scholarly journals The main factors of the recent development of European welfare states: Swedish case

Author(s):  
Aleksei Chekmazov ◽  
Vladyslav Butenko

This analytical essay is devoted to identifying the features of the formation and development of the Swedish model of the welfare state. The authors study the factors that played the main role in the development of the Swedish model. The authors also assess the impact of the 2008 economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic on the Swedish welfare state.

2006 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Hay

AbstractThe appeal to globalization as a non-negotiable external economic constraint plays an increasingly significant role in the linked politics of expectation suppression and welfare reform in contemporary Europe. Yet, although it threatens to become something of a self- fulfilling prophecy, the thesis that globalization entails welfare retrenchment and convergence is empirically suspect. In this paper it is argued that there is little evidence of convergence amongst European social models and that, although common trajectories can be identified, these have tended to be implemented more or less enthusiastically and at different paces to produce, to date, divergent outcomes. Second, I suggest that it is difficult to see globalization as the principal agent determining the path on which European social models are embarked since the empirical evidence points if anything to de-globalization rather than globalization. The implications of this for the future of the welfare state in Europe and for the USA as a model welfare state regime are explored.


Author(s):  
David Garland

The welfare states that enjoyed three decades of expansion after 1945 endured a challenging period in the following decades. From the late 1970s, in one country after another, opposition groups mounted a sustained attack on welfare states in the name of free markets and conservative family values. ‘Neoliberalism and WS 2.0’ describes the 1970s economic crisis and the neoliberal assault it unleashed. Despite their political dominance in the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal reformers did not abolish the welfare state, but succeeded in changing its character, creating a less expansive, more austere version—‘WS 2.0’—based on a neoliberal style of economic government and a market-oriented reworking of social policy.


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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 240-258
Author(s):  
Jan Zutavern ◽  
Martin Kohli

Welfare states must respond to the needs and risks that arise from secular transformations such as deindustrialization, tertiarization, digitalization, population ageing, declining fertility, and changing gender and family relations. This chapter shows that understanding the impact of needs and risks on welfare states requires both empirical and normative considerations: examining the socio-economic consequences of these transformations as well as the normative underpinnings of needs- and risk-based claims to social policy. We first discuss the normative concepts of human needs and risks and the marks they have left on prominent theories of the welfare state, and then move to the empirical side, taking stock of the current socio-economic challenges for a range of welfare states, and of their manifestation in today’s employment and family-related need and risk profiles.


2021 ◽  
pp. xxx-20
Author(s):  
Daniel Béland ◽  
Kimberly J. Morgan ◽  
Herbert Obinger ◽  
Christopher Pierson

This synoptic introduction guides the reader through the major themes in this comparative analysis of the developed welfare states. It first outlines the origins of the welfare state and its development down to 1940. It then considers the impact of the Second World War on social policy and traces the apparent successes of expanding welfare state regimes in the thirty years that followed the war. It then assesses the critique and challenges that arose for this welfare state settlement from the mid-1970s onwards and the idea of a ‘crisis of the welfare state’. These challenges were simultaneously ideological, political, economic, and demographic, and are sometimes seen to have created new circumstances of ‘permanent austerity’. The contemporary welfare state faces a set of challenges very different to those which arose after 1945 in which the near-future context is set by the continuing impact of the Great Recession after 2008 and the new world of social policy created by COVID-19.


Author(s):  
Kees van Kersbergen ◽  
Philip Manow

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.


2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 529-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grete Brochmann

Today Western European welfare states find themselves in a paradoxical situation: parts of working life are in need of labour that is difficult to find nationally – and internationally. While this is partly due to inflexible policies, it is also due to competition for labour among Western countries. At the same time, asylum seekers are constantly arriving, often to be joined by family members. The authorities are confronted with a mismatch between the supply of, and demand for, immigrants. The receiving countries do not get the labour they want, while many of those who actually come cannot be incorporated productively for various reasons. This situation illustrates the squeeze facing today’s welfare states – in this article exemplified with the Norwegian case – between the logic of humanitarian responsibilities and the concerns of the national economy.


2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bambi Ceuppens

Abstract:This article analyzes the growth of autochthony in Belgium as an example of the increasing popularity of autochthony discourses in Western Europe. Autochthony discourses, which try to reserve the benefits of the welfare state to those who are said to really belong, tend to thrive in prosperous Western European welfare states with a strong Social-Democratic tradition that refuse to accept that they have become immigrant countries. In federalized Belgium, however, autochthony has a much stronger appeal in Flanders, which historically was dominated by Christian-Democratic parties, than in Wallonia, which remains a Social-Democratic bulwark. Analyzing Western European autochthony in terms of welfare chauvinism helps explain the ways in which prosperous Flemings, unlike impoverished Walloons, can afford to buy into the neoliberal rhetoric of choice and thus create themselves as autochthons.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Powell ◽  
Armando Barrientos

Gosta Esping-Andersen's (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism has become one of the most cited works in social policy (over 20,600 Google Scholar citations; 20 October 2014). This path-breaking work, with its identification of three distinct forms of welfare capitalism in high income countries, has become the basis for a whole academic industry described as the Welfare Modelling Business (Abrahamson 1999; Powell and Barrientos 2011). According to Headey et al. (1997: 332), it has become a canon in comparative social policy against which any subsequent work must situate itself. Abrahamson (1999) notes that, since the publication of the book, every welfare state scholar has referred to Esping-Andersen's tripolar scheme. Scruggs and Allen (2006: 55, 69) remark that it ‘is difficult to find an article comparing welfare states in advanced democratic countries (or a syllabus on social policy) that does not refer to this seminal work’, and ‘it is hard to overstate the significance of the impact of The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (TWWC) on comparative studies of the welfare state’. Its seminal status is evidenced by the extent to which it continues to be cited in articles on comparative welfare states. It also remains required reading for most (graduate) students of comparative political economy and social policy (Scruggs and Allen, 2008). Kröger (2011) claims that, with few exceptions, comparative social policy research is shaped by welfare regime analysis. Arts and Gelissen conclude that TWWC is a defining influence upon the whole field of comparative welfare state research (2010: 569). Danforth (2014) writes that the ‘three worlds’ typology has become one of the principal heuristics for examining modern welfare states. In short, TWWC is a ‘modern classic’ (Arts and Gelissen, 2002).


2020 ◽  
pp. 376-394
Author(s):  
Kees van Kersbergen ◽  
Philip Manow

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: the functionalist approach, the 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.


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