scholarly journals Welfare and citizenship

Intersections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariann Dósa

Ever since Marshall (1965), the relationship between welfare and citizenship has been a key topic in political and academic discourses, and this interrelationship is still far from being unambiguous. This paper reviews mainstream approaches to the welfare–citizenship nexus and argues that shifting our focus to an alternative perspective – viewing welfare as an agent of citizenship socialisation – provides a more comprehensive understanding of both democratic citizenship as a concept and its interrelationship with the welfare state. This view broadens our understanding of the functions of welfare, being a key agent of democracy among others; therefore it has crucial policy implications.   

2021 ◽  
pp. 097370302110620
Author(s):  
Aditya Duggirala ◽  
Rohit Kumar

Social protection in India is segmented with multiple programmes applying different targeting methods to design and implementation, providing varied benefits and covering different groups of the population. Such approach to social protection has policy implications for not only India but also for other emerging countries following similar path. A shift to a systems approach to social protection is required to provide comprehensive coverage over the life course of an individual while improving equity and efficiency. In this article, we introduce the welfare state in India, provide a comparative analysis of various programmes, challenges posed by the segmented approach to social protection including barrier to emergency responses and some reforms to consider to move to a systems approach to social protection. We highlight how integrating and consolidation of programmes in the same area, leveraging digital technology and unique identification number, creation of a single database, etc., can speedup progressive universalism.


2013 ◽  
pp. 91-120
Author(s):  
Edoardo Bressan

In Italy, from the 1930s until the end of the century, the relationship between the Catholic world and the development of the Social state becomes a very relevant theme. Social thought and Catholic historiography issues witness a European civilisation crisis, by highlighting problems of poverty and historical forms of assistance. Furthermore, by following the 1931 Pope Pius XI encyclical Quadragesimo anno these issues interacted with fascist corporativism. After 1945, other key experiences arose, as the discussion on social security as the conclusion of the whole public assistance debate shown. These themes are reported in the Bologna social week works in 1949 and in Fanfani's and La Pira's positions, which present several correspondences with British and French worlds, such as Christian socialism, Reinhold Niebuhr's thought and Maritain's remarks. The 1948 Republican Constitution adopts the Welfare State model assumptions, and it is in those very years that the problem of a system based on a universal outlook arose. Afterwards, governments of coalition led by centre and left-wing parties fostered social security through welfare and health reforms until the '80s. While this model falls into crisis, and new social actors begin to be involved in a context of subsidiarity.


Author(s):  
Sandra den Otter

This essay examines T. H. Green’s evolving ideas on empire. Professor of moral philosophy in Oxford until his death in 1882, Green was the most prominent and respected philosophical idealist in Victorian Britain. The influence of his personal example and of his ideas has been traced by Jose Harris and other historians of the welfare state down to the 1940s. Initially enthusiastic for the civilizing mission of empire, Green came to see that any political system or relationship imposed by force, or dependent on coercion or control, was intrinsically incompatible with the ideals of citizenship, voluntarism, and solidarity that define the good community and make possible the self-realization of individuals within it. The essay opens up a new field for discussion and research: the relationship between idealist welfare thinking and imperialism. It argues that empire had a major impact on idealist notions of social welfare.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Kalm ◽  
Johannes Lindvall

This article puts contemporary debates about the relationship between immigration policy and the welfare state in historical perspective. Relying on new historical data, the article examines the relationship between immigration policy and social policy in Western Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the modern welfare state emerged. Germany already had comparably strict immigration policies when the German Empire introduced the world’s first national social insurances in the 1880s. Denmark, another early social-policy adopter, also pursued restrictive immigration policies early on. Almost all other countries in Western Europe started out with more liberal immigration policies than Germany’s and Denmark’s, but then adopted more restrictive immigration policies and more generous social policies concurrently. There are two exceptions, Belgium and Italy, which are discussed in the article.


Author(s):  
Christian Ydesen ◽  
Mette Buchardt

Education has long been held to be the nucleus capable of producing national identities, citizenry, and citizen ideals. It is the locus wherein the majority of children and families most actively experience their first encounter with the state and the societal order in the guise of state-sanctioned professionals, practices, culture, technologies, and knowledge. Starting from this observation and making a comparative, historical investigation of continuities and ruptures offers insights into the production of citizen ideals and the purposes of education. The Nordic states—Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark—have often been characterized as the cradle of the distinct—and, to many people, attractive—Nordic welfare state model known for distributing equal rights and opportunities among the entire population, for instance, by providing education free of charge. In addition, the educational system has been viewed as a means to create a citizenship mentality to support the welfare state program. A central feature cutting across place and to some extent time is the apparent dilemma that exists between creating social mobility through education and thereby including “all,” while still finding the means to differentiate “under the same school roof” because pupils are individuals and must be taught as such to fulfill the ultimate needs of society’s division of labor. At the same time, the welfare state school must educate its pupils to ensure a level of equal participation and democratic citizenship among them as these youth advance through the system. School must be mindful of retaining different approaches to teaching that can accommodate differing levels of intelligence and learning abilities in the student cohort. The Danish school reforms of 1975 and 2014 are examples of how Denmark’s political leaders answered such challenges. The reforms also reflect a moment in time wherein politicians and administrators worked to resolve these challenges through modifying and recreating welfare state educational policies.


Author(s):  
Simon Ball

This chapter characterizes the relationship of the British state to war over the long term. It analyses two epistemic turning points for the war–state relationship, one occurring in the 1860s, the other in the 1970s. It explains the importance of war to the British state under the ‘fiscal security’ compromise.The chapter traces the long and uneven emergence of the ‘welfare state’ as a successor to the ‘warfare state’. It argues that the ‘warfare state’ paradigm loses much of its empirical and conceptual force if it were to be extended beyond 1970. The relationship of the state to war changed so fundamentally at that point that history, the chapter suggests, ceased to be a useful guide for future conduct.


1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Eley ◽  
Atina Grossmann

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.


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.


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