The emergence of the idea of ‘the welfare state’ in British political discourse

2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110344
Author(s):  
David Garland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Economic System ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Core ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Subsequent Integration ◽  
The Welfare State

This article traces the emergence of the term welfare state in British political discourse and describes competing efforts to define its meaning. It presents a genealogy of the concept's emergence and its subsequent integration into various political scripts, tracing the struggles that sought to name, define, and narrate what welfare state would be taken to mean. It shows that the concept emerged only after the core programmes to which it referred had already been enacted into law and that the referents and meaning of the concept were never generally agreed upon – not even at the moment of its formation in the late 1940s. During the 1950s, the welfare state concept was being framed in three distinct senses: (a) the welfare state as a set of social security programmes; (b) the welfare state as a socio-economic system; and (c) the welfare state as a new kind of state. Each of these usages was deployed by opposing political actors – though with different scope, meaning, value, and implication. The article argues that the welfare state concept did not operate as a representation reflecting a separate, already-constituted reality. Rather, the use of the concept in the political and economic arguments of the period – and in later disputes about the nature of the Labour government's post-war achievements – was always thoroughly rhetorical and constitutive, its users aiming to shape the transformations and outcomes that they claimed merely to describe.

scholarly journals Vorwärts – und nichts vergessen

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (116) ◽  
pp. 411-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Lessenich
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Scientific Debate ◽  
The Core ◽  
Crisis Scenarios ◽  
Post War ◽  
Time Specific ◽  
State Interventions ◽  
The Welfare State

The recent scientific debate on the functions of social policy and the transformation of the welfare state evidences an ever waning sense of the dialectics that lies at the core of modern state interventionism. The consequences of this decline of dialectical thinking on social policy matters are now beginning to affect as well the political discourse on the reform of the welfare state in Germany. This discourse is utterly dominated by onedimensional crisis scenarios and equally one-sided reform proposals, the latter opting for straightforward re-commodification strategies as opposed to the classical, post-war decommodification consensus. In this context, the paper constitutes a plea for regaining consciousness, conceptualizing social policy as what it is and always has been: the at a time specific and historically changing combination of commodifying and de-commodifying state interventions.

scholarly journals MPs' Attitudes to Welfare: A New Consensus?

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
HUGH BOCHEL ◽  
ANDREW DEFTY
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
New Right ◽  
The Political ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Welfare Provision ◽  
Mixed Economy ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Welfare State

The post-war ‘consensus’ on welfare was based largely in the perceived agreement of leading politicians of Conservative and Labour parties on the role of the mixed economy and the welfare state. However, from the late 1970s economic and demographic pressures and ideological challenges, particularly from the New Right, led to cuts in spending on welfare, increased private involvement and an emphasis on more individualistic and selectivist approaches to provision. Recently some scholars have begun to discuss the emergence of a ‘new liberal consensus’ around welfare provision. Drawing upon interviews with 10 per cent of the House of Commons, this article examines the extent to which a new political consensus upon welfare can be identified. In addition to analysing responses to questions on welfare issues, it considers the extent to which MPs themselves believe there to be some degree of consensus in approaches to welfare. It also considers whether any consensus exists merely in the political language used in relation to welfare issues, or whether there is a more substantive convergence.

Gendered States: Women, Unemployment Insurance, and the Political Economy of the Welfare State in Canada, 1945–1997

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 747-748
Author(s):  
Candace Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Unemployment Insurance ◽  
The Political ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Labour Requirement ◽  
Productive Labour ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Welfare State

Gendered States: Women, Unemployment Insurance, and the Political Economy of the Welfare State in Canada, 1945–1997, Ann Porter, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003, pp. 355It is amazing that Canadian society has been consistently bewildered as to the social, political and economic placement of women. In her new book, Ann Porter explains that the labour requirement that enabled women's participation in the workforce during the Second World War created a post-war environment that was inequitable, illogical, gendered, and “regulating.” Thus, progressive measures were to produce regressive results, as they were taken for the sake of nationalism and not gender equality. Porter documents the change in Unemployment Insurance (UI) policy from limited coverage for certain groups of male workers that could not engage in productive labour to “site of contestation over women's entitlement to state benefits” (66).

The Good, the Bad, or the Godless Society?: Danish “Church People” and the Modern Welfare State

2013 ◽  
Vol 82 (4) ◽  
pp. 904-940 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Petersen ◽  
Jørn Henrik Petersen
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
State Research ◽  
Modern Welfare State ◽  
Socio Economic Variables ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Church ◽  
Cultural Turn ◽  
The Welfare State

This contribution analyzes the views held by Danish and Norwegian church people regarding the welfare state, as expressed in the period when the general debate on the welfare state culminated in both countries. Generally speaking, religion played a relatively limited role in international welfare state research, which can be referred to as “blind to religion.” Tough socio-economic variables, well-established political actors, and government interests dominate the field. There are examples of religion as one among many variables, but when it has been ascribed explanatory value, it predominantly has been in relation to southern and continental European welfare models, because the focus has been on Catholicism. In recent years, the frequently mentioned “cultural turn” has made its entrance into comparative welfare research; yet, even then culture and religion are often assigned a modest role in “the black box,” which is invoked when the “harder” data are insufficient. Most recently, historians and church historians have launched a discussion on the Lutheran Nordic welfare state, but so far this discussion has not analyzed empirically the role of the church in the golden age of the welfare state. In this article, we go directly to those involved and examine what the church actors really felt about the post-war welfare state.

From welfare state to participation society: austerity, ideology or rhetoric?

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Menno Fenger ◽  
Babs Broekema
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Budget Deficit ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
European Countries ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Welfare State

In his first annual speech to parliament in 2013, Dutch King Willem-Alexander announced the end of the era of the welfare state and proclaimed the Participation Society. He stated that the process of individualization, combined with the need to reduce the government's budget deficit leads “to a slow transition of the classical welfare state into a participation society. Everyone who is able to do so, is asked to take responsibility for his or her own life and environment”. This shift towards a participation society is not unique for the Netherlands. Many European countries have experience reforms of their welfare states that limit the responsibility of the state and increases the responsibility of individual citizens. This chapter discusses the backgrounds of Dutch Participation Society in the political discourse, and analyses how and to what extent the ideas of the Participation Society have actually been translated into the content of social policies, their implementation and their consequences.

WHAT'S LEFT OF THE WELFARE STATE?

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Miller
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Consensus ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Capitalist Democracies ◽  
The Welfare State

What, if anything, is left of the socialist project? One way of interpreting this question is to ask whether socialism has bequeathed any permanent legacy to the capitalist democracies—do they have any features that would not exist apart from the historical impact of socialism, and that positively reflect socialist values? If we assume, with the political consensus of the moment, that full-blown socialism no longer represents a possible programme for these democracies, perhaps we can still discover the remains of socialism embedded in their practices. Or maybe not—that is the question I want to address.

Managing Decentralization: The Strategy of Institutional Differentiation in German Industrial Relations

1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 52-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Schroeder ◽  
Rainer Weinert
Keyword(s):  
Collective Bargaining ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Collective Bargaining Agreement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Institutional Differentiation ◽  
The Welfare State

The approach of the new millennium appears to signal the demiseof traditional models of social organization. The political core ofthis process of change—the restructuring of the welfare state—andthe related crisis of the industrywide collective bargaining agreementhave been subjects of much debate. For some years now inspecialist literature, this debate has been conducted between theproponents of a neo-liberal (minimally regulated) welfare state andthe supporters of a social democratic model (highly regulated). Thealternatives are variously expressed as “exit vs. voice,” “comparativeausterity vs. progressive competitiveness,” or “deregulation vs.cooperative re-regulation.”

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