scholarly journals Outsourcing the Welfare State: The Role of Private Actors in Welfare Fraud Investigations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sofia Ranchordas ◽  
Ymre Schuurmans
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare Fraud ◽  
Private Actors ◽  
The Welfare State

scholarly journals Outsourcing the Welfare State: The Role of Private Actors in Welfare Fraud Investigations

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-42
Author(s):  
Sofia Ranchordás ◽  
Ymre Schuurmans
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Administrative Procedure ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Contractual Relationship ◽  
Welfare Fraud ◽  
The Right ◽  
Private Actors ◽  
The Welfare State

This article discusses the growing trend to employ private parties as informants, private detectives and providers of digital technology (e.g., automated risk assessments) to predict and investigate welfare fraud. In this article, we argue that this type of outsourcing is problematic for multiple reasons. First, private actors and governments often have an ill-defined contractual relationship which creates legal uncertainty and promotes the use of unconventional evidence-gathering instruments. This issue also raises concerns regarding the accountability of public bodies and the transparency and fairness of administrative procedure. Second, the private enforcement of anti-fraud regulations is susceptible of endangering the adequate pursuit of the public interest due to the misalignment of public and private interests. Third, the outsourcing of enforcement tasks to private technology companies and their opaque automated systems can be detrimental to the right to due process, the right to non-discrimination, and the privacy of welfare recipients. This article contributes to the literature with a novel critical account of how private actors are reshaping the welfare state.

Entreprenøren som figur under neoliberalismen - Kapitalisme, individ og velfærdsorganisering

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luise Li Langergaard
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Entrepreneurship ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Economic Innovation ◽  
The One ◽  
The Welfare State

The article explores the central role of the entrepreneur in neoliberalism. It demonstrates how a displacement and a broadening of the concept of the entrepreneur occur in the neoliberal interpretation of the entrepreneur compared to Schumpeter’s economic innovation theory. From being a specific economic figure with a particular delimited function the entrepreneur is reinterpreted as, on the one hand, a particular type of subject, the entrepreneur of the self, and on the other, an ism, entrepreneurialism, which permeates individuals, society, and institutions. Entrepreneurialism is discussed as a movement of the economic into previously non-economic domains, such as the welfare state and society. Social entrepreneurship is an example of this in relation to solutions to social welfare problems. This can, on the one hand, be understood as an extension of the neoliberal understanding of the entrepreneur, but it also, in certain interpretations, resists the neoliberal understanding of economy and society.

Last Rights? Funerals, Poverty and Social Exclusion

1998 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 507-524 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK DRAKEFORD
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Security ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Poor People ◽  
The Public ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Welfare State

This article considers the current state of help with funeral expenses in Britain. It argues that assistance has been progressively and deliberately eroded to the point where the famous ‘from the cradle to the grave’ protection of the welfare state has been removed from increasing numbers of poor people. The article sets these developments within the context of the contemporary British funeral industry, with emphasis upon its treatment of less-well-off consumers. The changing nature of social security provision for funeral expenses is traced in detail, including the actions of the incoming 1997 Labour government. This article investigates the public health role of local authorities in the case of burials, concluding that such services are insufficiently robust to meet the new weight placed upon them. The article ends with a consideration of the impact which these different changes produce in the lives of individuals upon whom they have an effect.

Nouveaux principes de référence et différenciation des arbitrages politiques : le cas des politiques à l'égard des sans-emploi

1998 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gérard Boismenu ◽  
Pascale Dufour
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
The State ◽  
Unemployed People ◽  
Level Of Abstraction ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
Reference Et ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThis article underlines three principles of reference that renew discourse on and comprehension of the role of the state in social protection towards unemployed people. At a certain level of abstraction, those principles of reference are present in many countries. They lead to label and to understand situations in different terms of which we were familiar during the Welfare State apogee. At the same time, they permit and open up to various political orientations and mechanisms of implementation. This dualism is emphasized. Four countries are referenced for this discussion: Canada, France, Germany and Sweden. The study considers the way in which problems are stated in their principles and the implementation of programmes. Policies and programmes implemented reveal logics of intervention which suggest different ways to consider the articulation between the « integrated area » and the « excluded area » of the society.

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.

Inequality and the Carceral State

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Gottschalk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Institutionalism ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Penal Policy ◽  
Cross National ◽  
The Welfare State

Some of the most promising work on mass incarceration, the retributive turn in penal policy, and growing inequalities in the United States employs a historical institutional lens. This work has illuminated the origins of the carceral state and the possibilities for dismantling it, the sources of interstate and cross-national variations in penal policy, and the role of race, gender, and the transformation of the welfare state in the construction of the carceral state. Going forward, illumination of pressing political problems like the carceral state will require that historical institutionalism retain or resurrect some of the qualities that originally made it so distinctive—even if that cuts against the grain of the wider discipline of political science.

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