Is the Future American? Or, Can Left Politics Preserve European Welfare States from Erosion through Growing ‘Racial’ Diversity?

2005 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 661-672 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER TAYLOR-GOOBY
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Open Market ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Welfare State

The welfare state is the distinctive contribution of Europe to the modern world. Other places do market capitalism better, and democracy, art and culture at least as well. However, the future of the European welfare state is in question, as a result of economic globalisation, pressures from population ageing and other social changes and the dominance of an EU primarily committed to creating an open market to rival that of the US. An important recent critique of the welfare state project argues that social cohesion and diversity are simply incompatible – with the implication, that as Europe grows more diverse, welfare states will wither. An influential variant of this argument uses statistical modelling to support the argument that greater ethnic diversity accounts for the failure of the US to develop political support for a welfare state on European lines (and implies that Europe's future is American). This article demonstrates that the model used fails to take into account the significance of left politics in European countries. The evidence is that the left substantially counteracts the impact of greater diversity on welfare states in Europe. The case that increased migration will undermine popular commitment to social spending is not proven.

What's Globalization Got to Do with It? Economic Interdependence and the Future of European Welfare States

2006 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Hay
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Social Models ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Usa ◽  
State Regime ◽  
European Welfare States ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThe appeal to globalization as a non-negotiable external economic constraint plays an increasingly significant role in the linked politics of expectation suppression and welfare reform in contemporary Europe. Yet, although it threatens to become something of a self- fulfilling prophecy, the thesis that globalization entails welfare retrenchment and convergence is empirically suspect. In this paper it is argued that there is little evidence of convergence amongst European social models and that, although common trajectories can be identified, these have tended to be implemented more or less enthusiastically and at different paces to produce, to date, divergent outcomes. Second, I suggest that it is difficult to see globalization as the principal agent determining the path on which European social models are embarked since the empirical evidence points if anything to de-globalization rather than globalization. The implications of this for the future of the welfare state in Europe and for the USA as a model welfare state regime are explored.

The Persistence of Poverty under Welfare States and the Prospects for its Abolition

1992 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Walker
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
New Right ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Main Factor ◽  
The Welfare State

This article examines the relationship between poverty and the welfare state and attempts to answer the question as to why poverty has persisted under all welfare states. Several major reasons for the persistence of poverty are advanced, and the author argues that the main factor underlying the failure to abolish poverty is the conflict between economic policy and social policy. The challenge to welfare states from the New Right is examined—particularly the contention that welfare states themselves create poverty and dependence—in the light of evidence of the impact of the Thatcher government's policies in Britain. Finally, the author proposes an alternative approach to the abolition of poverty, one that is based on the integration of economic and social policy.

Social Expenditure and Welfare State Financing

2021 ◽  
pp. 452-472
Author(s):  
Herbert Obinger
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Social Expenditure ◽  
National Differences ◽  
Welfare State Development ◽  
State Financing ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Western Democracies ◽  
Cross National ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter focuses on both the expenditures and the revenues of the welfare state. Using the latest data available, it depicts and analyses major developments in social spending and public revenues in twenty-one advanced Western democracies since 1980. The entry discusses measurement issues, depicts the determinants of cross-national differences in spending and revenue levels identified in the literature, and sheds light on the impact of social spending and taxation on social outcomes, such as income inequality. It is argued that spending and revenue figures, irrespective of several shortcomings, provide important indicators of both the logic and pattern of welfare state development.

Needs and Risks in the Welfare State

2021 ◽  
pp. 240-258
Author(s):  
Jan Zutavern ◽  
Martin Kohli
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Population Ageing ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Human Needs ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Normative Considerations ◽  
The Welfare State

Welfare states must respond to the needs and risks that arise from secular transformations such as deindustrialization, tertiarization, digitalization, population ageing, declining fertility, and changing gender and family relations. This chapter shows that understanding the impact of needs and risks on welfare states requires both empirical and normative considerations: examining the socio-economic consequences of these transformations as well as the normative underpinnings of needs- and risk-based claims to social policy. We first discuss the normative concepts of human needs and risks and the marks they have left on prominent theories of the welfare state, and then move to the empirical side, taking stock of the current socio-economic challenges for a range of welfare states, and of their manifestation in today’s employment and family-related need and risk profiles.

‘A Re-Specification of the Welfare State’: Conceptual Issues in ‘The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’

2014 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Powell
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Theoretical Underpinning ◽  
Welfare Capitalism ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Welfare State

In his path-breaking account of ‘The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’, Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) aimed to provide a ‘re-specification of the welfare state’. This article examines the claim of Esping-Andersen that his account draws on the theoretical work of Polanyi, Marshall and Titmuss. It then explores the conceptual critique of Esping-Andersen which led to his 1999 revision, with its rather different theoretical underpinnings. It concludes that some of the theoretical underpinning of this work is unclear both in the work of Esping-Andersen and in subsequent accounts, resulting in a largely atheoretical debate. Concepts such as de-commodification do not appear to be clearly drawn from their stated ‘parent’ authors, and may not sum up the content or essence of welfare states. The ‘re-specification of the welfare state’ must be a larger part of the strategy of the welfare modelling business in the future.

scholarly journals Welfare-State Retrenchment Revisited: Entitlement Cuts, Public Sector Restructuring, and Inegalitarian Trends in Advanced Capitalist Societies

1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Clayton ◽  
Jonas Pontusson
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Oecd Countries ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Welfare State ◽  
Advanced Capitalist

In recent years it has become commonplace for comparativists to emphasize the resilience of welfare states in advanced capitalist societies and the failure of neoliberal efforts to dismantle the welfare state. Challenging some tenets of the resilience thesis, this article seeks to broaden the discussion of welfare-state retrenchment. The authors argue that a sharp deceleration of social spending has occurred in most OECD countries since 1980, that welfare states have failed to offset the rise of market-generated inequality and insecurity, and that welfare programs have become less universalistic. They stress the distributive and political consequences of market-oriented reforms of the public sector.

scholarly journals The main factors of the recent development of European welfare states: Swedish case

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksei Chekmazov ◽  
Vladyslav Butenko
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Main Role ◽  
Swedish Model ◽  
Main Factors ◽  
The Impact ◽  
European Welfare States ◽  
The Welfare State

This analytical essay is devoted to identifying the features of the formation and development of the Swedish model of the welfare state. The authors study the factors that played the main role in the development of the Swedish model. The authors also assess the impact of the 2008 economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic on the Swedish welfare state.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. xxx-20
Author(s):  
Daniel Béland ◽  
Kimberly J. Morgan ◽  
Herbert Obinger ◽  
Christopher Pierson
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Welfare State Regimes ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Welfare State

This synoptic introduction guides the reader through the major themes in this comparative analysis of the developed welfare states. It first outlines the origins of the welfare state and its development down to 1940. It then considers the impact of the Second World War on social policy and traces the apparent successes of expanding welfare state regimes in the thirty years that followed the war. It then assesses the critique and challenges that arose for this welfare state settlement from the mid-1970s onwards and the idea of a ‘crisis of the welfare state’. These challenges were simultaneously ideological, political, economic, and demographic, and are sometimes seen to have created new circumstances of ‘permanent austerity’. The contemporary welfare state faces a set of challenges very different to those which arose after 1945 in which the near-future context is set by the continuing impact of the Great Recession after 2008 and the new world of social policy created by COVID-19.

21. The welfare state

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kees van Kersbergen ◽  
Philip Manow
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Christian Democracy ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Social Doctrine ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Functionalist Approach ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter examines the emergence, expansion, variation, and transformation of the welfare state. It first considers the meaning of the welfare state before discussing three perspectives that explain the emergence of the welfare state: functionalist approach, class mobilization approach, and a literature emphasizing the impact of state institutions and the relative autonomy of bureaucratic elites. It then describes the expansion of the welfare state, taking into account the impact of social democracy, neocorporatism and the international economy, risk redistribution, Christian democracy and Catholic social doctrine, and secular trends. It also explores variations among developed welfare states as well as the effects of the welfare state and concludes with an analysis of the challenges and dynamics of contemporary welfare states. The chapter shows that the welfare state is a democratic state that guarantees social protection as a right attached to citizenship.

Racial Diversity, Immigration, and Social Spending in the US

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis C. Spies
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Racial Diversity ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Negative Feelings

The chapter analyses the fractious relationship between racial diversity and the welfare state in the US—arguably the most influential case in NPD literature. It shows that US Whites are critical of welfare because their attitude rests on negative feelings about African-Americans and Latino immigrants. However, not all parts of the US welfare state are affected by this combination of race coding and low public support: means-tested welfare is badly affected but the social security components are not. These differences are traced back to their origins by comparing a highly race coded and unpopular welfare program (AFDC, and later TANF) with a non-coded, popular program of old age social security (OAI). Originally highly affected by racial considerations, the programs diverged because of their institutional design and their ability to raise and expand their political support bases.

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