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.

Comparative Social Policy and Political Conflict in Advanced Welfare States: Denmark and Sweden

1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gøsta Esping-Andersen
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Welfare State

There has developed an abundant literature on the social and political determinants of social policies, but few have addressed the question of how state policies, once implemented, affect the system of stratification in civil society. This article examines the political consequences of social policy in Denmark and Sweden, countries in which a social democratic labor movement has predominated for decades. Superficially, these two highly developed welfare states appear very similar. Yet, the political and social contexts in which their social policies have evolved differ substantially. I shall demonstrate the argument that the traditional welfare state approach may be conducive to a new and powerful political conflict, which directly questions the legitimacy of the welfare state itself, unless government is successful in subordinating private capitalist growth to effective public regulation. In Denmark, where social democratic governments have failed to match welfare state growth with more control of private capital, social policy has tended to undermine the political unity of the working class. Consequently, the Social Democratic Party has been weakened. Social welfare programs, in effect, have helped create new forms of stratification within the working class. In Sweden, social democratic governments have been quite successful in shifting a decisive degree of power over the private market to the state. This has helped avert a crisis of the welfare state, and has also been an important condition for continued social democratic hegemony and working-class unity. I conclude that social reform politics tend to be problematic from the point of view of the future power of social democratic movements.

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.

The Critics of Welfare

2021 ◽  
pp. 52-70
Author(s):  
Gerda Hooijer ◽  
Desmond King
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Vested Interests ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Political Right ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter explores how the welfare state’s critics, from the political right and the left, have contributed to institutional change through their ideas and advocacy. It discusses the neoliberal, conservative, social democratic, and right-wing populist critiques on the welfare state. These ideas are important to understand changes to the welfare state because they create the momentum for institutional disturbance. The chapter’s focus on the critics emphasizes the endogenous undercurrents disrupting welfare states, as well as the path-shaping capacity of new ideas. It shows that political reforms of the welfare state are not only driven by functional needs, vested interests, institutional habits, and public opinion, but also by ideas and their political advocates.

The Politics of Welfare in Turkey

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erdem Yörük
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Assistance ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Electoral Support ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter examines the political dynamics that have shaped the transformation of the Turkish welfare system since the 1960s. Over the years, income-based social assistance policies have supplanted employment-based social security policies, while the welfare state has significantly expanded. To explain why and how the Turkish welfare state has expanded during neoliberalism and why social policies have shifted from social security to social assistance, the chapter focuses on the rivalries between mainstream parties and the impact of grassroots politics, as well as the political mechanisms that mediate and transform structural pressures into policies. The chapter illustrates that political efforts to contain the political radicalization of the informal proletariat and to mobilize its electoral support have driven the expansion of social assistance policies during the post-1980 neoliberal period. State authorities now see the informal proletariat as a more significant political threat and source of support than the formal proletariat whose dynamism drove the expansion of the welfare state during the pre-1980 developmentalist period. The chapter provides a historical analysis of the interaction between parliamentary processes and social movements in order to account for the transformation of welfare provision in Turkey. It concludes by locating Turkey in a larger context, in which other emerging markets develop similar welfare states as a response to similar political exigencies.

Towards the Centre: Early Neoliberals in the Netherlands and the Rise of the Welfare State, 1945–1958

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bram Mellink
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Early History ◽  
The Political ◽  
European Welfare State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Wide Dissemination ◽  
The Welfare State

Although scholars have recently taken an increased interest in the history of neoliberalism, the ‘breakthrough’ of neoliberalism under Thatcher and Reagan still captures most of their attention. Consequently, the neoliberal project is primarily taken as Anglo-American, while its early history is mostly studied to explain the political shift of the 1980s. This article focuses on the early neoliberal movement in the Netherlands (1945–58) to highlight the continental European roots of neoliberal thought, trace the remarkably wide dissemination of neoliberal ideas in Dutch socio-economic debates and highlight the key role of these ideas in the conceptualisation of the Western European welfare state.

Social Assistance

2021 ◽  
pp. 623-640
Author(s):  
Thomas Bahle ◽  
Claus Wendt
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Assistance ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Social Security System ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Security System ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Welfare Regime ◽  
The Welfare State

Social assistance guarantees basic social rights and provides means-tested, residual benefits to persons in need. It is the last safety net of the welfare state. The actual significance of social assistance varies by welfare regime: the more inclusive and generous a social security system, the less important usually is social assistance. In the Nordic countries, for example, with highly developed social security, few persons actually depend on social assistance. By contrast, in most countries with a liberal welfare regime, social assistance is an essential part of the welfare state. Yet in most cases, social assistance is not a viable alternative to inclusive social security. In Southern or Eastern European countries with rudimentary welfare states, social assistance is also patchy, exclusive, and rudimentary. In continental European countries, the situation varies by population group: most systems are more generous to the elderly than to families with children, and in particular to the unemployed. Moreover, in almost all countries social assistance benefits do not actually lift people out of poverty. Social assistance thus provides a basic minimum income for some groups, but does not effectively prevent poverty. In general, social assistance is more effective in countries in which it clearly operates as a last safety net within an otherwise well-developed overall social security system.

Individual Attitudes toward the Welfare State: A Test of the “Crowding Out Hypothesis” across European Countries

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durmus A. Yuksek ◽  
Ozgur Solakoglu
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Crowding Out ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Crowd Out ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Welfare State

Abstract Although numerous studies have confirmed the relationship between welfare states and social capital, their arguments have been contradictory. Some argue that strong welfare states crowd out social capital, while others consider the welfare state as a stimulator of social capital. However, research focusing on both the arguments simultaneously and considering whether or not welfare states can both make and break social capital is almost unavailable. Also, individual attitudes toward the welfare state have mainly been the neglected part of this research tradition. Concordantly, findings of this study suggest that regardless of the strength of the civil society, a welfare state can both crowd out and crowd in social capital. While the comprehensiveness of the welfare state plays a part in stimulating or rather unlikely destroying social capital, it is actually the particular design, implementation of the welfare policies, and legitimacy of the state officials that make or break social capital.

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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