Explaining the welfare state: power resources vs. the Quality of Government

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo Rothstein ◽  
Marcus Samanni ◽  
Jan Teorell
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Power Resources ◽  
Social Risks ◽  
Wage Earners ◽  
Power Resource Theory ◽  
The Welfare State

The hitherto most successful theory explaining why similar industrialized market economies have developed such varying systems for social protection is the Power Resource Theory (PRT), according to which the generosity of the welfare state is a function of working class mobilization. In this paper, we argue that there is an under-theorized link in the micro-foundations for PRT, namely why wage earners trying to cope with social risks and demand for redistribution would turn to the state for a solution. Our approach, the Quality of Government (QoG) theory, stresses the importance of trustworthy, impartial, and uncorrupted government institutions as a precondition for citizens’ willingness to support policies for social insurance. Drawing on data on 18 OECD countries during 1984–2000, we find (a) that QoG positively affects the size and generosity of the welfare state, and (b) that the effect of working class mobilization on welfare state generosity increases with the level of QoG.

scholarly journals Social innovation as a policy response to restructure the welfare state

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 269-276
Author(s):  
Doğa Başar Sariipek ◽  
Gökçe Cerev ◽  
Bora Yenihan
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The State ◽  
Welfare Provision ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Social Risks ◽  
The Welfare State

The focus of this paper is the interaction between social innovation and restructuring welfare state. Modern welfare states have been reconfiguring their welfare mixes through social innovation. This includes a productive integration of formal and informal actors with support and leading role of the state. This collaboration becomes significantly important since it means the integration of not only the actors, but also their capabilities and resources in today’s world where new social risks and new social challenges have emerged and no actor can overcome these by its own. Therefore, social innovation is a useful tool in the new role sharing within the welfare mix in order to reach higher levels of satisfaction and success in welfare provision. The main point here is that this is not a zero-sum competition; gaining more power of the actors other than the state – the market, civil society organisations and the family – does not necessarily mean that the state lost its leading role and power. This is rather a new type of cooperation among actors and their capabilities as well as their resources in welfare provision. In this sense, social innovation may contribute well to the debates over the financial crisis of the welfare state since it may lead to the more wisely use of existing resources of welfare actors. Thanks to social innovative programs, not only the NGOs, but also market forces as well as citizens are more active to access welfare provisions and social protection in the broadest sense. Thus, social innovative strategies are definitely a solid step taken towards “enabling” or “active” welfare state.

scholarly journals The development of the Welfare State in Portugal: trends in social expenditure between 1938 and 2003

2010 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Fernando Carolo ◽  
José António Pereirinha
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Data Series ◽  
Social Risk ◽  
Social Expenditure ◽  
Social Risks ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Risk Protection ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThis paper presents a data series on social expenditure in Portugal for the period 1938-2003. The series was built with the aim of identifying and characterizing the most significant phases in the process leading up to the current welfare state system in this country. The establishment of a social insurance (Previdência) in 1935 was one of the founding pillars of the Estado Novo (New State). Reforms to Social Welfare (Previdência Social) in 1962, while in the full throes of the New State, policy measures taken after the revolution of 1974 and a new orientation for social policy following the accession of Portugal to the European Economic Community (EEC) in the mid-1980s brought about significant transformations in the institutional organizational structure that provided welfare and conferred social rights in Portugal. To understand this process, knowledge is needed of the transformations to the institutional structures governing the organizations that provided welfare, welfare coverage in terms of the type of benefit and the population entitled to social risk protection, the magnitude of spending on benefits associated with these risks, as well as how benefits were allocated between the institutions. We built a data series for the period 1938-1980, which can then be matched to data already published in the OECD Social Expenditure Database from 1980 onwards. As a result, a consistent series for social expenditure from 1938 to 2003 was obtained. The methodology used to create the series enabled us to measure the impact of the variation in population coverage for social risks and the average generosity of benefits on the relative share of social expenditure in GDP. We present an interpretive reading for the full period, covering the New State and the Democracy from 1974, of the process of building the welfare state in Portugal.

The Changing Shapes of Latin American Welfare States

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelyne Huber ◽  
Zoila Ponce de León
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
Healthcare Services ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Cash Assistance ◽  
The Welfare State

Latin American welfare states have undergone major changes over the past half century. As of 1980, there were only a handful of countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay) with social policy regimes that covered more than half of their population with some kind of safety net to insure adequate care during their old age and that provided adequate healthcare services. With few exceptions, access to social protection and to healthcare in these countries and others was based on formal employment and contributions from employees and employers. There were very few programs, and those few were poorly funded, for those without formal sector jobs and their dependents. The debt crisis and the ensuing neoliberal reforms then damaged the welfare state in all countries, including these leading nations. Deindustrialization, shrinking of the public sector, and cuts in public expenditures reduced both coverage and quality of transfers and services. Poverty and inequality rose, and the welfare state did little to ameliorate these trends. With the turn of the century, the economic and political situation changed significantly. The commodity boom eased fiscal pressures and made resources available for an increase in public social expenditure. Democracy was more consolidated in the region and civil society had recovered from repression. Left-wing parties began to win elections and take advantage of the fiscal room which allowed for the building of redistributive social programs. The most significant innovation has been expansion of coverage to people in the informal sector and to people with insufficient histories of contributions to social insurance schemes. The overwhelming majority of Latin Americans now have the right to some kind of cash assistance at some point in their lives and to healthcare provided by their governments. In many cases, there have also been real improvements in the generosity of cash assistance, particularly in the case of non-contributory pensions, and in the quality of healthcare services. However, the least progress has been made toward equity. With very few exceptions, new non-contributory programs were added to the traditional contributory ones; severe inequalities continue to exist in the quality of services provided through the new and the traditional programs.

Worker and the Welfare State in Imperial Germany

1991 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 18-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Steinmetz
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Social Democratic Party ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
Imperial Germany ◽  
The Social ◽  
Insurance Funds ◽  
The Welfare State

A complex relationship existed between working-class formation and the development of the welfare state in Imperial Germany between 1871 and 1914. In the 1880s, the Social Democratic party voted against the three major national social insurance law's, and many workers seemed to spurn the incipient welfare state. But by 1914, socialists were active in social policy-making and workers were participating in the operations of the welfare state. Tens of thousands of workers and social democrats held positions in the social insurance funds and offices, the labor courts and labor exchanges, and other institutions of the official welfare state. Hundreds of workers had even become “friendly visitors” in the traditional middle-class domain of municipal poor relief. This shift is interesting not only from the standpoint of working-class orientations; it also challenges the received image of the German working class as excluded from the state —an interpretation based on an overly narrow focus on national parliamentary politics.

Quality of Government and Welfare State Support

2021 ◽  
pp. 722-736
Author(s):  
Staffan Kumlin
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
State Support ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Welfare State

Abstract: Research on citizens’ support for government redistribution, social protection, and public services (shorthand: welfare state support) has been late to examine quality of government explanations. Slowly but surely in the 2000s, however, scholars have compensated a previous neglect. This literature provides examples of how research on welfare state attitudes is expanding beyond the much-studied rich Western welfare states. In terms of substantive questions, scholars increasingly seek to answer questions such as: Are citizens’ assessments of various “quality of government” aspects positive or negative across space and time? Are assessments multi- or unidimensional? What aspects of quality of government do citizens assess? Are evaluations rooted in relevant information and objective facts? Finally, how do quality of government factors affect normative support for the welfare state and its constituent policies and aspects?

scholarly journals The Welfare State as Universal Social Security: A Global Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-113
Author(s):  
Kerem Gabriel Öktem
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Global Analysis ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Social Expenditures ◽  
Social Protection Systems ◽  
The Welfare State

Over the past decades, the geography of comparative welfare state research has transformed. Whereas scholars used to focus on a limited number of advanced industrialised democracies, they now increasingly study developments in Europe’s periphery, East Asia, and Latin America. So, does this mean that the welfare state has spread around the world? To answer this question, we analyse different ways to measure welfare states and map their results. With the help of International Labour Organization and International Monetary Fund data, we explore measurements based on social expenditures, social rights, and social security legislations and show that each of them faces serious limitations in a global analysis of welfare states. For some measurements, we simply lack global data. For others, we risk misclassifying the extent and quality of some social protection systems. Finally, we present a measurement that is grounded in the idea that the welfare state is essentially about universalism. Relying on a conceptualisation of the welfare state as collective responsibility for the wellbeing of the entire population, we use universal social security as a yardstick. We measure this conceptualization through health and pension coverage and show that a growing number of countries have become welfare states by this definition. Yet, it is possible that at least some of these cases offer only basic levels of protection, we caution.

scholarly journals “Welfare State” as a Variable Conceptual Model of a Modern Socially Oriented Market Economy

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-171
Author(s):  
Serhii Shcherbak ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Market Economy ◽  
High Level ◽  
The Welfare State

Annotation. Introduction. The article discusses the views of scientists on the “welfare state” model of the implementation of the principles of a socially oriented market economy. Purpose. Analysis of versatile scientific works and researches. Research of the theorical and methodological principles of “welfare state” as a variable conceptual model of modern socially oriented market economy. Results. The implementation of the tactical and strategic task that fundamentally faces the state and the national economy of Ukraine – a significant improvement in the welfare and level of social protection of citizens – is possible only if the socially oriented market economy is consistently developed according to the “state of general welfare” model. Fundamentally, this model should include, as shown earlier: effective private and public sectors of the economy, effective state macroeconomic regulation, high level of social protection and health care, correctly defined goals of investment and innovation development, stimulation of entrepreneurial initiative and competition, a clear focus on a high level of international competitiveness. Conclusions. The socially oriented market economy, built in developed countries in the last third of the twentieth century, was studied as a generalized and practically implemented model of the “welfare state”. Theoretical and methodological directions of its analysis as a conceptual model in variative theoretical and practical approaches and their application in the context of possibilities of realization of general principles, principles and peculiarities of certain countries are defined. It has been shown that in the target orientation of the “welfare state” as a conceptual model of the social market economy, the welfare of the country’s citizens occupies the first place, that is, the standard of living, which includes not only the material component (the level of income per capita), but also such a concept as quality of life (ecology, quality of food, medicines, social standards, etc.). The theoretic and methodological approach to the analysis of the socio-economic system as a model of development and functioning is substantiated, which allows to find out more thoroughly and clearly the main directions of society’s progress in the XXI century. Keywords: welfare state; socio-economic system; socially oriented economy; welfare of the nation; social protection.

scholarly journals Economic Crises and the Welfare State in Korea: Reforms and Future Challenges

2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-192
Author(s):  
Kwon Huck Ju ◽  
Dong Grami ◽  
Moon Hyun Gyung
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Economic Crises ◽  
Labor Market Reform ◽  
Social Risks ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Welfare State

"East Asian countries have been hit yet again by economic crisis, this time of a global nature, after having endured the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98. Social protection for the weak in society during the crisis poses a great policy challenge. This paper examines Korea’s social policy responses to these economic crises in the context of the evolution of the welfare state. Faced with the economic crisis of 1997-98, the welfare state was extended and strengthened in terms of coverage and benefits in order to facilitate labor market reform. In the current global economic crisis, social policies such as public assistance and unemployment benefits, together with extra job-retaining measures that the government put into place, have enabled Korea to respond much more effectively to social risks arising from the crisis than it did during the earlier Asian crisis. However, it is imperative for Korea to further strengthen the welfare state, particularly in the areas of social services for children and the elderly, in order to maintain its economic potential in the face of dramatic demographic transitions and changes in family structure that are likely to occur in the future."

scholarly journals INCOME INEQUALITY, MOBILITY, AND THE WELFARE STATE: A POLITICAL ECONOMY MODEL

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (6) ◽  
pp. 1198-1226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Bossi ◽  
Gulcin Gumus
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Overlapping Generations ◽  
Tax Rates ◽  
Overlapping Generations Model ◽  
Public Programs ◽  
Transfer Payments ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Welfare State

In this paper, we set up a three-period stochastic overlapping-generations model to analyze the implications of income inequality and mobility for demand for redistribution and social insurance. We model the size of two different public programs under the welfare state. We investigate bidimensional voting on the tax rates that determine the allocation of government revenues among transfer payments and old-age pensions. We show that the coalitions formed, the resulting political equilibria, and the demand for redistribution crucially depend on the level of income inequality and mobility.

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