The four global worlds of welfare capitalism: Institutional, neoliberal, populist and residual welfare state regimes

What welfare state regimes are observed when the analysis is extended globally, empirically and theoretically? We introduce a novel perspective into the ‘welfare state regimes analyzes’ – a perspective that brings developed and developing countries together and, as such, broadens the geographical, empirical and theoretical scope of the ‘welfare modelling business’. The expanding welfare regimes literature has suffered from several drawbacks: (i) it is radically slanted towards organisation for economic co-operation and development (OECD) countries, (ii) the literature on non-OECD countries does not use genuine welfare policy variables and (iii) social assistance and healthcare programmes are not utilized as components of welfare state effort and generosity. To overcome these limitations, we employ advanced data reduction methods, exploit an original dataset that we assembled from several international and domestic sources covering 52 emerging markets and OECD countries and present a welfare state regime structure as of the mid-2010s. Our analysis is based on genuine welfare policy variables that are theorized to capture welfare generosity and welfare efforts across five major policy domains: old-age pensions, sickness cash benefits, unemployment insurance, social assistance and healthcare. The sample of OECD countries and emerging market economies form four distinct welfare state regime clusters: institutional, neoliberal, populist and residual. We unveil the composition and performance of welfare state components in each welfare state regime family and develop politics-based working hypotheses about the formation of these regimes. Institutional welfare state regimes perform high in social security, healthcare and social assistance, while populist regimes perform moderately in social assistance and healthcare and moderate-to-high in social security. The neoliberal regime performs moderately in social assistance and healthcare, and it performs low in social security, and the residual regime performs low in all components. We then hypothesize that the relative political strengths of formal and informal working classes are key factors that shaped these welfare state regime typologies.

Gendered retirement pathways across lifecourse regimes

In order to capture the rapidly changing reality of older workers, it is important to study retirement not as a one-off transition, but rather as a series of diverse pathways that unfold during the period before and after reaching the full retirement age. The retirement transitions of men and women have been shown to vary widely according to individual characteristics such as health, education and marital status, but also according to macro-institutional factors, such as welfare regimes and gender norms. While there is a consensus about the combined influence of institutional and individual factors in shaping retirement transitions, previous research has rarely included both levels of analysis. This study aims to close this research gap. Using a pooled-country dataset from three panel surveys, covering 11 nations, we examine the retirement pathways of 1,594 women and 1,105 men during a 12-year period (2004–2016) around the country- and gender-specific full pension age. Results show that retirement pathways diverge considerably across countries and lifecourse regimes. The distribution of men and women between the different pathways is also variable, both within and across societal contexts. More importantly, the influence of individual-level characteristics, such as education, on the gendering of retirement pathways is not identical across societal contexts. These findings provide useful insights into the gender-differentiated implications of policies aimed at extending working lives.

Children First? Intra-Household Inequality in Reconstituted Couple Households

An increasing number of children are growing up in reconstituted households, formed by a couple and a non-common child. Reconstituted households tend to be poorer, which is associated with worse behavioural and developmental outcomes. Additionally, there is evidence that non-common children receive less economic support from their parents upon leaving the parental home. Using age-specific deprivation data collected in the 2014 European Survey on Income and Living Conditions this article compares the allocation of resources in reconstituted and intact couple households. It shows that indeed, children in reconstituted households are more likely to be deprived compared to those in intact households. However, it finds no evidence that reconstituted households are less likely to prioritise children. The findings hold across welfare regimes. Women are more likely to go without compared with men, although differences are small.

Looking for a North Star? Ideological justifications and trade unions’ preferences for a universal basic income

Trade unions are often said to be hostile to a universal basic income (UBI). Their judgement may be affected by factors such as their work ethic, perceptions of the unemployed and preferences for labour decommodification. Yet, most studies fail to sketch out the reasons for which unions oppose or support a UBI from a normative standpoint. To understand the impact of ideology on unions’ appreciation for a UBI, I integrate results from 62 questionnaires with 27 in-depth qualitative interviews. This study illustrates that unions’ preferences for a UBI are associated with their theoretical understanding of labour, diverging substantially across welfare regimes. Whereas unions from Bismarckian and Nordic countries are generally opposed to a UBI, organizations from Liberal and Mediterranean countries tend to see UBI as a legitimate policy option. However, in some circumstances they set aside the policy for pragmatic reasons, thus disconnecting their normative orientations from perceptions of its concrete viability.

The Welfare State as Employer

This chapter introduces the concept of public employment regimes to understand why reform trajectories aligning public to private employment take on different pathways and reflect differences in welfare regimes and political economy types referring to OECD countries. After mapping the state of the art on the relevance and development of public employment in Western welfare states, the chapter presents a comparative evaluation of the distinct features of public employment regimes. Specifically, we compare the costs and size of government employment (capturing the fiscal side of public employment regimes), the extent to which females and migrants are represented in the public workforce (referring to the societal integration function of the state as an employer), and public–private-sector wage differentials (referring to the role of the state as employer for the private sector). The chapter concludes by outlining future trends and the need for further research from a global perspective.

Governance

The creation of every social programme entails decisions about governance—about how these programmes are to be funded and administered. Policymakers have made varying choices about the territorial organization of social programme governance, as well as the mix of public and private actors involved in their financing, administration, and delivery. These decisions are highly consequential, shaping the relative power of different constituencies and governing bodies. Governance systems also reflect views about central versus local power, the role of religious and other groups in social provision, and the balance between markets versus states in providing for human welfare needs. This chapter examines social programme governance from a historical and a cross-national perspective to elucidate key patterns and trends. The first half of the chapter focuses on the public–private mix in welfare governance, while the second explores territorial governance, with a specific focus on federalism. One important theme in this chapter concerns the need to challenge assumptions that welfare states are monolithic, highly centralized, and state dominated. Instead, contemporary welfare regimes are mixed systems in which policy development and implementation often take place through non-state actors and/or at subnational levels of government.

Recent Developments

The trajectory of developed welfare states in the early twenty-first century is perhaps best understood through the idea of ‘social investment’. The first section of the chapter defines social investment as a sui generis welfare paradigm, distinct from both the Keynesian–Beveridgean welfare state and its neoliberal critique, and analytically rooted in the three interrelated policy functions of lifelong human capital stocks, work–life-balanced flows, and inclusive buffers. The second section identifies the trajectories of (non-)social investment reform that have cross-cut welfare regimes in the past two decades. Section three takes stock of the impact of the economic crisis on recent welfare state developments. The final section concludes by reflecting on the challenges and opportunities for welfare reform after the Great Recession. Most notably, it highlights how high public spending on established social protection commitments seemingly operates as a ‘productive constraint’ that accelerates social investment reform, reinforcing employment and productivity growth, to sustain popular welfare states.

Welfare States Matter for Democracy: Income-based Participatory Inequality in Post-WW 2 Western Democracies

Poorer citizens generally participate less in politics; at the same time, the income-based gap in participation is not the same across democracies. Whereas in Denmark in 1977 turnout among poorer citizens was 6 percentage points higher than among wealthier ones, in the United States in 1988 the gap is reversed: turnout among wealthier Americans is 31 percentage points higher than among their poorer peers. Existing attempts at understanding the sources of this variation point to macro-level factors, such as compulsory voting, ballot complexity, or income inequality (Gallego, 2015; Solt, 2008). Though important, we argue that existing accounts aren't successful in explaining temporal variation in this participation gap, over periods of time in which the institutional framework is stable. We propose instead a largely neglected, yet plausible, reason for why a differential effect of income on political participation exists: the characteristics of the welfare state. In addition to providing resources relevant to participation, welfare state arrangements also create political constituencies that can be mobilized around a shared goal by political entrepreneurs. Building on Schneider and Makszin's (2014) education-based analysis we inductively develop, with the use of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), various welfare regime types that condition patterns of income-based participatory inequality in democracies. These are produced based on an original data set of roughly 150 merged surveys from 19 OECD members, between 1960 and 2010. We label these types the supportive and mobilizing welfare regimes, along with their non-mobilizing and non-supportive counterparts. These welfare state regimes correspond to different mechanisms through which welfare state characteristics shape participatory patterns: (1) resource endowments available to individuals for participation and (2) unions' and parties' ability to politically mobilize and inform their members. We complement our aggregate-level QCA analysis with individual-level tests of these hypothesized mechanisms. Relying on six cross-national survey programs, such as the European Social Survey or the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find consistent support for the mobilization-based mechanisms, while revealing mixed evidence that they also spill over into attitudinal factors which underpin participation. Only weaker evidence is found for our resource-based mechanisms. Overall, our results indicate the effect of welfare state characteristics on political participation gaps in advanced industrial democracies. Welfare state reforms, and in particular retrenchment, are likely to have (damaging) consequences for democracy.

Doctor's Assessment on Salary, Income in Vietnam Public Hospital

This article studies the salary and income of doctors at public hospitals in Vietnam based on the survey results of 228 doctors at 5 central hospitals, 9 provincially run and centrally run hospitals and 10 district hospitals. The surveys were conducted during April and May, 2021. Research results show that it is necessary to have a correct viewpoint of the nature and role of salaries, bonuses and welfare regimes in the total income of doctors paid by public hospitals; It is also necessary to compare and evaluate the salary and income of doctors in public hospitals with the salaries and incomes of other industries and fields, other hospitals, and with colleagues in the same hospital; in order that essential changes can be made in state regulations, hospitals administration following a state-owned manner, and doctors perception of salary and income.