Drugs and change in the welfare state framework as reflected in newspaper editorials

2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pekka Hakkarainen ◽  
Jukka Törrönen
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Drug Policy ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Service System ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
Action Programme ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Welfare State

This article presents a comparative analysis of the treatment of the drug problem and drug policy issues in Finnish newspaper editorials across three periods, viz. 1966–1971, 1972–1985 and 1993–2000. The material for the first two periods was obtained through Alko Inc.'s library and information service, while the editorials published in the 1990s were drawn from the newspapers' own electronic archives. The analysis reveals three main shifts in the welfare state's drug policy rationality over the past 35 years. First, there has been a shift from the closed nation to a global world. During the first drug wave of the 1960s Finland was categorised as a separate, isolated corner beyond the reach of the world's trafficking routes, and the aim was to create a united national front in defence against the external enemy. In the 1990s, the enemy is both on the outside and in, and Finland is positioned as an integral part of global processes. Secondly, there is evidence of a transition from the protection of deviant individuals and groups to the protection of the whole population. When drug use began to attract attention in the 1960s, it was categorised mainly as a problem for youths. The aim was to keep Finland clean above all by protecting the youth: this, it was hoped, could be achieved through police control, on the one hand, and education, on the other. In the 1990s drugs were no longer categorised solely as a youth problem, but the whole population is affected. The newspapers began to deconstruct the deviant label by arguing that drug users were ordinary Finnish youths who needed to be helped rather than isolated. The need for help and support was raised alongside the issue of protection (care and harm reduction). The shift in emphasis from deviance control to the development of treatment and care clearly illustrates the shift in the welfare state framework from paternalistic protection to client-ism that underlines the individual's rights and clienthood. Third, there has been a shift in the way that the actors in the drug problem are positioned. The control-oriented action programme that stressed the subject position of the police in the efforts to combat the first drug wave, was widely endorsed in the print press in the 1970s, even though there were other proposed positions in the newspapers in the 1960s. In the 1990s this model was called into question. The position take in the press was that it would no longer be possible to fend off the second drug wave simply by means of control and policing. There were growing calls for prevention, treatment and harm reduction alongside criminal control. According to the predominant line of thinking in the editorials, the new action programme was to be based upon equal cooperation among control authorities and other actors. In this programme the concept of drug offender was broken down into the components of sellers and users. The subject position of the control authorities was defined above all through combatting drug trade. Drug users, by contrast, were to be integrated into society: responsibility for this was given to the welfare state's service system and to various community actors. In the division of labour among state authorities, this model implied a strengthening of the position of the service system in the field of drug policy. There are also important continuities to be seen in the welfare state's drug policy rationality. Key among these is that related to the view of young people as the major group at risk that requires national protection. There has also been a strong emphasis in all three periods on collective welfare state responsibility.

Justifications of citizens’ subject positions in public debates on welfare

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janne Mikael Autto ◽  
Jukka Törrönen
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Day Care ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Welfare State

Foucault’s work has inspired studies examining how subject positions are constructed for citizens of the welfare state that encourage them to adopt the subject position of active and responsible people or consumers. Yet these studies are often criticised for analysing these subject positions as coherent constructions without considering how their construction varies from one situation to another. This paper develops the concept of subject position in relation to the theory of justification and the concept of modality in order to achieve a more sensitive and nuanced analysis of the politics of welfare in public debates. The theory of justification places greater weight on actors’ competence in social situations. It helps to reveal how justifications and critiques of welfare policies are based on the skilful contextual combination of diverse normative bases. The concept of modality, in turn, makes it possible to elaborate how subject positions in justifications and critiques of welfare policies become associated with specific kinds of values. We demonstrate the approach by using public debates on children’s day care in Finland. The analysis illustrates how subject positions are justified in relation to different kinds of worlds and made persuasive by connecting them to commonly desirable rights, responsibilities, competences or abilities.

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.

Maternalism and Citizenship in Weimar Germany: the Gendered Politics of Welfare

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Eley ◽  
Atina Grossmann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Gendered Politics ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Political Value ◽  
The Welfare State

The three papers collected here present important arguments concerning the gendered context and content of the Weimar welfare state. They unsettle our abilityto judge the origins, the efficacy, and the abstract political value of the welfare state and its democratic claims; they have much to say about twentieth-century women's history and the coordinates of feminist politics in the period between the early 1900s and the 1960s; they have vital lessons for a politics of democratic citizenship; and they all demonstrate the payoff of taking gender seriously as a useful category of historical analysis. In fact, gender seems to have acquired particular salience, in especially public and visible ways, in the period dealt with by these papers.

Sozialgerichtsbarkeit im Blick – Interdisziplinäre Forschung in Bewegung

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Social Law ◽  
Constitutional State ◽  
Junior Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Welfare State

Social jurisdiction is an essential institution of the German social constitutional state. It is here that social rights are realised and the welfare state can be experienced. At the same time, the social courts with their upstream and downstream divisions are places where social conflicts are fought out. As such, they have not yet been the subject of comprehensive research. This volume is a contribution to interdisciplinary social policy research and brings together different perspectives on the legal and judicial forms of action of the welfare state. They were the subject of a conference of the FIS-funded junior research group "Social Jurisdiction and the Development of Social Law and Social Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany". With contributions by Katie Baldschun, Minou Banafsche, Michael Beyerlein, Alice Dillbahner, Gesine Fuchs, Thomas Frank, Stefan Greß, Christian Grube, Andreas Hänlein, Armin Höland, Christian Jesberger, Lukas Kiepe, Martin Kilimann, Tanja Klenk, Sabine Knickrehm, Simone Kreher, Romina-Victoria Köller, Tanja Pritzlaff-Scheele, Stephan Rixen, Simon Roesen, Gül Savran, Wolfgang Schroeder, Solveig Sternjakob, Berthold Vogel, Felix Welti and Katharina Weyrich.

The Historical and Social Context

Hurt ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miriam Boeri
Keyword(s):  
Drug Use ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Drug Policy ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Law Enforcement Agencies ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
The 1960S

Drug use and drug policy do not happen in a social vacuum. This chapter shows how the social and historical context shaped drug use patterns as a figurative war became literal one. Coming of age during the “peace and love” era of the 1960s, early baby boomers encountered an increasingly punitive drug policy as they aged in adulthood. Mass incarceration left many drug users with a criminal record and limited options for employment. The financial security needed for a stable family life became unattainable for many, and divorce rates increased, with no social safety net for single-parent homes. Working-class and middle-class jobs were replaced by low-paying service work. As fewer boomers could achieve the American Dream, the middle class was vanishing, and one drug epidemic was replaced by another in rapid succession. Law enforcement agencies were given more power over drug users, with minorities and the poor receiving the brunt of this aggressive infringement on their private lives.

Parties

2021 ◽  
pp. 297-312
Author(s):  
Manfred G. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Demographic Ageing ◽  
Partisan Theory ◽  
Democratic Parties ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter focuses attention on short-term and long-term impacts of political parties on social policy in advanced democracies. According to a wide variety of both comparative research and in-depth country studies, partisan effects have influenced the structure and expansion of the welfare state in the post-Second World War period to a large extent. Particularly strong have been these effects in the ‘Golden Age’ of the welfare state in the 1960s, 1970s, and in some countries also in the 1980s—mainly due to policy choices of leftist and Christian democratic parties. More mixed has been the explanatory power of partisan theory after the ‘Golden Age’. In view of critical circumstances, such as a major fiscal crisis of the state and the pressure generated by demographic ageing, but also due to massive changes in their social constituencies, a considerable number of pro-welfare state parties accepted recalibration and cutbacks in social policy in order to consolidate budgets.

Peer Support as a Method of Risk Reduction in Injecting Drug-User Communities: Experiences in Dutch Projects and the “European Peer Support Project”

1995 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 617-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz Trautmann
Keyword(s):  
Peer Support ◽  
Drug User ◽  
Drug Policy ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
Self Help ◽  
User Communities ◽  
Injecting Drug User

This article discusses the central importance in Western Europe of active drug users/injectors working with their peers to combat the spread of HIV and reduce other health problems. The structure and workings of several different peer organizations are described, and an important distinction is made between “self-help” versus drug-user “unions” or “interest” groups. The roots of the first drug-user unions are traced to the junkiebonden that surfaced in the Netherlands in the early 1970s. Now, the European Peer Support Project, which is described, coordinates projects in six different western European countries, supporting several different initiatives, and producing training programs and manuals for users to assist them in their organizing efforts. The underlying premise of drug-user self-organizations is that repressive drug policy, as defined by criminal laws, is not only a fundamentally inappropriate approach to the “drug problem;” repressive drug policy is partly responsible for the creation of the “drug problem” in the first place.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Innovations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Welfare State

The introduction to this book considers the ways in which the history of modern social welfare in Britain has been written and explained. These approaches include biographical and prosopographical studies of key individuals and groups responsible for founding the welfare state and administering it; the study of crucial social policies and institutions; appreciation of the key intellectual concepts which underpin the idea of welfare in Britain, including philosophical idealism, citizenship, planning, and social equality; the role of political contestation in the initiation and also in the obstruction of policy and its implementation; and the relation of specific places to the development of welfare in theory and in practice, whether east London in the late Victorian era or west London in the 1960s, both of which districts and the social innovations deriving from them are examined in chapters in this volume.

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