National Welfare State Research Articles

Is Unrestricted Immigration Compatible with Inclusive Welfare States? The (Un)Sustainability of EU Exceptionalism

The current rules for “free movement” in the European Union (EU) facilitate unrestricted intra-EU labour mobility and equal access to national welfare states for EU workers. Free movement is thus a case of “exceptionalism” in the view of longstanding theory and research which alleges the incompatibility between open borders and inclusive welfare states. The sustainability of this EU exceptionalism has recently been threatened by highly divisive debates between EU member states about the need to restrict some welfare benefits for EU workers. This paper develops a theory for why the current free movement rules might present particular challenges for certain EU member states. It focuses on the potential roles of three types of national institutions and social norms in determining national policy positions on free movement in the EU15 countries: national labour markets (especially their regulation and “flexibility”); welfare states (especially their “contributory basis”); and citizenship norms (with a focus on the “European-ness” of national identities). I show that these institutions and norms vary considerably across member states and explain why we can expect these differences to contribute to variations in the scale and effects of EU labour immigration, and to divergent national policy preferences for reforming free movement. Although focused on intra-EU labour mobility, the paper contributes to broader research and debates about institutional variations across EU member states, the potential tensions between national institutions/norms and common EU regulations, and the implications for the design and sustainability of different types of EU policies on migration and mobility.

Understanding healthcare practices in superdiverse neighbourhoods and developing the concept of welfare bricolage: Protocol of a cross-national mixed-methods study.

BackgroundDiversity in Europe has both increased and become more complex posing challenges to both national and local welfare state regimes. Evidence indicates specific barriers for migrant, faith and minority ethnic groups when accessing healthcare. However, previous studies of health in diverse cities in European countries have mainly adopted an ethno-national focus. Taking into account the new complexity of diversity within cities, a deeper and multi-faceted understanding of everyday health practices in superdiverse contexts is needed to support appropriate healthcare provision.Methods/DesignThis protocol describes a mixed method study investigating how residents in superdiverse neighbourhoods access healthcare. The study will include participant observation and qualitative interviewing as well as a standardised health survey and will be carried out in eight superdiverse neighbourhoods – with varying deprivations levels and trajectories of change – in four European countries (Germany, Portugal, Sweden and UK). In each neighbourhood, trained polylingual community researchers together with university researchers will map formal and informal provision and infrastructures supportive to health and healthcare. In-depth interviews with residents and healthcare providers in each country will investigate local health-supportive practices. Thematic analysis will be used to identify different types of help-seeking behaviours and support structures across neighbourhoods and countries. Using categories identified from analyses of interview material, a health survey will be set up investigating determinants of access to healthcare. Complex models, such as structural equation modelling, will be applied to analyse commonalities and differences between population groups, neighbourhoods and countries.DiscussionThis study offers the potential to contribute to a deeper understanding of how residents in superdiverse neighbourhoods deal with health and healthcare in everyday practices. The findings will inform governmental authorities, formal and informal healthcare providers how to further refine health services and how to achieve equitable access in diverse population groups.

Europe's Crisis-Law and the Welfare State

This article explores the constitutional dimension of the new European crisis-management-law. The author's critical stance is that the new architecture of the European economic governance deepens the well-known asymmetries between supranational market forces and national Welfare State arrangements. A convergent process of de-politicisation and de-legalisation takes place at EU level, with dramatic implications for the viability of the so-called European social model.

‘Heads I Win. Tails you Lose.’ Migration and the Worker Citizen

Everyone is talking about immigration. The impacts of migration on the social, the economic and the political are perceived as multifarious and profoundly disruptive. The proportion of people that move internationally, approximately 3 per cent of the world’s population has long been stable but the meaning, significance and constitution of mobility have changed. The story is one of unparalleled movement and huge demographic change. This is analysed as presenting a direct threat to sovereignty and generating costs and benefits that must be traded off, posing a ‘tragedy of commons’, particularly in Europe, for national welfare states.

Neighborhood Decline and the Economic Crisis

Neighborhood decline is a complex and multidimensional process. National and regional variation in economic and political structures (including variety in national welfare state arrangements), combined with differences in neighborhood history, development and population composition, makes it extremely difficult to identify a unilateral process of neighborhood decline over time. Some scholars have tried to develop all-encompassing models to explain neighborhood decline; others have studied more deeply the relevance of a limited number of factors and developments in processes of decline. The literature has paid little attention to the influence of economic development on neighborhood development, and surprisingly, few studies have focused on the effects of the economic crisis on urban neighborhoods. The recent global economic and financial crisis affected many European and North-American cities in terms of growing unemployment levels and rising poverty in concentrated areas. At the same time, urban investments such as urban restructuring and neighborhood improvement programs have decreased, or come to a halt altogether. By reviewing existing literature, this paper aims to contribute to an understanding of neighborhood decline in light of the economic crisis. By formulating ten hypotheses about the ways in which the economic crisis might interact with processes of neighborhood decline, this paper aims to push the debate on neighborhood decline forward and calls for more contextualized research on neighborhood change. We will highlight challenges for future research and point to factors that need to be taken into consideration in a post-crisis society.

Has the EU Become More Intrusive in Shaping National Welfare State Reforms? Evidence from Greece and Portugal

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the Memorandums of understanding (MoUs) in Greece and Portugal in the areas of old-age pensions and labour market policies and shows that, compared to earlier economic governance instruments, the MoUs have entailed much greater interference in setting policy objectives, tighter surveillance and stricter enforcement.These three dimensions of EU intrusiveness in national social policies have been greater, the more the implementation of the programmes was seen to be stalling, the more adjustment in fiscal or competitiveness variables had failed to take place according to plan and the more direct the relevance of a given policy area for the adjustment in question was.Although the measures promoted by the EU in the two countries were sometimes in the direction of extending the coverage of the social safety net, the drive to cut expenditures in combination with the increased needs for social protection that the crisis generated led in balanced to weakening the social safety net.

Family Policies in ‘Hybrid’ Welfare States after the Crisis: Pathways between Policy Expansion and Retrenchment

AbstractThe economic crisis has significantly challenged national welfare states and has often led to retrenchment. The question arises how countries have reacted to the crisis in the area of family policy – not directly connected to rising unemployment and also not as demanding for state spending as for example the pension system. This article analyzes family policy reforms during the crisis in three small European welfare states – Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Focusing on the ‘rationale’ behind the reforms, it aims to explore how family policy was affected by the crisis and whether the crisis gave rise to new policy pathways and ideas in the area. The exploratory case studies of reforms conducted in the three countries between 2009 and 2013 show that everywhere the pre‐crisis policy pathways were also continued in the period of crisis. The reforms were framed by diverse paradigms related to national‐specific contexts along with newly emerged austerity arguments. The Czech Republic shows a continued focus on a neo‐liberal paradigm, utilizing the crisis to introduce further residual measures, i.e. mostly negative re‐familializing reforms, mixed with de‐familializing policies based on the workfare paradigm. Strong crisis‐related discourse in Slovenia was accompanied by diverse austerity measures, which strengthened the social dimension of family policy and weakened a de‐familialistic effect of the pre‐crisis reforms. Austria, much less affected by the crisis, continues to combine social investment and ‘freedom of choice’ paradigms, introducing an ambivalent amalgam of positive familialistic and de‐familialistic family policy reforms.

Institutional barriers for adults’ participation in higher education in thirteen European countries

This study focuses on institutional barriers that adult learners experience while participating in higher education programmes. We developed a holistic measure of diversification, accessibility, flexibility and affordability of higher education for adults. Based on pre-economic-crisis data across Europe we then explored the impact of macro-level institutional factors on the formation of the barriers by national welfare state arrangements. We found that perceived barriers are the lowest in liberal and social democratic countries but highest in post-soviet ones, with other post-socialist countries and continental ones in between. While perception of various barriers can be lessened by increasing flexibility of the educational programmes, our findings still show that the level of perceived barriers remains high also in flexible systems, hence other characteristics of higher education systems seem to be of more relevance. Higher education diversification and better affordability of higher education system seems to predict lower level of institutional barriers for adult learners, indicating that these are the crucial aspects. Our study serves as a baseline for further studies on the effects of changes that have been put in place since, especially regarding the variety of national responses.

Global city aspirations, graduated citizenship and public housing: analysing the consumer citizenships of neoliberalism

Global city discourses rearticulate the relationships between the state, urban space and the global economy. At the local level, global city reconfigurations stamp the mark of a global economic order onto local citizenship practices. Public housing is a legacy of specific national (welfare) states where citizenship rights arose from territorially bound constitutional discourses, and is incompatible in its current form with the consumer-based rights and responsibilities of a global economic order. At the same time, property markets in high-value areas of cities like Sydney, Australia, see not only increasing presence of international investment but fundamental changes in planning and governance processes in order to facilitate it. Global market-oriented discourses of urban governance promote consumer “performances of citizenship” and a graduated approach to the distribution of rights, including the right to housing. In this article we explore what is new about neoliberal approaches to public and social housing policy, and how public tenants respond to and negotiate it. In Australia tenants’ right to participate in local-level democracy, and in housing management, must be reconsidered in light of the broader discourses of consumer citizenship that are now enforced on tenants as a set of “responsibilities” to the market and state.

European Welfare States and Immigrant Incorporation Strategies

European policymakers have put a premium on immigrant incorporation since the mid-1970s, when oil shocks preceded rapid economic deterioration in countries that had been importing foreign labour. Governments in all of the receiving countries prohibited additional immigration and announced that their task would thereafter be to incorporate their immigrant-origin residents. Since then, the broader institutions and policies associated with national welfare states — including the subset of them more directly aimed at fitting immigrants into host-society economic, social, and political life — have helped determine immigrant-origin populations’ participation in host-society institutions. While commonly constructed typologies of national welfare states and incorporation regimes have serious shortcomings, the (non-)policies associated with those states and regimes have also moulded ethnic and other identities, influencing whether social control is loosened and conflict sparked. The ongoing restructuring of the welfare state and the transformation of migration into a contentious fixture of socioeconomic reality, therefore, are heavily intertwined developments in contemporary European politics.

Housing Welfare Policies in Scandinavia: A Comparative Perspective on a Transition Era

(Received December 18, 2012 / Revised April 29, 2013 / Accepted April 29, 2013)ABSTRACTIt is commonplace to refer to the Nordic countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland as a distinctive and homogenous welfare regime. As far as social housing is concerned, however, the institutional heritage of the respective countries significantly frames the ways in which social housing is understood, regulated and subsidized, and, in turn, how housing regimes respond to the general challenges to the national welfare states. The paper presents a historical institutionalist approach to understanding the diversity of regime responses in the modern era characterized by increasing marketization, welfare criticism and internationalization. The aim is to provide outside readers a theoretically guided empirical insight into Scandinavian social housing policy. The paper first lines up the core of the inbuilt argument of historical institutionalism in housing policy. Secondly, it briefly introduces the distinctive ideal typical features of the five housing regimes, which reveals the first internal distinction between the universal policies of Sweden and Denmark selective policies of Iceland and Finland. The Norwegian case constitutes a transitional model from general to selective during the past quarter of a decade. The third section then concentrates on the differences between Denmark, Sweden and Norway in which social housing is, our was originally, embedded in a universal welfare policy targeting the general level of housing quality for the entire population. Differences stand out, however, between finance, ownership, regulation and governance. The historical institutional argument is, that these differences frame the way in which actors operating on the respective policy arenas can and do respond to challenges. Here, in this section we lose Norway, which de facto has come to operate in a residual manner, due to contemporary effects of the long historical heritage of home ownership. The fourth section then discusses the recent challenges of welfare criticism, internationalization and marketization to the universal models in Denmark and Sweden. Here, it is argued that the institutional differences between the Swedish model of municipal ownership and the Danish model of independent cooperative social housing associations provides different sources of resistance to the prospective dismantlement of social housing as we know it. The fifth section presents the recent Danish reform of the governance model of social housing policy in which the housing associations are conceived of as ‘dialogue partners’ in the local housing policy, expected to create solutions to, rather than produce problems in social housing areas. The reform testifies to the strategic ability of the Danish social housing associations to employ their historically grounded institutional relative independence of the public system.Key words: Housing Welfare, Social Housing, ScandinaviaLHI Journal (2013) 4(2):133-144 http://dx.doi.org/10.5804/LHIJ.2013.4.2.133http://lhi.lh.or.kr

The Idea of Social Policy in Western Societies: Origins and Diversity

Today, "social policy" is an expression used across the globe to denote a broad range of issues, such as old age security, health, housing and so on. But historically, "social policy" had a distinct European origin and a distinct meaning. I maintain that "social policy" and the "welfare state" are more than a list of social services, and also have strong socio-cultural underpinnings that account for the diversity of social policy. The idea of "social policy" emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Germany against the backdrop of secularization and functional differentiation of modern society. I then pinpoint the twentieth-century move from "social policy" to the broader cultural idea of a universalistic "welfare state." The idea emerged internationally as early as the 1940s, even before the post-WWII rise of national welfare states, which, as I argue, differ according to national notions of "state" and "society." To this end, I compare the UK, Sweden, Germany, France, and two non-welfare states, the United States and the Soviet Union.

European foundations of the welfare state

List of Figures Foreword Anthony Atkinson Translator's Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: A Sociological Perspective PART I: INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS Chapter 1. Pioneers of Social Reformism: Sismondi, List, Mill Chapter 2. German Origins of a Theory of Social Reform: Hegel, Stein and the Idea of 'Social Policy' Chapter 3. Christian Infl uences on Social Reform Chapter 4. Welfare Internationalism before the Welfare State: The Emergence of Social Human Rights PART II: THEORY OF SOCIAL POLICY Chapter 5. Social Security: The Leading Idea and its Problems Chapter 6. Social Policy Intervention: Elements of a Sociological Theory 146 Chapter 7. First-order and Second-order Social Policies PART III: THEORY OF AND FOR THE WELFARE STATE Chapter 8. The State and the Production of Welfare Chapter 9. National Welfare State Traditions and the European Social Model Chapter 10. Towards a Theory of the Welfare State PART IV: THE FUTURE OF THE WELFARE STATE Chapter 11. The Welfare State's Achievements and Continuing Problems Chapter 12. Human Assets and Demographic Challenges to the Welfare State Chapter 13. Solidarity and Redistribution under the Pressure of International Competition Chapter 14. What Comes after the Classic Welfare State? Bibliography Index of Names Index of Subjects

The Transformation of EU Competition and Internal Market Law by the Stability and Growth Pact: Competence Creep into the National Welfare States?

The paper discusses the measures taken by the EU in order to address the problems of the euro crisis. The focus is on the Stability and Growth Pact. Then, it explores the impact of these measures on EU internal market law, the European competition rules and the national welfare states. It is argued that a comprehensive EU approach to European economic law and the national welfare states is emerging.

Transnational Solidarity and the Mediation of Conflicts of Justice in Europe

AbstractThis contribution analyses the conflicts of justice that are becoming increasingly visible in Europe. It argues that while European Union (EU) law can be understood as an instrument for the incorporation of the demands of justice and the articulation of ‘the good’ beyond the nation state, it also potentially skews the distributive criteria and assumptions of justice that underlie the national welfare state. In light of the absence of a transnational political system that can bound such conflicts of justice, this article suggests that the capacity of the EU to contribute to, rather than detract from, the attainment of justice depends on the careful articulation and institutionalisation of the different types of transnational solidarity that exist in Europe.

Housing in the welfare state: Partitioning places and people

The language of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, social exclusion and social and spatial segregation has been prominent in policy debates in the UK in recent decades and has been associated with failures in health, education, employment, crime and other policies. But while these patterns are seen as creating problems the underlying trend towards increased social and spatial division has been speeded by policy changes. Cities, towns and neighbourhoods in the UK have been shaped and reshaped by the national and local welfare state especially through housing and planning policies. This short article examines the likely effects of the current round of welfare reform and policy change, and argues that they promise to further erode the effects of earlier interventions and create a more difficult context for social and economic success.

Welfare Regimes and Global Cities: A Missing Link in the Comparative Analysis of Welfare States?

AbstractThe ‘welfare modelling business’ has been at the heart of comparative social policy analysis but debate has largely proceeded on the basis that coherent national welfare states exist. This assumption was always problematic but globalisation processes have added a further dimension to this debate. In particular, geographers and sociologists have pointed to the increasing power of global cities that act as co-ordinating hubs for the global economy. Though residing in nation states, these cities have a special status flowing from their central role in the global economy. Little attempt has been made to explore the implications of these cities for welfare regimes and welfare regime analysis. This paper addresses this under explored issue and suggests there are strong overlaps between global city types and welfare types.

Is the Problem of European Citizenship a Problem of Social Citizenship? Social Policy, Federalism, and Democracy in the EU and United States*

The development of supranational (European) social rights, and therefore social citizenship, is undermined by strong, direct relationships between citizens and national welfare states. Social policies contribute to national identities because they entail direct relationships between states and citizens. In well‐developed European welfare states strong relationships between citizens and their member‐states are expected. This may prevent the development of a similar relationship at the European level. The U.S. provides a comparison case, wherein a successful transference of citizenship identity from a lower to higher level has occurred, partly as a result of the building of national‐level social citizenship, at least for certain classes of people. Revolutionary War Pensions provide an example of how social policy influences national identity. The lack of EU‐level social policy precludes the possibility of this type of identity formation. Finally, the interplay of social citizenship and democracy in both cases is explored. T.H. Marshall’s work regarding citizenship as the basis for democracy is used to understand how the inability to create a common social policy in the EU is harmful to democracy.

From E1 to 90057: The Immigrant-Serving Nonprofit Sector Among London Bangladeshis and Los Angeles Central Americans

This study contributes to the current literature on the welfare state, the voluntary sector, and immigrant communities in two ways. It compares two immigrant groups who immigrated to London and Los Angeles in the 1980s (Bangladeshis and Central Americans, respectively), in terms of how their immigrant-serving, nonprofit sector mediates the larger welfare state, itself pluralistic and neoliberalizing. Results suggest that although each community experienced similar grassroots origins that expanded to assume the functions of an unaccommodating welfare state, development trajectories have diverged considerably since the 1980s. For London Bangladeshis, the sector is smaller because of much stronger national and local welfare state settlements, whereas for the Central-Americans in L.A., the sector is larger and has been forced, due to a residualized welfare state, to shoulder far greater burdens.

The Efficiency and Effectiveness of Social Spending in the EU-27 and the OECD – A 2011 Reanalysis

The Efficiency and Effectiveness of Social Spending in the EU-27 and the OECD – A 2011 Reanalysis