Public Opinion, Party Politics, and the Welfare State

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Lindvall ◽  
David Rueda
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Party System ◽  
Median Voter ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Party Positions ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter examines the long-run relationship between public opinion, party politics, and the welfare state. It argues that when large parties receive a clear signal concerning the median voter’s position on the welfare state, vote-seeking motivations dominate and the large parties in the party system converge on the position of the median voter. When the position of the median voter is more difficult to discern, however, policy-seeking motivations dominate, and party positions diverge. This argument implies that the effects of government partisanship on welfare state policy are more ambiguous than generally understood. The countries covered in the chapter are Denmark, France, Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom (going back to the 1960s). The number of observations is (necessarily) limited, but the diverse cases illustrate a common electoral dynamic centered around the position of the median voter.

Concrete Monsters of the Welfare State: Discussions of Brutalist Architecture on Social Media

2021 ◽  
pp. 120633122110193
Author(s):  
Max Holleran
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Municipal Governments ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Welfare State

Brutalist architecture is an object of fascination on social media that has taken on new popularity in recent years. This article, drawing on 3,000 social media posts in Russian and English, argues that the buildings stand out for their arresting scale and their association with the expanding state in the 1960s and 1970s. In both North Atlantic and Eastern European contexts, the aesthetic was employed in publicly financed urban planning projects, creating imposing concrete structures for universities, libraries, and government offices. While some online social media users associate the style with the overreach of both socialist and capitalist governments, others are more nostalgic. They use Brutalist buildings as a means to start conversations about welfare state goals of social housing, free university, and other services. They also lament that many municipal governments no longer have the capacity or vision to take on large-scale projects of reworking the built environment to meet contemporary challenges.

The influence of the welfare state on the number of young old persons

2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-624 ◽  
Author(s):  
KATHRIN KOMP ◽  
THEO VAN TILBURG ◽  
MARJOLEIN BROESE VAN GROENOU
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Legal Responsibility ◽  
Retirement Age ◽  
Old People ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Country Differences ◽  
Southern European Countries ◽  
Young Old ◽  
The Welfare State

ABSTRACTMany current discussions of welfare state reforms focus on the ‘young old’, a group now generally perceived as healthy people past retirement age without a legal responsibility for dependent persons in need of care. For the welfare state, they constitute a resource whose activities are hard to steer. This article focuses on the influence of the welfare state on the number of ‘young old’ people. It describes different ways in which the welfare state influences the number of young old persons, and investigates whether variations in the regulations for the ages of normal, early and late retirement are the prime cause. The paper also estimates the share of the young old among those aged 50–90 years in 10 European countries in 2004 using comparable survey data. These shares ranged between 36 and 49 per cent for men and between 35 and 52 per cent for women. High shares were found in continental European countries, and low shares in Scandinavian countries and the United Kingdom. The shares in southern European countries varied among the countries and by gender. To explain the variations in the share, country differences in retirement regulations proved helpful but insufficient. When the overall influence of the welfare state on the share of young old persons in the population was analysed, a country-characteristic pattern emerged.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger E. Backhouse ◽  
Bradley W. Bateman ◽  
Tamotsu Nishizawa ◽  
Dieter Plehwe
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Provision ◽  
Economic Argument ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Origin ◽  
Welfare Discourse ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Welfare State

During the last several decades, the welfare state has come under increasing pressure around the world, with social provision often being cut or privatized. Often the justification for these changes has been made as an economic argument, especially a neoliberal argument that the welfare state diminishes growth or produces disincentives to work. These arguments are of relatively recent origin, however; many types of economists have supported the creation of the welfare state, even liberal economists. The purpose of this book is to examine the economic arguments that have been used in the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany in support of, and in opposition to, the welfare state. Special attention is paid to the transnational dimensions of recent welfare discourse and to the ways that liberal and neoliberal arguments about the welfare state have changed over time.

scholarly journals The Origins of the British Welfare State

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-433
Author(s):  
Pat Thane
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Legal Structures ◽  
Precise Quantification ◽  
British State ◽  
The Welfare State

George Boyer’s The Winding Road to the Welfare State, which traces the shift in Britain from the early nineteenth-century Poor Law to the post-1945 welfare state, is strongest and most useful in its analysis of the labor market in relation to poverty and insecurity and in its precise quantification of wages, poverty, insecurity, and public relief. It is much weaker when discussing how politics and public opinion shaped social policies; overlooking important areas of British state welfare, the book focuses upon unemployment and old-age policies. Nor is the book really about “Britain.” Most of the statistics and analyses refer to England and occasionally Wales. Scotland, with its different economic, administrative, and legal structures, though constitutionally in Britain, is barely mentioned. Notwithstanding Boyer’s contributions to the picture of how the British welfare state emerged, his version of Britain’s “winding road” falls short of the descriptions and analyses that many British publications have already provided within the past thirty years.

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