Social Welfare Expansion Research Articles

Big business as vanguard: social welfare expansion in China

Why would an emerging market economy without Western democratic institutions provide and promote social welfare to its citizens? This paper explores the driving forces behind the rapid yet unequal expansion of social welfare in China, a phenomenon notable since the late 1990s. Rather than adhering to the conventional state-centered approach that views welfare expansion as a strategy for one-party regimes to seek legitimacy, this study offers an alternate perspective that emphasizes the ‘demand’ side, particularly the role of business. Through a systematic analysis of all 336 Chinese municipalities from 2001 to 2012, the study demonstrates how big businesses act as ‘vanguard,’ pushing local governments to enhance social welfare provision. It suggests that big businesses, in the absence of institutionalized democratic institutions, serve as ‘functional equivalents,’ channeling societal demands to the government. This paper also finds that firms’ influence on social policy in non-democracies is more capability based instead of institutional based; large domestic and multinational corporations are more capable in lobbying the government.

How welfare wins: Discursive institutionalism, the politics of the poor, and the expansion of social welfare in India during the early 21st century

Abstract The worldwide explosion of social welfare has been described as the “quiet revolution” of our time. This paper analyses the expansion of social welfare in India during the early part of the 2000s. What explains this expansion of encompassing social welfare in India, following a history of disparate and fragmented social policies? The answer, I argue, lies in recognizing the importance of the “politics of the poor,” the ensemble of negotiations that encompass both electoral participation and contentious politics vis-à-vis the political institutions in India. The paper develops this argument by drawing together insights from discursive institutionalism, Indian politics, and the politics of welfare literature. Doing so enables me to examine the ways in which poor people’s political practices were interpreted by India’s parliamentarians to justify the legislation of India’s flagship social welfare program the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. I analyze the discourses communicated through 78 parliamentary debates in English and Hindi to enact the law. I blend this analysis with process tracing of electoral behavior of India’s poor and the Maoist insurrection that exploded in the country’s poorest districts at the turn of the century.

War and Welfare in Colonial Algeria

AbstractA distinguishing feature of the modern state is the broad scope of social welfare provision. This remarkable expansion of public assistance was characterized by huge spatial and temporal disparities. What explains the uneven expansion in the reach of social welfare? We argue that social welfare expansion depends in part on the ability of the governed to compel the state to provide rewards in return for military service—and crucially, that marginalized groups faced greater barriers to obtaining those rewards. In colonial states, subjects faced a bargaining disadvantage relative to citizens living in the colony and were less likely to win concessions from the state for their wartime sacrifices. We test this argument using a difference-in-differences research design and a rich data set of local spending before and after World War I in colonial Algeria. Our results reveal that social welfare spending expanded less in communes where the French subject share of the population was greater. This paper contributes to the state-building literature by highlighting the differential ability of the governed to bargain with the state in the aftermath of conflict.

Political Trust and Support for a Tax Increase for Social Welfare: The Role of Perceived Tax Burden

Recent decades have seen a rapid increase in social welfare spending in South Korea. Along with rapid population aging and increased demands for social welfare programs, securing a sustainable level of taxation is becoming urgent. Thus, this study explores the factors associated with individuals’ support for a tax increase for social welfare expansion, focusing on political trust. This study also explores the role of perceived tax burden in moderating the linkage between political trust and individuals’ support for a tax increase for social welfare expansion. Using ordered probit and the 2019 National Survey of Tax and Benefit, this study found that political trust is positively associated with support for a tax increase for social welfare expansion. However, the positive effect of political trust decreases when individuals perceive their tax burdens as high. This study offers implications of the findings for policymakers such as simplifying tax codes and improving tax fairness for taxpayers.

Understanding the Expansion of Latin America's New Social Welfare Regimes

Latin American countries have been described as truncated welfare states. However, the recent expansion of innovative social welfare programs have brought millions of excluded citizens access to social benefits. This review article examines a new body of scholarship that studies how democratic political competition has created the institutional context for social welfare expansion. This literature makes several important contributions to the study of distributive politics. It moves beyond regime type and party ideology and focuses on the nature of domestic political institutions and citizen-state linkages within Latin American democracies. Countries with robust political competition and denser ties to constituents have had the most extensive welfare expansion, and non-partisan programs have undermined clientelism. In single party dominated settings, the political incentives for informal and clientelist provision remains significant.

What do workers want? Institutional complementarity as a mechanism of social change

AbstractThis article presents a theory of social protection expansion in late-developing open economies based on actors’ perceptions of complementarity. Drawing on recent theories of institutional change and political economic theories of welfare regimes, the article explains why in late-developing open economies, processes of liberalization often result in social welfare expansion. The explanation is based on the existence of institutional complementarity between the production regime and the social welfare regime. The article offers an agent-based theory of change according to which actors – state or market actors – are likely to promote welfare expansion amid their expectations of higher payoffs and/or improved performance of the liberalized economy. This theory challenges the more conventional Power Resource Theory, according to which welfare regimes are shaped primarily by the balance of power between workers and employers. To test the theory, the article analyzes the enactment of the unemployment insurance law in Israel (1972).

Impact Of Social Security Expenditures On Income Distribution: Case Of Turkey

Income inequality is a significant hindrance to the growth and expansion of social welfare. Modern societies use many tools to overcome this hindrance. Social security system is one of the most known tools. The fact that social security spending improves the income distribution differently in each country, originating from the diversity of social security methods. In this study, the influence of social security expenditure on income distribution in Turkey is examined by Johansen and Juselius (JJ) Cointegration test for the period 1975-2010. The findings of the unit root tests show that all the variables are stationary at first difference and the findings of the cointegration test display that variables have a long run relationship. In addition, it is found that social security expenditure has a negative effect on income distribution in Turkey in the studied period, while economic growth has a positive effect on it.

Inter-Regional Competition in Retirement Benefit Growth—The Role of the Sub-National Government in Authoritarian China

After the Chinese central government announced a policy of raising retirement benefits in 2005, there ensued a race to the top in pension benefit growth among its 31 provincial units. This study seeks to explain how this seemingly unusual nationwide social welfare expansion came about in authoritarian China. It helps to open up the black box of mysterious Chinese politics. The study highlights the roles of sub-national governments in decentralized Chinese social welfare policymaking. Instead of treating authoritarian rulers as unitary actors, this study looks into the interplay of center and provinces in a decentralized authoritarian political system. Compared with the center, provinces have traditionally been more reluctant to devote economic resources to social welfare. To motivate provincial governments to implement a policy of increased benefits, the center granted fiscal subsidies to certain provinces. This special subsidy program had three effects: (1) it reduced the provincial costs of the benefit increase; (2) it elevated the center’s annual fiscal transfer base for subsidized provincial governments beyond the current year, into the future; and (3) it increased disposable personal income, a key indicator of local government officials’ political merits in the cadre evaluation system. Inter-provincial competition in raising retirement benefits is explained, first, by provinces’ desires to earn greater fiscal subsidies from the center; and, second, by the efforts of those provinces which did not receive the subsidies to keep their benefit levels up with the levels of those which did. The result of the center’s subsidy program was not only a rise in pension levels, but also an increase in inter-regional social welfare disparities. The central government, perhaps alarmed by the consequences of its policy, acted to bring the rapid expansion of pension levels to an apparent end in 2016.

Determinants of Attitude toward the Public Health Spending and Its Relationship with Voting Behavior in the 2012 South Korean Presidential Election.

This study aimed to identify the factors influencing South Korean voters’ attitudes towards increasing public expenditure on health and to identify whether the issue of healthcare expenditure influenced candidate choice in the 2012 Korean presidential election. The study used the data from a survey conducted by the Institute of Korean Politics at Seoul National University immediately following the 2012 presidential election. The survey was completed by a nationwide sample of 1,200 people aged 19 or over using a face-to-face interview method and proportional quota sampling based on sex, age, and region. About 44.3% of respondents had a positive attitude toward increasing public health expenditure. There was no significant difference by the candidate they supported (conservative Park Geun-hye or liberal Moon Jae-in). In particular, even 44.9% of conservative supporters agreed with more spending. Politically neutral respondents (OR = 1.76, 90% CI 1.22–2.54) and strong conservative party supporters (OR = 1.53, 90% CI 1.05–2.25) were more likely to support public health expenditure increase compared to strong liberal party supporters. Also, respondents who believed that the economic gap in the country was widening were 1.91 times more likely to support an increase in public health expenditures. However, the issue of health expenditure had no influence on voters’ choice of presidential candidates, and in particular no negative effect of choice of the ruling (conservative) party’s candidate. Our results should be interpreted with care; one possible reason for this lack of effect might be that constituents voted along partisan lines regardless of their attitude to the welfare issue; another possible explanation might be the success of the “left click strategy” of the conservative party. That is, the conservatives did not reject economic democratization or social welfare expansion. Further research should be done to explain why attitudes to health spending did not directly affect choice of candidate.

한국 영재교육의 위기 현상 진단과 해결 방안

한국에서 영재교육 진흥법이 제정된 이래, 지난 15년 이상 동안 한국의 영재교육은 양적으로 급속한 성장을 지속해 왔다. 영재학급이나 영재교육원이 증가하는가 하면, 영재교육 지도교사의 연수나 교육 참여 활동도 늘어났다. 그렇지만, 2014년 이후 영재교육은 다소 위축되는 양상이다. 한국 사회의 사교육 논쟁과 무상복지 확대로 인하여 영재교육에 대한 행 재정적 지원이 축소되고 있는 것이다. 이에 본 연구는 역대 정부에서 추진한 영재교육 정책을 개관함으로써, 정부의 정치적 노선과 영재교육 지원 노력 간의 연관성을 분석하였다. 이와 함께, 최근 한국사회에서 영재교육이 위축되고 있는 현상을 중앙 및 지방정부의 영재교육에 대한 행 재정적 지원의 약화로 인한 양적 성장의 저하, 사교육 억제와 관련한 규제, 영재교육 접근 기회의 사회적 불평등성, 영재교육 학문공동체의 연대성 미흡 등 다양한 측면에서 분석하였다. 이러한 영재교육 현상 분석을 토대로, 향후 한국의 영재교육이 지향해야 할 이념적, 실천적 측면의 몇 가지 발전 방안을 제안하였다. 이념적 차원에서는 영재 혹은 영재성의 개념, 지능의 개념, 영재교육의 정당성에 대한 인식 등 영재교육에 대한 우리 사회의 편협적, 고착적인 관점에서 탈피해야 한다는 점을 역설하였다. 한편, 실천적 차원에서는 영재교육의 경제적 효과에 대한 실증자료의 수집, 영재교육 법령의 개정, 영재 판별과 함께 영재교육 프로그램의 최적화, 영재교육 서비스 체제의 다원화, 영재교육과 관련하여 새로운 연구 주제의 적극 발굴 등을 제안하였다. Since the Gifted and Talented Education Promotion Law was enacted 15 years ago, in Korea, gifted education in Korea has continued rapid and quantitative growth. The number of gifted classes or institutes for the gifted have increased, as well as the number of gifted education teachers increasing their participation in professional development training and educational activities. However after 2014, gifted education is somewhat shrinking. Due to the controversy of private education and expansion of social welfare in Korea, administrative and financial support for gifted education is being reduced. This study reviewed the gifted education policies promoted by successive governments and analyzed the relationship between politics and support for gifted education efforts by the government. In addition, the phenomenon of the recently shrinking gifted education in Korean society was analyzed in various aspects. These aspects include: decreasing quantitative growth due to the weakening of administrative and financial support from central and local governments on gifted education, regulations on suppressing private education, social inequality to gifted education access, and lack of solidarity in the gifted education scholastic community. Based on this analysis of gifted phenomenon, ways of developing the ideological and practical aspects of future-oriented gifted education were suggested. In the ideological dimension, it was emphasized that gifted education must move away from insularity and the adhesive perspective of Korean society on the concept of giftedness, the concept of intelligence and the recognition of the legitimacy of gifted education. On the other hand, in the practical dimension, the following points were identified: the collection of empirical data on the economic impact of gifted education, gifted education amendment of the statutes, adaptation of the gifted education program with gifted identification, diversification of gifted education service system, and actively promoting new research topics in relation to the Gifted and Talented Education.

Revisiting the “Guns versus Butter” Argument in China (1950–2014): New Evidence from the Continuous Wavelet Analysis

The long-lasting “guns versus butter” argument reflects the fact that China has been experiencing a difficult choice in terms of improving the defense and social welfare sectors, and thus achieving fiscal sustainability. The result, however, is controversial. The present paper therefore re-examines the relationship between defense and social welfare by employing continuous wavelet analysis during a long period of 1950–2014 in China. We focus in particular on their dynamic correlation and the lead-lag relationship across different frequency bands. Our results clearly show the inexistence of the crowding-out effect between defense expenditure and social welfare; moreover, the increase in defense (social welfare) expenditure could stimulate the expansion of social welfare (defense) spending. In addition, we find a positive relationship between defense and social welfare with defense leading during 1961–1968 in the short term, when China suffered from the economic breakdown and the social turbulence caused by the Great Famine, Sino-Soviet border conflict, etc. Notably, social welfare also led the progress in defense during 1984–1988 and 1995–1998 in the medium and long terms by the further deepening of the opening-up policy and enforcing the economic system reform.

The size and structure of China’s full-covered fiscal expenditure

Many Chinese literatures compared the size and structure of fiscal expenditure between China and the developed countries. However, due to the statistic differentiation, this kind of comparison may not be accurate. Referring to the standard of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (2001), I measured the size from 2003 to 2012 and the structure in 2012 of China’s full-covered fiscal expenditure. Furthermore, I compared the size of China’s fiscal expenditure with OECD countries. I find - as China is going through the ‘dual-peak’ period, the peak of infrastructure development and social welfare expansion the overall fiscal expenditure share of GDP has risen from around 31% in 2003 to around 37% in 2012. The ratio of infrastructure expenditure to the whole fiscal expenditure is about 39%, while spending on social welfare is only about 41%.

Expansion of Chinese Social Health Insurance: who gets what, when and how?

This article asks ‘who gets what, when and how’ from China's recent social welfare expansion. Little research to date examines the overall landscape of China's social health insurance, which has changed dramatically since 2003, and the distributive consequences and implications thereof. Drawing on public survey data and fieldwork for empirical support, this article finds that China's recent social health insurance expansion does significantly expand people's access to social health insurance. However, the expansion, which entails health insurance fragmentation and increasing benefit disparities, not only reinforces existing social cleavages such as the rural–urban divide, but it also generates new divisions within urbanites and workforce. Moreover, multiple social cleavages that cross-cut class differences have been institutionalized into China's social health insurance system. This reflects authoritarian regimes' ‘divide and rule’ tactic in social welfare provision.

Health care and democratization in Indonesia

Analyses of Indonesian democracy often emphasize elite capture of democratic institutions, continuity in oligarchic power relations, and exclusion of popular interests. Defying such analyses, over the last decade, Indonesia has experienced a proliferation of social welfare programmes, some with a redistributive element. This article analyses the expansion of social welfare protection by focusing on health care. At the national level, Indonesia has introduced programmes providing free health care to the poor and approved a plan for universal social insurance. At the subnational level, in the context of far-reaching decentralization reforms, politicians have competed with each other to introduce generous local health care schemes. Taking its cue from analyses of social welfare expansion in other East Asian states, the article finds the origins of policy shift in the incentives that democracy creates for elites to design policies that appeal to broad social constituencies, and in the widening scope for engagement in policymaking that democracy allows. The article ends with a cautionary note, pointing to ways in which oligarchic power relations and the corruption they spawn still undermine health care quality, despite expansion of coverage.

Gender roles and social policy in an ageing society

This article reviews the major underpinnings of the Japanese welfare state in the context of social care from a feminist perspective. In Japan, familycare responsibilities have traditionally been assigned to women; hence, care has long been a women’s issue. However, as the social contract of a male breadwinner and a ’’professional housewife’’ gradually fades out, Japanese women find more opportunities to renegotiate their caring roles. Of course, this social transformation did not occur in isolation, it was influenced by patterns in economic development, state policies and mainly demographic changes. All this has stimulated new state responses in the form of social welfare expansion that arguably aim to relieve women of the burdens of family-care. The issue remains, however, as to whether Japan would be able to recognise that the main structural issues of population ageing do not originate from demographic changes, but from a strict gendered division of labour and gender inequality.

“Building a New Socialist Countryside” – Only a Political Slogan?

In March 2006, China's National People's Congress officially promulgated the central government's intention to “build a new socialist countryside”, a new policy initiative and approach to rural development. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in two Chinese counties in 2008 and 2009, this article investigates how the new policy is being substantiated and implemented at the local level. It argues that by combining China's new fiscal system of transfer payments to poor local governments with administrative reforms, intensified internal project evaluation, and efforts to increase the rural income through a mixture of infrastructural investment, agricultural specialization, the expansion of social welfare, and accelerated urbanization, “building a new socialist countryside” constitutes more than a political slogan and has the potential to successfully overcome rural poverty and the rural-urban divide.

Why Budgets Matter: Budget Policy and American Politics. By Dennis S. Ippolito. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. xiv, 329 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-271-02259-0.)

Historians have generally been more interested in specific federal policies than the federal budget in aggregate. The political scientist Dennis S. Ippolito makes a strong case that the overall budget merits attention as “a measure of political reality that uses money” (p. xiii). His purpose is to illuminate the political significance of budget policy from the nation's founding to the present and beyond and to explore what budget policy outcomes tell us about past struggles over the size and role of the federal government. The book is organized chronologically into six historical eras. From 1789 to 1860, federal budgets were relatively small and usually balanced, but the lack of an executive budget process undermined fiscal management during wars and financial emergencies. From 1860 to 1915, the politically dominant Republicans discarded Jeffersonian small government ideals to spend on subsidies, internal improvements, and veterans' pensions, which soaked up the bountiful revenues produced by protective tariffs, but the lack of centralized fiscal control led to recurring deficits when the economy fluctuated. From 1915 to 1940, the federal budget benefited from new revenue sources (income taxes) and stronger fiscal planning (the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921). Building on this, the New Deal created the programmatic base of modern domestic politics. From 1940 to 1970, permanent defense expansion accompanied substantial domestic program development, but strong fiscal control exercised by presidents and Congress kept the budget in balance or nearly so until the late 1960s. From 1970 to 1990 the Great Society's legacy of social welfare expansion and the continuing need for strong defense placed unprecedented pressure on the budget, and the absence of political consensus over the means of preserving a nexus between spending and revenues produced the age of deficits. In the 1990s, Ippolito persuasively argues, the key issue between the political parties of whether to balance the budget at high or low levels of revenue was won by President Bill Clinton and the Democrats, and “their victory carried through into spending policy” (p. 288).

DETERMINANTS OF SOCIAL WELFARE DEVELOPMENT IN HONG KONG: A TIME‐SERIES STUDY

The expansion of social welfare in advanced capitalist countries following the Second World War has been phenomenal. Concomitant to this is the mushrooming of comparative social research devoted to the analysis of welfare states. The central question in comparative policy discourse has been the search for the determinants of social welfare development. There is no consensus over the structural determinants for welfare efforts. However, the literature on comparative social policy has identified a significant number of variables which spur social policy development: industrialization, urbanization, modernization, working‐class mobilization, union strength, state and its particular structure, open economy, diffusion, military spending, and national ideology (Wilensky & Lebeaux, 1965; Wilensky, 1975; Uusitalo, 1984; Wilensky, 1985; Flora, 1987; O'Conner, 1988; Esping‐Andersen, 1990; Pierson, 1991; Wong & Daley, 1991; Janoski & Hicks, 1994).

Neoliberal economic policies and infant and child mortality: Simulation analysis of a Chilean paradox

The paradox of deteriorating living standards for the poorest coexisting with declining infant and child mortality rates during the 1970s is explained by a simultaneous model where these rates and the birth rate are endogenous. Partial- and general-equilibrium results conflict; some apparently satisfactory policy tools have counterproductive impacts; action on small groups of selected policy variables is more effective than overall economic and social welfare expansion; and policy effects differ according to social class. The role of midwife visits, average real earnings, and cheap energy for poor urban households are emphasized. Perversely, high unemployment also contributed to the actual mortality decline during the period.

In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America

The Poorhouse Era * The Origins and Failure of the Poorhouse Poverty * Outdoor Relief * The Theory and Practice of Scientific Charity * The Transformation of the Poorhouse Building The Semi-Welfare State * Saving Children * Reorganizing Cities * Reorganizing the Labor Market * Reorganizing the Nation From The War On Poverty To The War On Welfare * The War on Poverty and the Expansion of Social Welfare * The War on Welfare