scholarly journals The Welfare State as Universal Social Security: A Global Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-113
Author(s):  
Kerem Gabriel Öktem
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Global Analysis ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Social Expenditures ◽  
Social Protection Systems ◽  
The Welfare State

Over the past decades, the geography of comparative welfare state research has transformed. Whereas scholars used to focus on a limited number of advanced industrialised democracies, they now increasingly study developments in Europe’s periphery, East Asia, and Latin America. So, does this mean that the welfare state has spread around the world? To answer this question, we analyse different ways to measure welfare states and map their results. With the help of International Labour Organization and International Monetary Fund data, we explore measurements based on social expenditures, social rights, and social security legislations and show that each of them faces serious limitations in a global analysis of welfare states. For some measurements, we simply lack global data. For others, we risk misclassifying the extent and quality of some social protection systems. Finally, we present a measurement that is grounded in the idea that the welfare state is essentially about universalism. Relying on a conceptualisation of the welfare state as collective responsibility for the wellbeing of the entire population, we use universal social security as a yardstick. We measure this conceptualization through health and pension coverage and show that a growing number of countries have become welfare states by this definition. Yet, it is possible that at least some of these cases offer only basic levels of protection, we caution.

The Changing Shapes of Latin American Welfare States

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelyne Huber ◽  
Zoila Ponce de León
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
Healthcare Services ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Cash Assistance ◽  
The Welfare State

Latin American welfare states have undergone major changes over the past half century. As of 1980, there were only a handful of countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay) with social policy regimes that covered more than half of their population with some kind of safety net to insure adequate care during their old age and that provided adequate healthcare services. With few exceptions, access to social protection and to healthcare in these countries and others was based on formal employment and contributions from employees and employers. There were very few programs, and those few were poorly funded, for those without formal sector jobs and their dependents. The debt crisis and the ensuing neoliberal reforms then damaged the welfare state in all countries, including these leading nations. Deindustrialization, shrinking of the public sector, and cuts in public expenditures reduced both coverage and quality of transfers and services. Poverty and inequality rose, and the welfare state did little to ameliorate these trends. With the turn of the century, the economic and political situation changed significantly. The commodity boom eased fiscal pressures and made resources available for an increase in public social expenditure. Democracy was more consolidated in the region and civil society had recovered from repression. Left-wing parties began to win elections and take advantage of the fiscal room which allowed for the building of redistributive social programs. The most significant innovation has been expansion of coverage to people in the informal sector and to people with insufficient histories of contributions to social insurance schemes. The overwhelming majority of Latin Americans now have the right to some kind of cash assistance at some point in their lives and to healthcare provided by their governments. In many cases, there have also been real improvements in the generosity of cash assistance, particularly in the case of non-contributory pensions, and in the quality of healthcare services. However, the least progress has been made toward equity. With very few exceptions, new non-contributory programs were added to the traditional contributory ones; severe inequalities continue to exist in the quality of services provided through the new and the traditional programs.

Quality of Government and Welfare State Support

2021 ◽  
pp. 722-736
Author(s):  
Staffan Kumlin
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
State Support ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Welfare State

Abstract: Research on citizens’ support for government redistribution, social protection, and public services (shorthand: welfare state support) has been late to examine quality of government explanations. Slowly but surely in the 2000s, however, scholars have compensated a previous neglect. This literature provides examples of how research on welfare state attitudes is expanding beyond the much-studied rich Western welfare states. In terms of substantive questions, scholars increasingly seek to answer questions such as: Are citizens’ assessments of various “quality of government” aspects positive or negative across space and time? Are assessments multi- or unidimensional? What aspects of quality of government do citizens assess? Are evaluations rooted in relevant information and objective facts? Finally, how do quality of government factors affect normative support for the welfare state and its constituent policies and aspects?

scholarly journals Social innovation as a policy response to restructure the welfare state

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 269-276
Author(s):  
Doğa Başar Sariipek ◽  
Gökçe Cerev ◽  
Bora Yenihan
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The State ◽  
Welfare Provision ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Social Risks ◽  
The Welfare State

The focus of this paper is the interaction between social innovation and restructuring welfare state. Modern welfare states have been reconfiguring their welfare mixes through social innovation. This includes a productive integration of formal and informal actors with support and leading role of the state. This collaboration becomes significantly important since it means the integration of not only the actors, but also their capabilities and resources in today’s world where new social risks and new social challenges have emerged and no actor can overcome these by its own. Therefore, social innovation is a useful tool in the new role sharing within the welfare mix in order to reach higher levels of satisfaction and success in welfare provision. The main point here is that this is not a zero-sum competition; gaining more power of the actors other than the state – the market, civil society organisations and the family – does not necessarily mean that the state lost its leading role and power. This is rather a new type of cooperation among actors and their capabilities as well as their resources in welfare provision. In this sense, social innovation may contribute well to the debates over the financial crisis of the welfare state since it may lead to the more wisely use of existing resources of welfare actors. Thanks to social innovative programs, not only the NGOs, but also market forces as well as citizens are more active to access welfare provisions and social protection in the broadest sense. Thus, social innovative strategies are definitely a solid step taken towards “enabling” or “active” welfare state.

scholarly journals Typology of welfare states: quality criteria for governance and ecology

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 235-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Koziuk ◽  
Oleksandr Dluhopolskyi ◽  
Yurij Hayda ◽  
Oksana Shymanska
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Clustering Methods ◽  
Governance System ◽  
Government Efficiency ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Welfare State

In the 21st century, in addition to the generally well-known indicators of material well-being, in the modern paradigm of the welfare state, the quality of the ecological environment is gaining an ever-increasing role. Besides that, the modern definition of welfare state takes into account not only environmental dimension, but also the quality of institutions through the governance system that affects the supply of environmental goods. The study provides the classification of countries according to indicators that can ensure the identification of welfare states and the assessment of the classification role of the criteria for environmental state.The strong direct correlation between environmental state and government efficiency has been established. The results of the classification of the studied countries obtained by k-means clustering methods indicate the possibility of using the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), Government Effectiveness Index (GEI) and government expenditures indicators as complementary attributes to the classical criteria for the welfare state.The level of country EPI can be regarded as an important complementary criterion for the welfare state. The country environmental state is much more determined by the government efficiency, the quality of state institutions and their activities, rather than by an extensive increase in the funding of such institutions and environmental measures.

2. Before the welfare state

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Garland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Social Provision ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Welfare State

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.

21. The welfare state

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kees van Kersbergen ◽  
Philip Manow
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Christian Democracy ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Social Doctrine ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Functionalist Approach ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Welfare State

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.

scholarly journals IDEOLOGY AND WELFARE STATE: HOW POLITICAL PARTIES INFLUENCE SOCIAL POLICY? THE CASE OF NORTH MACEDONIA

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 1343-1348
Author(s):  
Elisabeta Bajrami Ollogu
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Vulnerable Groups ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Welfare State

With the collapse of the former SFRY115, citizens, vulnerable groups in particular and the overall Macedonian society had to face the first decade of a prolonged transition, characterized by continuous reforms and rapid changes as a result of the newly emerging social conditions, ideological, political and economic challenges. The first decade of transitional period resulted in chaotic changes not only in the economic system, but in weaker measures of social protection and social security. With increased rates of unemployment, pensions and social security declining, health care services weakened, a number of legislative changes were introduced, both in terms of funding, administration and delivery of social policy services and institutional arrangements of social protection system. However, it has been shown that these policies and laws have not improved the overall situation of social beneficiary users nor have they helped to include them in the labor market.Since the independence of the country, social policies have undergone many changes broadly influenced by demographic factors, low economic growth and ideological ‘preferences’ of political parties governing the country so far. The question that naturally arises is: how much the measures applied have given rise to a positive change for the existence of the welfare state and to what extent it can be estimated that the social policies undertaken were influenced by ideological preferences? What is the legacy with the former state-socialist welfare tradition? Which were the main influences in the establishment of the welfare state in North Macedonia? Methodologically, this research is mainly characterized by literature review with the aim to analyze the social context in which reforms have undergone and being implemented. A document analysis of social policy documents will be used as well.

Sweden

2019 ◽  
pp. 228-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joakim Palme
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Financial Hardship ◽  
Policy Changes ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Protection Systems ◽  
Level Of Living ◽  
Social Protection Systems ◽  
The Welfare State

The two crises examined by Joakim Palme in this chapter impacted differently on the level of living conditions in Sweden. The deep 1990s crisis had a broad-ranging effect on population hardship, while Great Recession effects were much more restricted. The effects of the 1990s crisis were partially affected by the retrenchment of social protection expenditures across the board. This indicates an emerging institutional deficit in relation to the ideal type of universalism often associated with the Swedish welfare state model. In contrast, there were no retrenchment effects on social protection systems as such during the Great Recession, but policy changes made beforehand had actually increased the identified universalism deficit further. This leaves the welfare state at another crossroads, particularly in light of the massive refugee migration that took place in 2015. Nevertheless, the Swedish welfare state managed to avert an increase of financial hardship during the Great Recession.

Types of Social Protection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Pestieau ◽  
Mathieu Lefebvre
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Social Culture ◽  
Political Sustainability ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The One ◽  
Distinguishing Features ◽  
The Welfare State

There does not exist a single model forthe welfare state in Europe. Each country has its own model, which is the result of its political and social culture and of its economic evolution. There exist a number of taxonomies of welfare states. In this chapter we favour a taxonomy based on two characteristics: the generosity and the redistributiveness of programs. The main interest of distinguishing among different types of social protection programs is the different implications they have in terms of efficiency, equity, and political sustainability. We observe a trade-off between efficiency and political support on the one hand and equity on the other hand. Other distinguishing features of the welfare state are analysed: individualization, activation, and responsabilization.

Explaining the welfare state: power resources vs. the Quality of Government

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo Rothstein ◽  
Marcus Samanni ◽  
Jan Teorell
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Power Resources ◽  
Social Risks ◽  
Wage Earners ◽  
Power Resource Theory ◽  
The Welfare State

The hitherto most successful theory explaining why similar industrialized market economies have developed such varying systems for social protection is the Power Resource Theory (PRT), according to which the generosity of the welfare state is a function of working class mobilization. In this paper, we argue that there is an under-theorized link in the micro-foundations for PRT, namely why wage earners trying to cope with social risks and demand for redistribution would turn to the state for a solution. Our approach, the Quality of Government (QoG) theory, stresses the importance of trustworthy, impartial, and uncorrupted government institutions as a precondition for citizens’ willingness to support policies for social insurance. Drawing on data on 18 OECD countries during 1984–2000, we find (a) that QoG positively affects the size and generosity of the welfare state, and (b) that the effect of working class mobilization on welfare state generosity increases with the level of QoG.

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