The Material Consequences of Welfare States

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (7) ◽  
pp. 880-904 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyle Scruggs ◽  
James P. Allan
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Absolute Poverty ◽  
Economic Equality ◽  
Relative Poverty ◽  
Industrial Democracies ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Poverty Levels

Several recent studies have focused attention on the relationship between welfare states and poverty, looking primarily at relative poverty and employing concepts of welfare state generosity that are problematic. This has made it difficult to evaluate claims that equality has come at the expense of economic growth. In this article, the authors examine more directly the relationship between welfare state generosity in three social insurance programs— unemployment, sickness, and pensions—and poverty levels in advanced industrial democracies in the past quarter of the 20th century. The results strongly suggest that more generous entitlements to key social insurance programs are associated not only with lower relative poverty but also with lower absolute poverty. This supports the contention that promoting relative economic equality can improve the absolute material well-being of the poor. However, no evidence suggests that relatively more generous unemployment benefits systematically reduce poverty.

Book Reviews

2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 774-776
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Programs

Ann Huff Stevens of University of California, Davis reviews “Wealth and Welfare States: Is America a Laggard or Leader?” by Irwin Garfinkel, Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding. The EconLit Abstract of the reviewed work begins “Explores the role of the welfare state in the overall wealth and well-being of nations, focusing on the American welfare state in comparison with other developed nations in Europe and elsewhere. Discusses why all rich nations have large welfare states; the size, nature, and universality of welfare state transfers; how welfare state programs redistribute income, reduce poverty and inequality, build and sustain human capital, and promote opportunity; a short American-centric history of welfare state programs and outcomes; explaining American exceptionalism--laggard in public relief and social insurance--leader in education; explaining U.S. divergence in the last quarter of the twentieth century--the long swing right; and the future of the American welfare state. Garfinkel is Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems and the codirector of the Columbia Population Research Center at Columbia University. Rainwater is Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Harvard University and Founder and Research Director Emeritus of the Luxembourg Income Study. Smeeding is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty. Index.”

scholarly journals Welfare State Development

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Cook
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Publicly Funded ◽  
Health Care Education ◽  
Poor Laws ◽  
Industrial Democracies ◽  
Formal Employment ◽  
Modern Welfare State

The modern welfare state originated in industrializing Europe, in the English system of “poor laws” that supplemented private and church-based charity, and more fully, in the workers’ social security system established by Bismarck in 19th-century Germany. Welfare provision in Europe expanded after both world wars, growing into systems that provided publicly funded social insurance, health care, education, income security, and family supports, with the United States seen as a “welfare laggard” in comparison with European systems. In the industrial democracies the welfare state experienced its golden age of expansion in scope and generosity from 1945 to 1980. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, globalization, demographic change, and other factors have produced pressures for retrenchment. Scholarship initially focused on Organisation for Economi Co-operation and Development (OECD) welfare states and entitlements linked to formal employment, then extended to include Communist and developing states, women and “care work,” and broader issues of global stratification, privatization and informalization, clientelism, and nonstate provision.

scholarly journals A Multitypological Approach to the Relationship Between Welfare States and Globalization

SAGE Open ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824401769238
Author(s):  
Curt Pankratz
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Typological Approach ◽  
The Relationship

This article argues that understanding the relationship between welfare states and globalization can benefit from a “multi-typological” approach, in which a number of typologies are applied side-by-side as summaries of the relationships between particular aspects of social policy and globalization. Findings suggest that different welfare state typologies predict different aspects of globalization. The article concludes that the analysis of the connection between welfare states and globalization can benefit not from attempting to identify the most accurate welfare state typology, but from understanding the unique contributions made by each one.

scholarly journals Invited Commentary: Social Cohesion, Depression, and the Role of Welfare States

2019 ◽  
Vol 189 (4) ◽  
pp. 354-357
Author(s):  
Mikael Rostila
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
State Theory ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Neighborhood Disorder ◽  
Welfare Regimes ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract In this issue of the Journal, Baranyi et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2019;000(00):000–000) examine the longitudinal associations of perceived neighborhood disorder and social cohesion with depressive symptoms among persons aged 50 years or more in 16 different countries. An important contribution of their article is that they study how neighborhood-level social capital relates to depression in different welfare-state contexts. Although the authors provide empirical evidence for some significant differences between welfare states in the relationship between social capital and depression, they say little about potential explanations. In this commentary, I draw attention to welfare-state theory and how it could provide us with a greater understanding of Baranyi et al.’s findings. I also discuss the potential downsides of grouping countries into welfare regimes. I primarily focus on the associations between social cohesion and depression, as these associations were generally stronger than those for neighborhood disorder and depression. Finally, I provide some suggestions for future research within the field and discuss whether the findings could be used to guide policies aimed at increasing social cohesion and health.

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

2000 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliano Bonoli ◽  
Bruno Palier
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Unemployment Compensation ◽  
European Social Policy ◽  
Overall Resistance ◽  
The Uk

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.

Gender and the Origins of Modern Social Policies in Britain and the United States

1991 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theda Skocpol ◽  
Gretchen Ritter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Working Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Security Act ◽  
Modern Welfare State

Comparative research on the origins of modern welfare states typically asks why certain European nations, including Great Britain, enacted pensions and social insurance between the 1880s and the 1920s, while the United States “lagged behind,” that is did not establish such policies for the entire nation until the Social Security Act of 1935. To put the question this way overlooks the social policies that were distinctive to the early twentieth-century United States. During the period when major European nations, including Britain, were launching paternalist versions of the modern welfare state, the United States was tentatively experimenting with what might be called a maternalist welfare state. In Britain, male bureaucrats and party leaders designed policies “for the good” of male wage-workers and their dependents. Meanwhile, in the United States, early social policies were championed by elite and middle-class women “for the good” of less privileged women. Adult American women were helped as mothers, or as working women who deserved special protection because they were potential mothers.

scholarly journals Typology of welfare states: quality criteria for governance and ecology

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 235-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Koziuk ◽  
Oleksandr Dluhopolskyi ◽  
Yurij Hayda ◽  
Oksana Shymanska
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Clustering Methods ◽  
Governance System ◽  
Government Efficiency ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Welfare State

In the 21st century, in addition to the generally well-known indicators of material well-being, in the modern paradigm of the welfare state, the quality of the ecological environment is gaining an ever-increasing role. Besides that, the modern definition of welfare state takes into account not only environmental dimension, but also the quality of institutions through the governance system that affects the supply of environmental goods. The study provides the classification of countries according to indicators that can ensure the identification of welfare states and the assessment of the classification role of the criteria for environmental state.The strong direct correlation between environmental state and government efficiency has been established. The results of the classification of the studied countries obtained by k-means clustering methods indicate the possibility of using the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), Government Effectiveness Index (GEI) and government expenditures indicators as complementary attributes to the classical criteria for the welfare state.The level of country EPI can be regarded as an important complementary criterion for the welfare state. The country environmental state is much more determined by the government efficiency, the quality of state institutions and their activities, rather than by an extensive increase in the funding of such institutions and environmental measures.

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.

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.

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