Support For Welfare State Research Articles

Welfare state contract and family solidarity: Do informal carers prefer more welfare state support?

Welfare state contract and family solidarity: Do informal carers prefer more welfare state support?

The maintenance of carbonscapes: Enacting Net Zero in Stavanger, Norway

As a stable, democratic petrostate, Janus-faced Norway balances fossil fuel incumbency (profitable oil and gas exports) with leadership in green transitions (domestic hydropower supply and transport electrification) and just transitions (major donor to global green initiatives). These roles imbue domestic politics with reverence for fossil fuels as enablers of generous welfare state support, alongside a push to show progress on low-carbon energy transitions. This political dynamic has embraced the global rise to prominence of Net Zero target-setting, highly reliant on speculative, yet-to-emerge carbon mitigation technologies. Such a hubristic response to this target has served to direct massive financing to innovation activities of fossil incumbents. Nowhere is this push felt keener than in Stavanger, the oil capital rebranded to Norway’s ‘energy capital’, and the site of the country’s largest industrial hub Forus and great performative spectacles such as the Offshore Northern Seas conferences and numerous other oil and gas events. Yet it is also here that critique is often focused, pointing out the folly of continued investment that assumes oil and gas persistence in tempered form over rapid renewable energy rollout. We investigate the forms this enactment of Net Zero takes at the urban scale in Stavanger through which the promise of carbon removal is used to uphold carbonscapes. Empirical material includes place-based observation, participatory ethnography at events, and media reports. We engage with conceptual scholarship on the positionality of researchers, role of actionable knowledge, and the specific function of the knowledge economy to enable Stavanger’s juggling act as the site of fossil success since 1969, and champion of carbon removal innovation and development as one of Europe’s 112 climate-neutral 2030 Mission Cities. We argue that unpacking urban spectacle offers evidence of the interwoven nature of domestic politics and performative carbon mitigation approaches, constituting an entry point to critique mitigation deterrence.

Welfare-state selectivity, universality, and social trust in Europe, 2002–2019: Bringing deservingness back in

Social trust is a moral resource with a normatively highly desirable pay-off. Previous research argues that universal welfare state programmes ‘make’ social trust whereas means-testing programmes ‘break’ it. Despite its important implications for welfare-state design, comparative longitudinal evidence for this hypothesis is scarce. To test whether within-country changes in social trust are associated with within-country changes in total, means-tested, and non-means tested social protection expenditure, I thus merge country-year specific ESSPROS welfare spending data with cross-country survey data from 30 countries that participated in the 2002–2019 European Social Survey. Results from multilevel regression models show that neither within-country changes in total nor means-tested or non-means tested social protection expenditure predict social trust. Based on insights from the welfare deservingness literature, the second part of my analysis concentrates on welfare spending directed at two different life-course risks, with sickness representing a risk that the public widely considers to be ‘deserving’ of welfare support, and unemployment acting as an ‘undeserving’ risk. I find that, within countries over time, means-tested healthcare expenditures predict decreases in social trust, whereas non-means tested healthcare expenditure is associated with increasing social trust. My results thus lend support for the hypothesis that welfare-state selectivity and universality can contribute to the making and breaking of social trust, but only when interventions target life-course risks that the public considers ‘deserving’ of welfare state support.

Who deserves exceptions in times of crisis? A comparison of policy responses to mitigate negative consequences for unemployed people and immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic

The boundaries for whom the welfare state should protect during times of crisis are not necessarily obvious. Deservingness studies have identified unemployed people and immigrants as groups perceived as 'less deserving' of welfare state support than other groups in need during ‘normal’ times. These two groups have in recent years been subject to more conditional requirements and an incentivizing rationale. In this article, we compare the policy responses for 1) unemployed people and 2) immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway form 2020–2022. We ask: Who deserves exceptions in times of crisis? We find that a cross-partisan parliament introduced extensive economic relief packages and temporary regulations to mitigate negative financial consequences for unemployed persons and furloughed workers. Politicians argued that individuals were not to blame for their unfortunate financial circumstances during the pandemic, and that the welfare state had to take the larger share of the burden. However, the government chose not to make temporary exemptions from economic requirements for permanent residence or family reunification. It was explicitly stated that there was no reason to deviate (temporarily) from the general economic requirements during the pandemic, referring to the potential strain on the Norwegian welfare state if immigrants were not self-sufficient. We argue that the political rationale of incentives underlying these requirements falls short during economic crises and that this non-policy response illustrate new forms of welfare state chauvinism.

Openness and the welfare state: risk and income effects in protection without protectionism

Have recent trends in globalization changed the positive link between trade openness and social insurance? The consensus view – that voters want better social insurance against income loss the more open the economy – is seemingly contested by the rise of new right-wing parties and the China shock. We present a theoretical framework of risk and income effects of globalization that captures the conventional view, but also shows when it will be modified: When the income effect is negative, the political support for social insurance can decline in spite of the risk effect. We construct an empirical measure of welfare state support across European regions and leverage the rapid integration of China into the world economy to show that higher import competition reduces the support for social insurance. Consistent with our framework, we use variations in employment losses between regions to decompose the overall effect of the shock into a (weak) positive risk effect and a (strong) negative income effect.

Social risks of family carers in the context of welfare state policies

Objective: To determine how European care policies for older people differ in terms of their potential social risks to family carers, as well as the extent to which these differences can be explained by different types of welfare and care regime. Background: It is often assumed that welfare state support for family care entails high social risks to the carer, such as loss of employment income and social security rights. This paper challenges these assumptions and argues that care policies that generously support family carers might also alleviate some of the social risks related to family care. Method: This paper introduces an innovative approach to systematically measuring the generosity of policies that support family carers, and it theorises how these policies connect to family carers' social risks. It then applies this approach to a comparative study of five European welfare states based on analyses of these countries’ care policy documents, standardised policy reports by national experts and data from comparative social policy databases. Results: The findings reveal large cross-national differences in care policy design, which is only in some cases able to significantly mitigate social risks for family carers. Furthermore, these cross-national differences only partly correspond with assumptions based on welfare and care regime affiliation according to classic typologies. Conclusion: The paper sheds new light on the ways in which welfare states design their policies towards family carers, and on the extent to which these policies are associated with social risks.

The normalisation of welfare chauvinism

The normalisation of welfare chauvinism

Social innovation in Italian cities. A southern European perspective

Social innovation practices have attracted increasing attention in recent years. Especially in cities and urban areas, they have represented both a response to emerging social needs seldom addressed by declining forms of state welfare support and a platform for innovating inherited understandings of collective action and activism in cities. The authors argue that a regional perspective is needed when looking at such practices in southern European urban contexts. By looking at a variety of cases in Italian cities, this section aims to illuminate how key dimensions such as local governance models and legacies, social inclusiveness patterns, the relationship with formal and informal economies and the role of specific socio-spatial structures contribute to the shaping of social innovation practices in Italian cities.

The German Trade Shock and the Rise of the Neo-Welfare State in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

We study the international origins of the neo-welfare state in Britain during the era of globalization before World War I. We introduce a new mechanism linking trade to the expansion of the state. In addition to increasing assessments of the volatility of employment in a market economy, trade shocks changed beliefs about the deservingness of the poor. Employing a shift-share measure of local exposure to German imports, we show that rising imports caused worse labor market outcomes from 1880 to 1910. Import competition led to a decrease in support for the Conservative Party in national elections after 1900, when the Liberal Party supported welfare state reforms. We further show that rising imports increased the use in local newspapers of scientific terms like “unemployment” relative to pejorative terms like “vagrancy” to describe the poor. Political responses to globalization helped shape voter support for the modern British welfare state at its inception.

Welfare state support during the COVID-19 pandemic: Change and continuity in public attitudes towards social policies in Germany.

Our analysis asks whether the pandemic situation affects welfare state support in Germany. The pandemic has increased the health and income risks calling for welfare state intervention. While increased needs, more deservingness, and higher state responsibility during such a crisis would suggest augmented support generally and among those at risk, this might be a short‐term effect and cost considerations could reverse this trend. We study public attitudes towards four key social policy areas based on the German Internet Panel (GIP). We use three waves prior and further three waves since the pandemic had been declared in March 2020. The analysis shows both continuity in the popularity of social policies, in particular health and pensions, and some short‐term increase in support for unemployment and family policies. The results after nearly 2 years suggest rather continuation with some thermostatic short‐term boosts in support instead of any long‐lasting change.

Welfare state dissatisfaction and support for major welfare reform: Towards means‐tested welfare or a universal basic income?

AbstractThis research note investigates how people combine their views on two radically opposing welfare reforms: a universal basic income and a fully means‐tested welfare state. Using data from the 2016–2017 European Social Survey, we found that support for transformative welfare reform is rooted in perceptions of the performance of the current system. The preferred direction of reform, however, strongly depends on the specific aspects of the welfare state people are happy or unhappy with. At the country‐level, we show that underperforming welfare states—in terms of higher poverty rates and lower social spending—increase popular demand for transformative welfare reform, in either direction. These findings are of crucial importance for ongoing debates about the future of the welfare state.

An emerging populist welfare paradigm? How populist radical right‐wing parties are reshaping the welfare state

AbstractPopulist radical right‐wing parties (PRRPs) in Western Europe have almost without exception shifted their position on distributive issues, abandoning their earlier support for a minimal welfare state in favor of higher social spending. Recent studies suggest that PRRPs' distributive preferences go beyond the clash between simply expanding or retrenching welfare; instead, they defend a specific welfare state that focuses on consumption policies for the “deserving.” Drawing on this literature and the welfare paradigm literature, this paper suggests that PRRPs are not only welfare chauvinist but that they promote what we call a “dualistic” welfare state: protectionism for the “deserving” and neoliberal for the “undeserving.” To unpack PRRPs' welfare attitude and verify their influence on welfare reforms, this study focuses on two cases in which a PRRP cooperated with governing parties: Denmark (2009–2011) and Austria (2017–2019). The study confirms that PRRPs pursued a coherent but dual approach to welfare state distribution. Policy negotiations show that PRRPs successfully pursue austerity and workfare measures for social policies targeting the “undeserving,“ while preserving and expanding consumption policies for the “deserving.” This paper thus contributes to the research on PRRPs' welfare attitudes and, more broadly, the recent welfare transformations in Western Europe.

Social services in times of pandemic – Analysing the German welfare state's measures to safeguard its basic social infrastructure

Abstract The article examines how the German welfare state has been responding to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the basis of various fields of social services, it asks how non-governmental social service providers adapted their services to the situation to keep them accessible for citizens. Moreover, it analyses under which conditions they were able to access and use the support instruments provided by different levels of government during the pandemic. The article applies a theoretical framework from implementation and evaluation research. Using empirical findings from three forms of social services (individual counselling, services in the form of group measures and assisted living) it examines comparatively which factors filter service providers’ access to welfare state support instruments in the pandemic.

Personality and Roots of Welfare State Support: How Openness to Experience Moderates the Influence of Self-Interest and Ideology on Redistributive Preferences

Personality and Roots of Welfare State Support: How Openness to Experience Moderates the Influence of Self-Interest and Ideology on Redistributive Preferences

COVID-19 and welfare state support: the case of universal basic income

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has revived discussions about universal basic income (UBI) as a potential crisis response. Yet despite favorable circumstances, little actual policy change in this area was observed. This article seeks to explain this absence of policy change and to reflect on the prospects for introducing UBI schemes after the pandemic in European democracies. I argue that public opinion on UBI provides few electoral incentives to push for social policy change. Using prepandemic data from 21 European democracies and pandemic data from the UK, I show that political support for UBI has been divided between different groups who advocate conflicting policy goals and who hold divergent views about existing welfare state arrangements. While support for UBI might have increased during the pandemic, the underlying political dividing lines are likely to have remained intact. Due to these enduring divisions and the stable support for existing social policy arrangements over an untested policy, the prospects for introducing UBI schemes in the post-pandemic world remain uncertain.

Perceptions of Immigrant Belonging and Support for Redistribution

The national identity argument posits that a shared national identity can elicit social solidarity, or support for redistribution, in diverse societies. We analyse one, largely neglected, aspect of this argument, namely whether perceptions of immigrants' belonging to the nation can generate support for redistribution. Based on new survey data (N = 3,000), we measure how emotionally attached respondents think immigrants are to Sweden. We distinguish between immigrants born in Europe and immigrants born outside of Europe. Results show that people who believe that immigrants are attached to Sweden are more likely to be supportive of both generalised redistribution (welfare state support) and to display inclusive solidarity (willingness to grant rights to immigrants). This effect primarily holds for immigrants born outside Europe. We conclude that support for the welfare state and willingness to grant rights to immigrants depend on perceptions about immigrants' attachment to the nation, but mainly for non‐European immigrants.

Welfare and social protection: What is the link with secondary migration? Evidence from the 2014‐crisis hit Italian region of Lombardy

AbstractEvidence on the relationship between secondary international migration and welfare state (or formal protection) support is currently limited. Also, the experience of financial support from semiformal and informal social protection networks has seen limited inclusion in current reflections on secondary mobility patterns such as onward and return migration. Our study analyses the relationship between support from formal, informal and semiformal social protection and short‐term secondary migration intentions. The study uses open‐access data from the Regional Observatory for Integration and Multiethnicity of Lombardy (Italy) and adopts a competing‐risk framework through multinomial logistic regression. Our data do not support the hypothesis of an ex‐post “magnetic effect” of the Italian formal social protection on its beneficiaries: individuals on formal welfare are more prone to onward and return migration. However, the positive relationship observed between welfare entitlements and onward migration intentions cannot rule out any effect of welfare magnetism from more generous welfare systems. Monetary aid received from Italian friends is negatively related to return intention. At the same time, economic support from foreign‐born friends is correlated to return migration. We interpret results according to social network theory. Economic support and social capital from bridging networks can act as an ex‐post integration‐driven magnet. Bonding social capital from ties with migrants in Italy cannot secure the migrants' stay in Italy. However, it can support return migration. Networks providing bonding transnational social capital, and expressed in the form of financial support from relatives living abroad, are instead positively correlated to both forms of secondary migration.

Social Position and Support for the Welfare State in Western European Countries. A Test of Oesch’s Class Schema and a Comparison with ESEC

Social Position and Support for the Welfare State in Western European Countries. A Test of Oesch’s Class Schema and a Comparison with ESEC

Losers’ Consent in Changing Welfare States: Output Dissatisfaction, Experienced Voice and Political Distrust

Mature welfare states must increasingly handle growing fiscal pressures and a multitude of needs with smaller resources. Meanwhile, evaluations of policy outputs are characterized as ‘the weakest link’ in welfare state support, resulting in generalized political distrust. We assess the procedural fairness argument that citizens are not only concerned with welfare state outcomes but also assess the fairness of the processes of service delivery. The fairness perspective has usually been tested in cross-sectional studies, experiments or on the ‘input side’ of democracy. By contrast, we use primary three-wave panel data on evaluations and experiences with welfare state institutions. The random-effects within-between framework allows improved causal evidence that both outputs (service quality satisfaction) and procedural fairness (experienced voice opportunities) affect political trust. Crucially, however, perceived fairness mitigates detrimental effects of poor outcomes. This is because procedural voice matters, especially for the formation of political trust among losers.

When things go wrong with you, it hurts me too: The effects of partner's employment status on health in comparative perspective.

The effects of changes in employment status on health within couples have attracted increasing attention. This paper contributes to this emerging research by investigating whether the impact of a partner’s employment status on individual self-rated health varies systematically across countries with varying decommodification levels. We use longitudinal data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and hybrid models. We find that a change in an individual’s employment status may affect the health not just of the person who experiences this transition, but that of his or her partner. The likelihood that such a spillover will occur varies across countries with different decommodification levels. The negative effects of a partner’s employment status on self-rated health are observed when the generosity of welfare state support is limited. The moderating effects of financial support from the state are not very strong, though. They are not robust across all our models and do not extend to all the dimensions of the generosity of welfare state support.