The Beginnings of the Nordic Welfare States: Similarities and Differences

1978 ◽  
Vol 21 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 9-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stein Kuhnle
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Nordic Countries ◽  
Present Stage ◽  
Compulsory Insurance ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Welfare State

The beginning of our present stage in the development of the welfare state can be traced to Bismarck's large-scale social insurance schemes of the 1880s. The article compares various political and economic macro-characteristics of the Nordic countries at that time, and proposes hypotheses about the timing of legislation in the Nordic nations, and about the likelihood for Nordic imitations of the principle of compulsory insurance. The article discusses why Denmark was expected to become, and in fact became, a forerunner in the Nordic context, and why the principle of compulsory insurance stood a better chance of gaining acceptance in Norway than in Denmark and Sweden.

How Does Decentralisation Affect the Welfare State? Territorial Politics and the Welfare State in the UK and US

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
SCOTT L. GREER
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Intergovernmental Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Central State ◽  
Veto Points ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThe relationship between political decentralisation and the welfare state is much studied, and large-scale studies have repeatedly found that decentralised states have less generous welfare states. How do we fit that with other studies that emphasise the potential of decentralisation to raise welfare standards? This article argues that decentralisation, as a variable, is too broad and it is more efficient to focus on the structure of veto players in the central state, intergovernmental relations and intergovernmental finance. Those are the actual mechanisms that connect decentralisation to the welfare states, and they can all vary independently of decentralisation. It uses recent changes in the United States and United Kingdom as examples. The fragmentation and average weakness of the US welfare state is mostly due to a federal government riddled with internal veto points that permits considerable interstate variation and low overall average provision, while tight central control on finances in the UK means that most variation is in the organisation, rather than levels, of social services.

4. The welfare state 1.0

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Garland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Economic Governance ◽  
Publicly Funded ◽  
Employment Contracts ◽  
Poor Laws ◽  
Welfare Benefits ◽  
The Welfare State

The newly-emergent welfare states shared a distinctive set of features that set them apart both from the old poor laws and from state socialism. ‘The Welfare State 1.0’ identifies these defining features and describes how welfare states are structured. Welfare states generally have five institutional sectors: social insurance; social assistance; publicly funded social services; social work and personal social services; and economic governance. The WS 1.0 forms that predominated from the 1940s until the 1980s are described. Another feature of the welfare state landscape is sometimes called the ‘hidden welfare state’; it consists of welfare benefits that are channelled through the tax system or through private employment contracts.

scholarly journals The Property-Owning Democracy vesus the Welfare State

2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Weale
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Ideal Type ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Individualism And Collectivism ◽  
Private Savings ◽  
Negative Income Tax ◽  
The Welfare State ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractThe political theory of the property-owning democracy can be seen as a way of overcoming the ideological conflict between individualism and collectivism. Rawls offers the contemporary reference-point for this theory. Rawls contrasted the ideal-type of the property-owning democracy with the ideal-type of a capitalist welfare state. However, the terms of that contrast are not well drawn and raise a number of questions, in particular regarding Rawls’s a priori specification of the welfare state. An inductively derived specification of ideal-typical welfare states suggests that horizontal redistribution, in line with the principle of social savings, is more important than vertical redistribution. Rawls’s preference for a social dividend or negative income tax scheme can be contrasted with the use of social insurance, but the latter has a claim to instantiate Rawlsian ideals better than a social dividend. There is a potential problem with the pre-emption of private savings in the welfare state, but this turns out not to be troublesome empirically or conceptually. The irony of the discussion is that those who have interpreted Rawlsian theory as justifying the welfare state have the better of the argument, despite Rawls’s own views.

Social Insurance, Distributive Criteria and the Welfare Backlash: A Comparative Analysis

1982 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara A. Rosenberry
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Policy Development Process ◽  
The Welfare State

With some notable exceptions, comparative research on the welfare state falls generally into one of two categories: qualitative and generally descriptive case studies and large-scale quantitative efforts at explanation. Case studies have progressed past the point of being essentially journalistic descriptions of the peculiarities of the policy development process or the policies of a particular society. It is nevertheless true that there has been little progress in moving beyond the case study approach towards building a theory about how and why societies make particular decisions about the priorities and organization of their social welfare efforts. On the other hand, while large-scale aggregate analysis yields theoretical statements about the character of ‘the welfare state’, those conclusions are often so general as to be ‘difficult to relate to… how particular substantive problems have been [and might be] handled.’

3. Birth of the welfare state

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Garland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Pension Schemes ◽  
National Insurance ◽  
Post War ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
The Welfare State

‘Birth of the welfare state’ describes the embryonic version of the welfare state in Germany with Chancellor Bismarck’s social insurance laws in the 1880s. A decade later governments in Denmark, New Zealand, and Australia launched the first old age pension schemes. In the early 1900s Liberal governments in Britain introduced workmen’s compensation, old age pensions, labour exchanges, and a system of National Insurance for sickness, invalidity, and unemployment. In the 1930s President Roosevelt established the American welfare state with the ‘New Deal’ legislation. The new welfare states were expanded post-war and by 1960 every developed nation had a core of welfare state institutions and every government had accepted responsibility for managing its national economy.

The Long Life of Liberal America: Law and State-Building in the U.S. and England

2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Forbath
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
State Building ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
American Liberalism ◽  
The One ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
The U.S ◽  
The Welfare State

Reports of the Strange Death of Liberal America are greatly exaggerated. James Henretta's essay of that title offers a shrewd and insightful portrait of Charles Evans Hughes. But the liberalism whose death Henretta reports did not die. And the “statist,” “centralization,” “economic planning,” and broad “social insurance” minded liberalism he reports as prevailing did not prevail. From a certain lofty altitude (and rueful attitude), all “big,” “modern” “welfare states” look the same. That is Henretta's viewpoint. His wonderfully suggestive comparative framework has as one of its premises that America and England proceeded along the administrative-and-welfare-state-building path at different paces but arrived at the same destination. For me, a comparison of the law and politics, processes and outcomes of twentieth-century state-building in the U.S. and England prompts different conclusions. There were conspicuous differences between the New Deal state that was fashioned in 1930s and '40s America and the welfare state England created in those decades. More interestingly, the ideology and institutional contours of this new American state were deeply influenced by that ambivalent (and lawyerly) brand of American liberalism Henretta rightly attributes to figures such as Hughes and Roscoe Pound—poised between “progressive” commitments to social reform, social provision, and administrative-state-building, on the one hand, and older, “classical” liberal commitments to limited (and decentralized, dual federalist) government and the primacy of courts and common law and traditional legal and constitutional niceties, on the other. My notion is that this “transitional” and “forgotten” liberalism and its champions won more important battles than they lost against their “statist” rivals. A “strange death,” indeed!

scholarly journals Fostering the data welfare state: A Nordic perspective on datafication

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-223
Author(s):  
Rikke Andreassen ◽  
Anne Kaun ◽  
Kaarina Nikunen
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Employment Services ◽  
State Employment ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Rapid Pace ◽  
Automated Decision Making ◽  
Media And Communication ◽  
The Welfare State

Abstract Digital tools facilitating everything from health to education have been introduced at a rapid pace to replace physical meetings and allow for social distancing measures as the Covid-19 pandemic has sped up the drive to large-scale digitalisation. This rapid digitalisation enhances the already ongoing process of datafication, namely turning ever-increasing aspects of our identities, practices, and societal structures into data. Through an analysis of empirical examples of datafication in three important areas of the welfare state – employment services, public service media, and the corrections sector – we draw attention to some of the inherent problems of datafication in the Nordic welfare states. The analysis throws critical light on automated decision-making processes and illustrates how the ideology of dataism has become increasingly entangled with welfare provision. We end the article with a call to develop specific measures and policies to enable the development of the data welfare state, with media and communication scholars playing a crucial role.

scholarly journals The core of the Nordic health care system is not empty

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Hampus Lyttkens ◽  
Terkel Christiansen ◽  
Unto Häkkinen ◽  
Oddvar Kaarboe ◽  
Matt Sutton ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Health Care System ◽  
Health Care Systems ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Nordic Countries ◽  
Care Systems ◽  
European Economies ◽  
The Welfare State ◽  
Care System

The Nordic countries are well-known for their welfare states. A very important feature of the welfare state is that it aims at easy and equal access to adequate health care for the entire population. For many years, the Nordic systems were automatically viewed as very similar, and they were placed in the same group when the OECD classified health care systems around the world. However, close inspection soon reveals that there are important differences between the health care systems of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Consequently, it is perhaps no surprise that the Nordic countries fell into three different categories when the OECD revised its classification a few years ago. In this paper, we revisit this issue and argue that the most important similarity across the Nordic countries is the institutional context in which the health care sector is embedded. Nordic health care exists in a high-trust, high-taxation setting of small open economies. With this background, we find a set of important similarities in the manner in which health care is organized and financed in the Nordic countries. To evaluate the performance of the Nordic health care system, we compare a few health quality indicators in the Nordic countries with those of five non-Nordic similarly small open European economies with the same level of income. Overall, the Nordic countries seem to be performing relatively well. Whether they will continue to do so will depend to a large extent on whether the welfare state will continue to reform itself as it has in the past.Published: April 2016.

1. What is the welfare state?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Garland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Economic Management ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Welfare State

There are three general conceptions used for the welfare state: the first characterizes the welfare state as welfare for the poor; the second focuses on social insurance, social rights, and social services; and the third highlights economic management and the role that the ‘government of the economy’ plays in every welfare state. ‘What is the welfare state?’ explains that welfare states are varied, complex, and difficult to define. There is no simple theory that clearly expresses what they do, no simple vision that neatly captures what they are for. The welfare state is a damage-limiting, problem-solving device rather than anyone’s ideal social relationship.

Financing the Welfare State: Elite Politics and the Decline of the Social Insurance Model in America

2005 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Louise Campbell ◽  
Kimberly J. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Income Taxes ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Payroll Taxes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Budget Equation ◽  
Insurance Model ◽  
The Welfare State

While there is a vast and rich literature on the benefits and services provided by the welfare state, few scholars have investigated how these programs are financed. The tax side of the budget equation is crucial for the ability of welfare states to exist and expand; without a stable and growing source of revenues, the welfare state can neither meet its existing obligations nor increase its responsibilities. The mode of finance can be particularly important, as some taxes are more visible or contested, and thus more difficult to raise. For example, because there are limits to how much revenue can be raised with progressive income taxes, many industrialized countries finance large social programs through contributory finance, that is, payroll taxes. Levied over a broad swath of the population, these taxes generate a large amount of revenue, yet are politically acceptable because people see them as payments that entitle them to benefits in return.

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