West European Welfare States Research Articles

Selecting, disentitling, or investing? Exploring party and voter responses to immigrant welfare dependence in 15 West European welfare states

Academics have long predicted the tension between immigration and welfare to lead to the erosion of redistributive institutions, but empirical studies have found little evidence for that prediction. This paper argues that concerns about immigrant welfare dependence are more likely to lead to one or more of the following three responses: (1) changes to admission policies aimed at attracting those immigrants who are least likely to turn to the state for financial support; (2) restrictions on immigrants’ access to social programmes and benefits; and (3) extensive integration services and immigrant-targeted labour market programmes. Combining a content analysis of party manifestoes and secondary analysis of cross-national survey data, this paper maps the views of parties and voters on these possible strategies in 15 Western European welfare states. The analysis reaches three main conclusions. First, the currency these responses enjoy differs strikingly from one country to another. Second, ideological affiliation helps to explain some of the variation within countries. Third, by and large the views of voters and the position of political parties seem to be in line with each other, albeit with important exceptions.

Cold war isomorphism: communist regimes and the West European model of worker participation

ABSTRACTIn studies of cultural globalisation, the influence of communist regimes on Western Europe has remained under-theorised and little explored. Addressing this gap in research, this article puts forward the glocalisation grid of world-polity theory as a means for conceptualising and investigating how East European communist regimes helped shape the evolution of West European welfare states during the Cold War. The article re-traces the 1960s struggle over expert discourse within the International Labour Organization (ILO) in which communist regimes, including Yugoslavia and Poland, struggled to win the bureaucratic legitimacy of the ILO for their domestic policies. In focus are vertical, horizontal and temporal dimensions of glocalisation and the ensuing perceived or superficial similarity – so-called isomorphism – of legislation on worker participation in decision-making at the workplace. The article maps the timing of reforms across Europe, showing how East European reforms preceded and were co-constitutive to a pan-European process of policy isomorphism.

Nuevas políticas para cuidados en el hogar en los Estados de bienestar europeos

Since the 1990s, the West European welfare states have extended public social services and social rights for senior citizens in need of care. They have also started to support family members more in their caring role. The unpaid, informal care done by (mostly female) spouses or adult children of the frail elderly people has been transformed into forms of family care that are paid for by state programs such as ‘cash-for-care’ or by municipalities, and which connected to some degree also with employment rights. As a consequence, also the ways in which welfare states construct the relationship between family members has changed to some degree. So far, there is relatively little research about welfare state policies towards senior care by family members. This paper introduces a typology of ‘family care regimes’ in the field of care for senior citizens, which can be used as a theoretical framework for cross-national analyzes of welfare state institutions which are framing the work situation of caring family members and their relationship with the care recipients in family care. It also is analyzed how far the different types of the family care regime are connected with tensions.

China's Pension Reform and Its Discontents

Protests by pensioners in Chinese cities have arisen over specific, largely local demands over the past decade, but they possess an abstract, nearly universal grievance as well. This arises from the fact that pension reform often threatens to undermine an implicit contract between the state and a specific, usually loyal, group of beneficiaries. John Myles and Paul Pierson, writing about pension reforms in the American and West European welfare states, observe that Pension systems are essentially a of stipulating who may make claims on the state and under what conditions. Reneging on past contracts by unilaterally reducing benefits creates a profound problem of legitimacy for governments.1 In their study of Chinese pensioners and laid-off workers, William Hurst and Kevin O'Brien offer empirical support for the notion that public pensions in China carry an implicit contract. The authors conclude that pensions appear to be considered a truly sacred right in the eyes of both workers and the state.2 When the Chinese government in the 1990s introduced fundamental changes in how pensions were financed and distributed, it changed the unstated code of laws regarding who may claim benefits and who pays for these benefits. In effect, pension reform transferred the costs and responsibilities for financing and distributing retiree benefits from the work unit or state enterprise to society. This term is routinely used by officials and ordinary Chinese to emphasize that pensions are no longer administered, as they were for almost fifty years, by state enterprises on behalf of their retirees. Instead, pension reform has spread the financial and administrative burdens from state enterprises across a broad swath of employers, workers, national agencies and local governments. Successive regulations issued since the early 1990s have done little to resolve a fundamental problem that emerged with this shift: the diffusion of powers and responsibilities over pension fund collections and administration to local governments that face incentives both to comply with and to evade national pension regulations. The abundant and growing literature on China's pension reform has stressed the difficulties of financing benefits for retirees from a dwindling base of state firms, as well as problems associated with collecting sufficient security revenues. With few exceptions, most analyses of pension reform have tended to understate the critical fact that China's pensions come under, not a single institution, but rather an agglomeration of some 2,000 social pools (shehui tongchou) under the local control of provincial, city, county and prefectural governments.3 Nelson Chow and Yeubin Xu have discussed in broader studies on welfare in Guangzhou how the evolution of pension reform in the 1980s and 1990s created fragmented coverage and benefits depending on ownership categories (state, collective, etc.) and on employment status (full-time, temporary, etc.).4 This fragmenting of pension administration, and of welfare more broadly, occurred in virtually all urban areas of China. It was a legacy of the planned economy, which created sharp regulatory divides between rural and urban areas, across state and non-state enterprises and between permanent and temporary labour. As Linda Wong has shown, the pattern of welfare reforms closely mirrors in its coverage these categories created under the planned economy.5 Only registered urban residents, for instance, remain eligible today for pension coverage. The fragmented, locally-based structure of pension administration evolved gradually over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, when municipal governments began pooling the funds of local enterprises in order to spread the costs of retirement benefits across large groups of firms. Given the financial straits that so many state enterprises are in, substantial deficits exist in the new pension pools. …

The making of giants in a welfare state: the Norwegian experience in the 20th century

The population of Norway has become one of the tallest in the world even overtaking Americans during the course of the second half of the 20th century—not in terms of income, but in terms of physical stature and other indicators of biological welfare, such as longevity. This is also the case in several other west-European welfare states. Both income and physical stature have converged across Norwegian counties since the 1930s. We formulate the hypothesis that the west-European and Scandinavian welfare states perform well in mitigating spatial inequality in well being, in the sense that they translate income quite effectively into the biological well being of the population as a whole.

Investing in services in West European welfare states

Investing in services in West European welfare states

West European welfare states: The old politics of retrenchment

Abstract Analysing endeavours to restructure welfare provision, Paul Pierson proposes that the ‘politics of retrenchment’ is very different from the politics of welfare expansion. In particular, the difficulties of welfare retrenchment are not to be explained by existing theories of welfare expansion; and the ‘old’ politics of welfare expansion has little to offer in explaining the ‘new’ politics of welfare retrenchment. This article questions these claims. First, contemporary societal developments are considered in the light of three major theories advanced to explain the emergence of welfare states in Western Europe: the logic–of–industrialism, the crisis of capitalism, and nation–building. Secondly, focusing on trade unions, mainstream left parties, and traditions of governance, the current status of the political forces regarded as vital in building welfare states is assessed. The conclusion drawn is that the resilience of the welfare state in Western Europe lies less in the ‘new’ politics of ‘policy lock in’ and ‘client interest groups’ than in the persistence of the ‘old’ forces that led to the founding and expansion of welfare states.

How do welfare states change? Institutions and their impact on the politics of welfare state reform in Western Europe

In the 1980s and 1990s West European welfare states were exposed to strong pressures to ‘renovate’, to retrench. However, the European social policy landscape today looks as varied as it did at any time during the 20th century. ‘New institutionalism’ seems particularly helpful to account for the divergent outcomes observed, and it explains the resistance of different structures to change through past commitments, the political weight of welfare constituencies and the inertia of institutional arrangements – in short, through ‘path dependency’. Welfare state institutions play a special role in framing the politics of social reform and can explain trajectories and forms of policy change. The institutional shape of the existing social policy landscape poses a significant constraint on the degree and the direction of change. This approach is applied to welfare state developments in the UK and France, comparing reforms of unemployment compensation, old-age pensions and health care. Both countries have developed welfare states, although with extremely different institutional features. Two institutional effects in particular emerge: schemes that mainly redistribute horizontally and protect the middle classes well are likely to be more resistant against cuts. Their support base is larger and more influential compared with schemes that are targeted on the poor or are so parsimonious as to be insignificant for most of the electorate. The contrast between the overall resistance of French social insurance against cuts and the withering away of its British counterpart is telling. In addition, the involvement of the social partners, and particularly of the labour movement in managing the schemes, seems to provide an obstacle for government sponsored retrenchment exercises.

Catholic social teaching and the allocation of scarce resources.

Catholic Social Teaching and the Allocation of Scarce Resources John Langan S.J. (bio) I shall approach the issue of justice in the allocation of scarce resources from the viewpoint of Catholic social teaching, as developed over the last century. This teaching is found primarily in the social encyclicals issued by popes from Leo XIII (1878–1903) to John Paul II (1978- ), but also in the pastoral letters of the various bishops’ conferences, especially in the United States and in Latin America. These documents, which enjoy a high standing in Catholic teaching but which are not taken as binding in all their particulars, form part of a tradition of moral and social theorizing that a contemporary American would regard as “communitarian.” On social questions, this tradition also has shown itself to be historicist in that it is capable of modifying itself in significant ways in response to changing political and economic situations. It normally approaches issues from a universalist perspective, though it has shifted from a preoccupation with the concerns of the industrial societies of Europe to an advocacy of much of the reform agenda of the Third World. Rooted in classical and biblical sources and modified in the course of the last [End Page 401] century to include a principled acceptance of religious freedom, of human rights, and of democratic political institutions, the Catholic social tradition proposes a number of ideas that can serve as the basis for significant criticism of currently dominant liberal modes of organizing and interpreting advanced industrial societies. These ideas do not form a countertheory to liberalism so much as they indicate ways in which a religious organization that includes both hierarchical and egalitarian elements in its structure and that has both moral commitments and practical responsibilities with regard to health care can draw on its intellectual resources to develop alternative strategies for the reform of health care. I shall survey six ideas that figure prominently in Catholic social teaching and that are relevant to the allocation of scare resources in American health care. Space constraints require that I present them in a very condensed fashion, without tracing the complex development they have undergone in the internal Catholic debate or subjecting them to much criticism. First, Catholic social teaching, especially the great encyclical of John XXIII, Pacem In Terris (PT 1963), affirms the full range of human rights recognized in such modern documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1949). In addition to the civil and political rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights added to the original U.S. Constitution (1791), the Universal Declaration includes rights “to life, to bodily integrity, and to the means which are suitable for the proper development of life; these are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, and finally the necessary social services” (PT 11). Catholic social teaching has not committed itself to one particular way of institutionalizing these rights, but it effectively endorses the comprehensive West European welfare states that the Christian Democratic political parties helped to construct in the period after 1945. Second, Catholic social teaching has accorded a central organizing role to the notion of the common good, the realization of which “is the whole reason for the existence of civil authorities” (PT 54). The common good, however, is not to be understood as identical with the interest or the power of the state; rather, it “embraces the sum total of those conditions of social living whereby men are enabled to achieve their own integral perfection more fully and more easily” (PT 58; quoting Mater et Magistra). John XXIII is particularly anxious to affirm that the common good cannot be construed so as to exclude some groups or to violate the rights of individuals and that it must include both physical and spiritual goods (PT 55–61). The notion of the common good has both an inherent attractiveness and a vagueness that cries out for specification and clarification. But in the contemporary situation it serves to remind us that “individual citizens and intermediate groups are obliged to make their specific contributions to the common welfare” (PT 53). Third, while an insistence on the primacy of the common good and on the [End Page 402...

Globalization and West European Welfare States: a Critical Review of Recent Debates

West European political economies are cur rently experiencing a tumultuous process of change. Although it is still unclear exactly how far and in what ways this will affect welfare states, it is increasingly evident that they will not emerge unscathed. Understanding what is happening is far from easy, given the inability of much analysis to grasp the multifaceted nature of contemporary developments. Gradually we are beginning to get a clearer idea of the challenges and contradictions internal to the operation of west European welfare states. At the same time, innovations in the expanding discipline of international political economy are providing new insights into the changing nature of the world econ omy. Thus far, however, attempts to explore the relationship between the national and the global in the welfare arena have been partial, incompletely theorized, empirically limited and fragmented by discipline. As argued by Garrett and Lange (1995) the solution is to span the divide between international relations and the study of comparative politics and social policy.