modern State

Features of the Development of the Social Welfare State and the Risks of its Modern State

기본소득이 복지국가의 발전 요인으로 되기 어려운 이유

기본소득은 복지국가를 보완하고 강화시킬 수 있을까? 이 논문은 기본소득론자의 기대와 달리, 기본소득은 1/n 방식 때문에 소득보장제도로서 실효성이 낮고, 재정문제 때문에 기존 사회보장제도를 구축(驅逐)할 우려가 있음을 밝힐 것이다. 그리고 기본소득의 다섯 가지 핵심 요건(개인대상, 무조건성, 정기성, 현금급여, 보편성)을 사회보장 원리와 비교분석함으로써, 기본소득이 사회보장을 위한 정책수단으로써 내재적인 한계를 갖고 있음을 드러낸다. 결론적으로 기본소득론자들의 주장과 달리, 기본소득으로는 한국복지국가를 발전시키기 어렵고, 오히려 저해할 가능성이 있음을 주장한다.

Emerging scholars bring the case study approach back-in

This introduction to the special issue on case study research, which showcases cutting edge research by emerging scholars on France, describes the connection between these articles and current developments in political science methodology. SI contributors situate their analyses in thick description of France itself, demonstrating how modernity, rationality, common sense, citizenship, and democracy are inherently abstract concepts that only take on political meaning and significance within a specific national context. Simultaneously, these essays flesh out mid-level theories that are more amenable to cross-national generalization without losing rigor in the process, contributing to broader political science literature on experience versus reason, the European and Christian roots of secularism and how this contributes to contemporary discrimination, welfare state development, and political lawyering and the judicialization of politics.

Welfare state development and Finnish criminal justice reform from the 1910s to the 1960s

In contemporary research, Nordic countries are considered to have comparatively lenient penal policies, such as the restricted use of imprisonment. However, criminal justice in Finland during the early decades of its independence was exceptionally harsh. Due to its history, Finland is considered a difficult case for institutionalist theories that have related the Nordic welfare state model with lenient penal policy. This analysis argues that Finland’s development away from this severity was, in fact, caused by the shift of its social policy toward that of a (Nordic) welfare state in the 1940s, which is associated with the adoption of the model of democratic corporatism after decades of intense political conflict. The 1940s were a turning point when regulation of prison population sizes started to become an objective in legislation concerning the penal system. Meanwhile, independent of legislation, judges’ attitudes and sentencing practices began to relax. A generational replacement began among the criminal justice elite that manifested as generational disagreement in the 1950s, and by the 1970s, a reformist consensus was achieved.

발전국가에서 포용국가로 - 복지국가 발전과 민주화운동의 상관관계에 대한 시론

이 글은 우리나라 사회복지 발전을 민주화 진전과 연계하여 살펴본다. 한국 사회복지는 사회발전을 요구하는 민주세력의 힘이 강했을 때 이에 상응해서 발전해왔지만, 다른 나라에 비해 사회복지는 아직 양과 질에서 많은 문제를 갖고 있다. 하지만, 한국의 사회복지는 1998년 이후 국민기초생활보장법 제정에서 나타났듯이 사회권에 기반 한 복지 원칙으로 전환한 이래 빠른 속도로 확장되고 있으며, 특히 2017년 집권한 문 재인 정부는 포용적 복지국가라는 구호 아래 사회권 기반 복지제도로의 본질적인 변화를 시도하는 가운데, 1960년 이래의 발전국가가 남긴 경제성장 우선주의의 유산과 갈등하고 있다. 지금까지 지배적이었던 발전국가 복지정책의 유산의 영향으로 기존 복지국가의 제한적 확장에 그칠 가능성과 시민사회가 요구하는 포용적 복지국가 체제로의 변화 가능성이 있는데, 2010년 무상급식 논쟁에서부터 확인된 시민사회의 복지국가로의 전환 요구 및 최근 촛불 혁명은 포용국가로의 전환가능성을 높이는 요인으로 보인다.

Political Regimes, Path Dependence, and the South Korean Welfare State

Contrary to common belief that political actors can fundamentally shape the welfare state, any political regimes with distinct positions on welfare policies are usually put under public scrutiny, which makes it risky for them to simply follow their traditional beliefs without taking into account public reactions over welfare-related decision making. In terms of the welfare state development, South Korea is an interesting example in the sense that parties from different political backgrounds have had the opportunity to run the country for almost the same amount of time, since progressives came to power for the first time in modern Korean history. Based on data ranging from 1998 to 2016, the relationship between the welfare state and political/socioeconomic conditions is evaluated alongside policy implications, revealing the path dependence of the South Korean welfare development. The increase in social spending in South Korea was rather due to natural phenomena such as population aging, than any political actors’ approaches to the welfare state.

Is Service Quality a Driver of the Regulatory Welfare State? Policies for Health Services in Germany and France

The article analyzes the design and development of health services in Germany and France—two countries with similar welfare states but with striking differences in their national regulatory styles. Using these comparative cases, I show how the interplay of long-term institutional factors and short-term political factors shaped the establishment and development of these regulatory welfare states’ (RWS) social services. Specifically, I argue that the discovery of service quality in the 1990s had the potential to accelerate RWS development. In Germany, characterized by a corporatist state tradition and a cooperative regulatory style, the political debate on quality (either as a parameter of competition or as a concept for the professional consolidation of service production) had a greater influence on the design of the national quality regulation system (goals, instruments, processes, institutions) than in France, which is characterized by a state-centered Napoleonic tradition and a directive regulatory style.