Welfare Retrenchment Research Articles

Sophie's Choice

ABSTRACTThis article examines social attitudes towards social rights in Portugal. It utilizes original survey data from 2013 to study the distribution of welfare attitudes in a context of economic austerity and welfare retrenchment. The main argument is that there are at least two sources of preference formation regarding public social provision: one is universalistic (or needs-based), and the other is contributory. These two logics frame choices concerning the future of the welfare state in Portugal. We explore the determinants of this choice through three hypotheses: dualization between insiders and outsiders (H1), the type of welfare regime (H2) and social rights consciousness (H3). Our findings suggest that choice between universalistic and contributory models is not impervious to macro-institutional factors and labour market performance. The paper's main contribution, however, is to empirically demonstrate that this choice is significantly shaped by pre-existing understandings of social rights in Portugal, namely its politically contested character.

The investment and regenerative value of addiction treatment

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that despite welfare retrenchment and political rhetoric towards welfare, spending on residential addiction treatment should be protected. Design/methodology/approach – Examining benefits in context of costs, the research used social return on investment to monetise benefits and compare with costs. Based at a residential addiction centre, the research used questionnaires and focus groups with residents and former residents. Findings – The centre created almost £4 of benefit for every £1 of cost. Whilst the bulk of savings came from health, housing and criminal justice, there was also a regenerative impact for the local economy. Research limitations/implications – Sampling in sensitive themes is always problematic, however, the research had contact with many respondents, achieved data saturation and used the centre's success rate as a guide to weight the findings. Practical implications – The benefits of addiction treatment go beyond health outcomes and raise questions about how this should be reflected in cost distribution. Consequently, this has implications for the ways in which addiction services should be measuring their successes beyond solely health outcomes. Social implications – Existing research has largely overlooked the benefit of addiction treatment to the local economy and the fact that, as an investment, this benefit will continue to grow as more people enter the labour market over time. Originality/value – The research recognises the political context of funding and measures success beyond solely health outcomes. Furthermore, the research recognises the regenerative impact of addiction treatment, which is often overlooked in similar research.

Sophie's Choice: Social Attitudes to Welfare State Retrenchment in Bailed-Out Portugal

This article examines social attitudes towards social rights in Portugal. It utilizes original survey data from 2013 to study the distribution of welfare attitudes in a context of economic austerity and welfare retrenchment. The main argument is that there are at least two sources of preference-formation regarding public social provision: one is universalistic (or needs-based), the other is contributory. These two logics frame choices concerning the future of the welfare state in Portugal. We explore the determinants of this choice through three hypotheses: dualization between insiders and outsiders (H1); the type of welfare regime (H2), and social rights consciousness (H3). Our findings suggest that choice between universalistic and contributory models is not impervious to macro-institutional factors and labour market performance. The paper’s main contribution, however, is to empirically demonstrate that this choice is significantly shaped by pre-existing understandings of social rights in Portugal, namely its politically contested character.

Biting the Hand that Feeds: Reconsidering Partisanship in an Age of Permanent Austerity

The New Politics of the welfare state suggests that periods of welfare retrenchment present policy-makers with a qualitatively different set of challenges and electoral incentives compared to periods of welfare expansion. An unresolved puzzle for this literature is the relative electoral success of retrenching governments in recent decades, as evidenced by various studies on fiscal consolidations. This article points to the importance of partisan biases as the main explanatory factor. I argue that partisan biases in the electorate create incentives for incumbent governments to depart from their representative function and push the burden of retrenchment on the very constituencies that they owe their electoral mandate to ("Nixon-goes-to-China"). After offering a simple model on the logic of partisan biases, the article proceeds by testing the unexpected partisan hypotheses that the model generates. My findings from a cross-section-time-series analysis in a set of 25 OECD countries provide corroborative evidence on this Nixon-goes-to-China logic of welfare retrenchment: governments systematically inflict pain on their core constituencies. Some of the losses that the core constituencies suffer during austerity, however, are recouped during fiscal expansions when traditional partisan patterns take hold.

How does ideology influence welfare retrenchment proposals? Application of a new methodology

Most studies that aim to measure the influence of ideology on policymaking use the share of cabinet seats held by left versus right parties, manifesto data, expert judgments, or ideology scores as ways to operationalize ideology. These measures, however, cannot systematically capture the content of policy debates, ideological arguments used, or how these arguments change over time. Based on the concept of framing, this article presents an alternative methodology to study the role of ideology in welfare retrenchment proposals across countries and over time. By identifying recurring arguments, welfare ‘frames’ within which reform debates play out can be identified and compared over time. Applying this methodology to 578 New Zealand parliamentary budget debate speeches from 1970 to 2012, this article finds that there is more overlap in the welfare arguments used by both Labour and National in 1984 and 2000 – years when the Labour Party was in government. Thus instead of welfare frames being defined strictly along ideological party lines as Labour versus National, they might also be defined in terms of a multi-party ‘in power’ frame versus a multi-party ‘in opposition’ frame. In other words, whichever party is in power may matter more to welfare retrenchment debates than traditional party positions.

Complicating the triangle of race, class and state: the insights of black feminists

This article complicates Wacquant's three-sided schema of race, class and state by adding a focus on gender, the experiences of black women, and a black feminist intersectional analysis. Welfare retrenchment in the USA relied on stereotypes of black women, especially the ‘Welfare Queen’, that were at once sexist and racist and implemented policies targeted specifically at them as the vilified beneficiaries of state largess. Attributing social inequality to black women's childbearing furthers race, gender and class oppression in the context of neo-liberalism by legitimizing intensified deprivation and surveillance. A focus on the regulation of black mothers brings to the fore the child welfare system as a critical institution of social supervision, on a par with workfare and prisonfare. A black feminist analysis of the intersection of welfare, prison and foster care in the systemic punishment of black mothers and of strategies for resistance illuminates how racism and neo-liberalism operate together in the USA.

The Impact of the Fiscal Crisis on Greek and Portuguese Welfare States: Retrenchment before the Catch‐up?

AbstractThis article examines the impact of the ongoing (2008–13) economic crisis on Greek and Portuguese welfare state reforms in a comparative perspective with a particular focus on the public sector, labour markets and social protection. It is argued that the recent crisis caused ‘shock and awe’ in Greece and Portugal resulting in an unprecedented wave of cuts, tax rises and labour market reforms. In particular, public sector remuneration and jobs were cut, pensions were significantly curtailed and pension rights significantly restricted, successive tax hikes were implemented and welfare benefits became less generous and more conditional. It is argued that these reforms constitute a critical juncture and a considerable effort towards welfare retrenchment, which is which is implemented before converging with the more advanced welfare states of the EU15. Both countries appeared to be significantly more vulnerable to the crisis than the richer countries of Northern Europe (e.g. Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands) and their larger Southern counterparts (Italy and Spain). Yet, the latter had to implement similar measures, albeit in a less abrupt and extensive fashion. In other words, it may be that size is less important than economic and political power for coping with the effects of the current crisis.

The Great Recession and Welfare State Reform: Is Retrenchment Really the Only Game Left in Town?

AbstractBy 2010, when the Greek sovereign debt crisis changed into an existential crisis of the euro, all developed democracies entered a phase in which they had to consolidate their budgets, typically implying a politics of austerity. The scholarly literature, as well as the popular press, suggests that – consequently – welfare retrenchment and cost containment became the only games left in town. In this article, we study the welfare state reform measures taken between 2010 and 2012 in four countries characteristic of mature welfare state regimes (liberal, UK; conservative, Germany; social democratic, Denmark; and hybrid, the Netherlands) to examine empirically whether austerity has indeed become the only item left on the policy menu. Our analysis reveals that retrenchment features prominently on the agenda everywhere, but nowhere by itself. While compensation for income loss is rare since 2010, this still happens. More unexpectedly, reforms in line with a social investment agenda (like expansion of child care or active labour market policies) are still being pursued in all our four cases.

Reversing Early Retirement in Advanced Welfare Economies<br>A Paradigm Shift to Overcome Push and Pull Factors<br>

Recent reform efforts of advanced welfare states have attempted to reverse trends in early retirement and increase the statutory retirement age. This paradigm shift often occurred against the protest of unions, firms and their employees. As a consequence of expanding welfare states and as response to economic challenges since the 1970s early exit from work has become a widespread practice. Early retirement has been part of Continental Europe’s welfare without work problem, while the Scandinavian welfare states, the Anglophone liberal economies and the Japanese welfare society were able to maintain higher levels of employment for older workers. Since the 1990s, an international consensus to reverse early exit from work emerged among international organisations and national policy experts. Based on a comparative historical analysis of selected OECD countries, this study analyses the cross-national variations in the institutionalisation of early exit regimes and its recent reversal using macro-indictors on early exit trends and stylised information on institutional arrangements. Comparing the interaction of social policy and economic institutions, it reviews the cross-national differences in welfare state “pull” and economic “push” factors that have contributed to early exit from work and discusses the likely impact of welfare retrenchment and assesses the importance of “retention” factors such as activation policies for decreasing early exit from work.

The Biographical and Psychic Consequences of ‘Welfare Inaction’ for Young Women in Trouble with the Law

While the neo-liberal drift towards ‘responsibilizing’ youth justice programs and policies has been explored extensively in the literature, the lived realities of another aspect of the neo-liberal turn – welfare retrenchment – have been given much less attention. Drawing upon in-depth qualitative interviews with detained girls in the USA, this article explores what ‘welfare inaction’ means in the context of the lives of young women in trouble with the law. While gendered tropes about self-sufficiency and individualized empowerment may provide young women with the grammar by which to articulate self-reliance, the absence of welfare supports seemed the most important mechanism for offloading responsibility on to them and shaping what justice system intervention meant for them.

The Grapes of Wrath: Welfare Attitudes in Bailed-Out Portugal

This paper compares welfare attitudes in Portugal before and after the June 2011 bailout, using survey data from the 2008 European Social Survey (rotating module on the “welfare state”) and our own follow-up survey (spring 2013). Our findings suggest the welfare retrenchment rhetoric and agenda by both the international trio of funding bodies (the “Troika”) and the centre-right two-party coalition government elected immediately after the bailout have had significant unintended consequences. If, on the one hand, pessimism with the welfare provision in Portugal and skepticism regarding the social efficacy of social provision have grown dramatically, suggesting the internalization of the retrenchment rhetoric, on the other, this has been accompanied by a no less significant increase in the support for the welfare state among the “Troika’s children”, i.e. labour market outsiders, whose numbers have increased dramatically as the result of Troika’s austerity measures and the ensuing economic crisis. We further explore this impact by identifying three social groups with distinctively different sets of welfare attitudes (welfarists, hopeful welfarists, and liberal individualists), and by providing an explanation for this shift in social attitudes in terms of socio-demographic attributes (gender, etc.), social norms (citizenship norms) and cognitive practices (reflectivity, awareness).

‘We are All in This Together’? The Hidden Costs of Poverty, Recession and Austerity Policies on Britain's Poorest Children

In 2010, in the UK a new Coalition government inherited an ailing economy at a time of economic uncertainty and recession. Their response was to institute a fundamental revision and retrenchment of government spending accompanied by unprecedented cuts in welfare services and social security provision. This article explores the nature and meaning of these changes from a child‐centred perspective, to understand how and in what ways policy change and welfare retrenchment may uniquely impinge on low‐income children's lives. It reveals that recent cuts and welfare changes have threatened to overlook their needs and exacerbate their deepest concerns.

Protests against Welfare Retrenchment: Healthcare Restructuring inSweden

The ‘new politics’ perspective in welfare state research holds that class‐based parties and unions have lost some of their influence and that they have been replaced by client organizations that are capable of resisting retrenchment pressures. However, scholars within the ‘power resource tradition’ contend that class is still fundamental and that client interests are weak in corporatist countries with a strong labour movement. It is argued in this article that scholars within the power resource approach have focused too much on social insurance programmes and traditional forms of political participation, and that this has made them blind to client protests. An empirical study of political efforts to close down nighttime emergency surgery in Swedish hospitals is presented. The Swedish counties planned to close down emergency surgery in 17 hospitals in the period 2003–04. The political proposals to close down emergency departments were met with strong protests from client groups, and politicians often withdrew their proposals of closures. In this case study, politicians claim that it was client protests that made them withdraw a decision to close the emergency surgery. This result suggests that client protests are politically important and diverges from the expectations deduced from the power‐resource approach but lends credibility to the theory of the new politics of the welfare state.

Why Did Austrian Business Oppose Welfare Cuts? How the Organization of Interests Shapes Business Attitudes Toward Social Partnership

In recent decades, business interests became protagonists of welfare retrenchment in many countries. In contrast, Austria’s national business organization, the WKÖ (Wirtschaftskammer Österreich), defended welfare programs and social partnership against government initiatives to dismantle them. Drawing on interviews and media reports, this article analyzes the reasons for this deviation, focusing on reforms in two fields: (a) public pensions and (b) social insurance administration. The article suggests that the institutional setup of interest representation in Austria explains this stance better than alternative explanations that focus on competitive advantages. The article identifies compulsory membership, equal voting rights, and encompassing organization as the relevant features of the institutional setup. These features shaped the WKÖ’s social policy attitudes in two ways: first, by ensuring a strong role for small firms, and second, by reducing the vulnerability of the organization to discontented minorities. The findings point to the importance of organizational structures in shaping associational policy preferences.

Local approaches to counter a wider pattern? Urban poverty in Portland, Oregon

A model U.S. city, Portland Oregon's progressive policies are often credited with making it highly livable, with a vibrant urban core. Yet these policies have not protected Portland from broader trends that have increased urban poverty over the past several decades in the U.S., including social welfare cuts and the shift in the economy to the service sector. In terms of poverty dynamics and social policies, we argue that while regional planning and other progressive policies have helped protect Portland from extremely high concentrated poverty present in many large U.S. cities, it has still experienced growing social dislocations associated with national and macro-level social and economic factors. These trends suggest both the possibilities and limits of local policy, regional planning, and activism for ameliorating the deleterious consequences of social welfare retrenchment and franchise capitalism for vulnerable urban populations, and highlight the importance of the broader social policy context and economic change for understanding urban poverty and the experiences of the urban poor.

Back from the Brink: The Front National and the 2012 Elections in France

After suffering its worst electoral results since the early 1980s in the 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections, the Front National (FN) has reemerged as an ascendant electoral force in French politics. The party’s strong showing in the 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections, in which party leader Marine Le Pen respectively achieved a record score of 17.9% and the FN gained its greatest representation since the 1986-99 legislature, exceeded expectations. This paper seeks to account for this electoral resurgence of the FN. It argues that, particularly following the nomination of Ms. Le Pen at its head, the party has skillfully exploited the favorable conditions of political supply and demand that have come to the fore during the Sarkozy presidency.At the level of political demand, the present economic crisis, following on the heels of significant market liberalization and welfare retrenchment during Sarkozy’s term of office, has exacerbated the social vulnerability of the working and middle-class electorates that had gravitated to the FN since the mid-1980s. At the level of political supply, the failure of the Socialist Party to address this socioeconomic crisis enabled the FN to present itself as the sole defender of these crisis-ridden constituencies, while Sarkozy’s repressive anti-immigration discourse and policies served to normalize the FN’s exclusionary conception of the nation and anti-immigration agenda among a growing number of voters. In light of these favorable conditions of political demand and supply, it is argued that the party’s adoption of an anti-globalization, anti-EU economic program and strategy of normalization under Ms. Le Pen’s leadership provided an effective electoral platform on which the FN was bound to capitalize in 2012. In particular, its advocacy of statism, protectionism and the abandonment of the euro, combined with the ‘sanitizing’ of its anti-immigrant program by presenting it in the light of fiscal responsibility rather than racial differencialisme, were likely to appeal to working- and middle-class voters who, after experiencing a steady deterioration in their socioeconomic condition over the past quarter century, have been hardest hit by the 2008-9 financial crash and 2010-11 European debt crisis as well as the deflationary policies that have been adopted in response to them.

Credit Access and Social Welfare

Research into the causes of the 2008 financial crisis has drawn attention to a link between growing income inequality in the United States and high household indebtedness. Most accounts trace the U.S. idea of credit-as-welfare to the period of wage stagnation and welfare retrenchment that began in the early 1970s. Using France as a comparison case, I argue that the link between credit and welfare was not unique to the United States. Indeed, U.S. charitable lending institutions that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century were modeled in part on older French financial institutions. Three historical factors drove U.S. lenders and policymakers to push for expanded credit access for the working class. First, welfare reformers in the interwar period embraced private credit as an alternative to an expansive welfare state. Second, U.S. organized labor in the wake of World War II embraced credit access as a means to sustain industrial employment and finance strike actions. Third, commercial banks in the 1950s began offering revolving credit accounts as a means to attract new depositors at a time when banking regulation restricted the interest they could offer on deposits.

Partisan Embedding of Liberalism

Political scientists have long debated how economic globalization influences national social policies, but they have so far not explored the political demands of political parties implicitly underlying such influence. This article explores such demands to see how globalization affects partisan-political demands for the welfare state in industrialized countries. It argues that political parties link globalization to welfare policy, but in ways that differ across parties and faces of globalization. First, globalization can be expected to spark support for welfare policies as compensation for globalization’s risks, but given the constituencies and traditions of parties, this applies more for left than for right or other parties. Second, this dynamic is different for immigration than for trade or investment because migration poses fiscal pressures and threats to solidarity that can dampen enthusiasm for welfare compensation and spark calls for welfare retrenchment. Analysis of party manifestos in 23 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 1960 to 2004 supports this view that some but not all parties embed some but not all liberalism.

Economic Crisis and Welfare Retrenchment: Comparing Irish Policy Responses in the 1970s and 1980s with the Present

AbstractThis article juxtaposes the impact of the current economic crisis on the Irish welfare state with the impact of the international economic crisis of the 1970s which had a sustained effect in Ireland during much of the 1980s. The analysis focuses on the consequences for social security programmes during both crisis periods, each of which was marked by intractable socio‐economic and budgetary pressures. However, while elements of welfare retrenchment can be observed during the economic crisis of the 1980s, these appeared more difficult to instigate and sustain in comparison to the present period. As an inter‐temporal qualitative case study, this article aims to identify key drivers influencing why welfare retrenchment has more readily occurred and, it would appear so far, at a potentially deeper level than during the 1980s. As of yet the economic crisis is unabated, and as welfare state changes typically occur in relatively slow motion (Castles 2010), outcomes of the process remain uncertain. However, it seems that if Ireland continues on the path it has instigated, the liberal disposition of the Irish welfare state will intensify.

Nationalism, development, and social policy: The politics of nation-building in sub-Saharan Africa

This article examines the relationship between nation-building and social policy in post-independence sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It argues that post-independence nationalist leaders used health, housing, and education programmes to foster a sense of national unity that would transcend the existing ethnic divisions created by the arbitrary drawing of state boundaries during colonization. Yet, in SSA, the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s favoured the decline of state-level integration and solidarity, which helped trigger territorial mobilization and fragmentation. As a consequence, the politics of welfare retrenchment in SSA does more than simply reduce benefits and increase inequalities; it also potentially weakens national unity.