Constructing Tolerance

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus M. L. Crepaz ◽  
Regan Damron

Over the past 30 years, the hitherto rather homogeneous welfare states in Europe have been experiencing a dramatic influx of immigrants, making them much more diverse. The central purpose of the early development of the welfare state was twofold: to bridge class divisions and to mollify ethnic divisions in the vast multiethnic empires of 19th-century Germany and Austria. This research examines the impact of the programmatic and expenditure dimensions of the welfare state on attitudes of natives across modern publics, theorizing that nativist resentment and welfare chauvinism should be reduced in more comprehensive welfare systems. Individual, aggregate, and multilevel analyses reveal that the more comprehensive the welfare state is, the more tolerant natives are of immigrants, indicating that contemporary welfare states have a similar capacity to bridge ethnic divisions as their 19th-century incarnations.

2021 ◽  
pp. 786-802
Author(s):  
Philip Manow

IN 1990, Gøsta Esping-Andersen published The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, a work which has turned out to be the single most important and decisive contribution to welfare state research in the past thirty to forty years. In essence, Esping-Andersen argued that we can observe systematic variation in the character of the developed welfare states of the West, which he grouped into three distinct welfare state models: a Scandinavian social democratic model, a conservative continental European model, and a liberal Anglo-Saxon model. This chapter provides a short description of Esping-Andersen’s three regimes; introduces a fourth, Southern European model, which will then be described in somewhat more detail; and outlines a historical and genealogical account of the development of all four models. Finally, the chapter briefly expands on the comparative perspective with a short discussion on whether the regime concept or the understanding of distinct welfare models can also be applied to other regions, such as Latin America and Asia.


Author(s):  
David Garland

Welfare states emerged in western nations at the end of the 19th century and were fully established in the middle decades of the 20th. But collective social provision in one form or another has been characteristic of societies throughout human history. ‘Before the welfare state’ outlines pre-capitalist societies and explains the social roots of welfare, the expanding role of the state, the end of the old Poor Laws, and the reaction against laissez-faire. By the end of the 19th century, the question of social provision was caught up in a struggle between two opposing principles: the logic of free-market liberalism versus the logic of moral economy and social protection.


1992 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Walker

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 240-258
Author(s):  
Jan Zutavern ◽  
Martin Kohli

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.


1992 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abram de Swaan

WELFARE STATES ARE NATIONAL STATES, AND IN EVERY country welfare is a national concern, circumscribed by the nation's borders and reserved for its residents alone. In the course of centuries, these states have emerged from and against one another, in mutual competition, and in the past century this process of state formation in the West went in tandem with the collectivization of care. The welfare state is the national state in its latest phase. It may be succeeded by another stage which we may eventually see.


1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas E. Ashford

Butterfield's well-known warning to historians may hold important lessons for the analysis of the contemporary welfare state. In his view, the Whig historians distorted history by interpreting the past in terms of the present. They allowed themselves to become “dispensers of moral judgments” by dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress. Many contemporary explanations of welfare states pose the same problem, not so much because social science intentionally excludes the past, but because the search for rigorous empirical explanations of our present choices and accomplishments is divorced from the past. As Himmelfarb noted in her comments on the study of social history, the investigations of this intricate transformation of nineteenth-century liberal states are now virtually “two cultures.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Kevin Farnsworth

This article is an attempt to take stock and critically reflect on the UK’s decade of austerity and social policy hostility over the past decade. It distinguishes between economic and political austerity and digs deeper into the data on expenditure in order to examine the impact of austerity on British public expenditure and politics. It argues that the decade of austerity was a hostile one for British social policy which not only undermined the financial base of key parts of the welfare state, it reshaped it and redefined its priorities, setting in train a series of subsequent events that would further change, not just British social policies, but British economics, polity and politics. And, as subsequent crises – notably Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic – testify, crisis events tend to be linked, and each one shapes and influences the ability of the state to respond to the next.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksei Chekmazov ◽  
Vladyslav Butenko

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. xxx-20
Author(s):  
Daniel Béland ◽  
Kimberly J. Morgan ◽  
Herbert Obinger ◽  
Christopher Pierson

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.


Author(s):  
Kees van Kersbergen ◽  
Philip Manow

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.


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