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.

Nordic vagabonds: The Roma and the logic of benevolent violence in the Swedish welfare state

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanessa Barker
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Mixed Responses ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Welfare State

In Sweden, control of the mobile poor is often driven by the needs and demands of the welfare state itself and follows a different logic outside the neoliberal paradigm. By examining the case of the Roma, EU citizens who travel to Sweden to ask for money on the streets, we can see the expansion and retraction of the criminal law as the government responds to new forms of migration and poverty in its society. The government’s mixed responses – no to bans on begging, but yes to evictions – are the result of dualities inherent in Nordic welfare states, when their inclusionary ameliorative dimensions collide with their exclusionary and nationalistic tendencies. This article proposes the term benevolent violence to conceptualize this duality. It occurs when coercive means are used to uphold the state’s ameliorative goals and when the state’s ameliorative practices have violent effects. In the case of the Roma, it means protecting them from their own livelihood and it means protecting the welfare state for nationals, keeping it solvent for members.

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 Availability of social services for families with disabled children in the context of the welfare state

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-48
Author(s):  
Agota Giedrė Raišienė ◽  
Laura Gardziulevičienė
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Children With Disabilities ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Disabled Children ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
The Welfare State

The phenomenon of the welfare state is characterized by complexity of indicators. To determine in which areas the country is closer to the welfare state, various areas of social policy are analysed. In this article, we set out to investigate one of them, i.e., the accessibility of social services for children with disabilities. The European Union ensures the basic preconditions for the well-being of children with disabilities and emphasizes the compatibility of health, social and educational services (European Commission, 2021). In addition, Member States are free to introduce specific measures for social inclusion (COM, 2021). The well-being of children with disabilities is inseparable from that of adults, usually the family in which the children live. Depending on the child’s disability, the family has to devote time to the child’s special needs, so opportunities to function in society, such as working and earning an income, become dependent on the social assistance received for the disabled child. Research shows that participation in labour market processes reduces the social exclusion of families with children with disabilities and improves quality of life indicators in general (Stefanidis & Strogilos 2020). However, analysis of good practice is more common, while information about the lack of services that parents face difficulties remains overboard. Thus, our research contributes to a better understanding of how families raising children with disabilities use state-provided social services and what solutions and measures are needed to improve the quality of life of children with disabilities and their relatives. The practical implications of our article are revealed through the possibility of more confidently shaping the decisions and measures of the welfare state.The article presents results of a survey of 68 families with disabled children. Our research was conducted in Druskininkai municipality which has typical infrastructure of social services for the disabled and their families in Lithuania.Our study has shown that social services in Lithuania poorly meet needs of families with disabled children. Though social inclusion is one of the most important features of the welfare state, the provision of social services to disabled and their families goes beyond the concept in Druskininkai municipality at least. Families have little information about social guarantees and support provided by the state and municipality. The families are limited to services reported by health care and education institutions. Moreover, the most significant problem hindering social integration of disabled and their families is a small portion of disabled children using services of day care centre. As a result, children suffer at risk of social exclusion while disabled children’s parents lack of opportunities to fully participate in the labour market.Based on the results of the study we state that increasing the availability of social services that meet the needs of families with disabled children is a necessary social policy solution, without which the development of a welfare state in Lithuania is hardly possible.

scholarly journals THE LIBERAL AND LIBERTARIAN VIEW OF THE WELLFARE STATE

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-176
Author(s):  
Kire Sharlamanov
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Current Topic ◽  
The World ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
A Current ◽  
Libertarian View ◽  
The Welfare State

The reduction of the state of well-being is a current topic both in the general and in the professional public. There is debate in the professional public about the reasons that caused the welfare state to decline. An important part of the researchers point out that the collapse of communism, among other things, has resulted in a reduction of welfare states around the world. However, the number of analysts who consider that the idolatical movements and the debates between the Liberals and the Libertarian have also influenced the practices associated with the reduction of the welfare state. In order to understand the differences between these two ideological doctrines, in this text we will consider the basic positions of the most prominent liberal author John Rawls and the most notable libertarian author Robert Noizick.

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.

TYPOLOGY OF WELFARE STATE, QUALITY OF INSTITUTIONS AND ENVIRONMENTAL GOODS IN POST-SOCIALIST COUNTRIES

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-19
Author(s):  
Oksana SHYMANSKA ◽  
Victor KOZIUK ◽  
Yuriy HAYDA
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Market Process ◽  
Ecological State ◽  
Public Finances ◽  
Environmental Goods ◽  
Quality Of Institutions ◽  
The Government

The change in the views on the welfare state, which ceases to be associated only with the scale of social transfers, redistribution, or extension of the perimeters of market process regulation, has been researched, and is increasingly perceived in new coordinates: «quality of institutions and effective governance – inclusiveness – environmental factors of well-being. The theoretical explication of correspondence between the «state scale» and the efficiency of the government (taking into account the problem of ensuring a high-quality ecology) is proposed, on the basis of which it is concluded that welfare becomes a derivative of the institutionalchoice. For example, in a number of post-socialist countries using statistical data that characterizes the ecological state, governance efficiency and public finances, there is a direct correlation between the first two indicators. At the same time, the high probability of mutual influence of the efficiency of public administration and the share of public finances on the country ecological state is not denied. Such results clarify the understanding of the supply of public goods as such, the demand for which has only rich countries.

The Oxford Handbook of Swedish Politics

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Electoral Behavior ◽  
Wealthy Country ◽  
The Public ◽  
Eu Membership ◽  
Global Comparison ◽  
Swedish Politics ◽  
The Welfare State

Sweden signifies to many international observers a universal welfare state embedded in a capitalist economy, with high taxes and extensive redistribution of wealth. The welfare state is sustained by values such as equal standards, a strong public sector, legality, and redistribution of wealth. Many of these values have been challenged by cutbacks in the public budget, globalization, and the emergence of neoliberalism. More broadly, politics and political behavior are less exceptional today in international comparison than they were a few decades ago. Electoral behavior, institutional reform, and public administration conform these days to mainstream international patterns of change. Sweden no longer ranks as a top country on many indicators of quality of public service or indeed of well-being. Instead, the country has moved closer to the average of the OECD countries on most of these indicators. In the international arena, the previous policy of non-alliance and neutrality is challenged by EU membership, although Sweden maintains its position as an advocate for human rights and national sovereignty. However, in a global comparison Sweden still stands out as a wealthy country with extensive welfare services.

1. What is the welfare state?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Garland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Social Rights ◽  
Economic Management ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Welfare State

There are three general conceptions used for the welfare state: the first characterizes the welfare state as welfare for the poor; the second focuses on social insurance, social rights, and social services; and the third highlights economic management and the role that the ‘government of the economy’ plays in every welfare state. ‘What is the welfare state?’ explains that welfare states are varied, complex, and difficult to define. There is no simple theory that clearly expresses what they do, no simple vision that neatly captures what they are for. The welfare state is a damage-limiting, problem-solving device rather than anyone’s ideal social relationship.

Well-being and Economic Growth: Critical Perspectives

2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-16
Author(s):  
Catherine Audard
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
American University ◽  
Financial Capitalism ◽  
Critical Democracy ◽  
The Welfare State

In Democracy in America (1840) , Tocqueville treats the passion for well-being as the consequence of equality. He does not forget to warn of the threats to democratic societies that could arise from the simple pursuit of “small and vulgar pleasures”, but he concludes that no government can be stable unless it satisfies this democratic passion for the “greatest well-being of all” (II, 4, 8). Tocqueville’s vision proved prophetic, and well-being did indeed become a matter of statecraft, with the welfare state emerging in the twentieth century as the indispensable mode of governance to regulate economic growth, protect the citizens and secure their standard of living against the ceaseless crises of capitalism and the vagaries of life. But this consensus on the nature and value of well-being and the economic growth that makes it possible is being increasingly challenged by the unprecedented crisis that we are experiencing, a crisis that simultaneously encompasses representative democracies, financial capitalism and the inequalities it engenders, welfare states and the threats to the environment posed by the race to consume and live well. In these circumstances, the colloquium presented in this introduction revisited the very notion of well-being and took stock of its different conflicting conceptions. Organized by The Tocqueville Society/La Société Tocqueville and The Center for Critical Democracy Studies at The American University of Paris, it was held by videoconference on 21 and 22 October 2020. All the papers in this dossier were presented at the colloquium.

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