Social Expenditure and Welfare State Financing

This chapter focuses on both the expenditures and the revenues of the welfare state. Using the latest data available, it depicts and analyses major developments in social spending and public revenues in twenty-one advanced Western democracies since 1980. The entry discusses measurement issues, depicts the determinants of cross-national differences in spending and revenue levels identified in the literature, and sheds light on the impact of social spending and taxation on social outcomes, such as income inequality. It is argued that spending and revenue figures, irrespective of several shortcomings, provide important indicators of both the logic and pattern of welfare state development.

Political Institutions

This chapter surveys theories and empirical evidence about the impact of state structures and political institutions on welfare state structures and outcomes. It shows that the political-institutional analysis of welfare states has shifted over time from an interest in static structures to a much more dynamic analysis of the interplay amongst preferences, structures, ideas, and institutions. It reviews different approaches to the study of political institutions, including majoritarian versus consensus democracy, veto points, and veto players. The impact of veto points on welfare state development and change, as well as the links between electoral systems and electoral dynamics on social policy outcomes, are explained and discussed. The chapter concludes with a review of the impact of past policies on welfare state politics and outcomes.

The Social Rights of Citizenship

This chapter reviews the welfare state literature which conceives of welfare state entitlements as ‘social rights of citizenship’, following the conceptualization of T. H. Marshall in his 1950 essay on citizenship. Beginning with Marshall’s influential essay, the first section of the chapter discusses how social rights of citizenship have been defined in the literature on comparative welfare states. Marshall argues that the defining feature of the social rights of citizenship is that they entail a claim for public transfers, goods, and services ‘which is not proportionate to the market value of the claimant’. Early quantitative studies of welfare state development measured welfare state effort with social expenditure, which was seen as a proxy for the variables of real interest, social rights, or welfare state redistribution. In the 1980s, ambitious efforts to measure social rights through time and across countries were initiated, though these measures did not find their way into the public domain until after 2000. These measures focus on rights to welfare state transfers and thus neglect services. The chapter ends with reviews of the literature on the causes of variations in social rights across countries and through time and on the outcomes of variations in social rights.

Basic Human Values and Attitudes Towards a Universal Basic Income in Europe

This study contributes to the emerging literature on public opinion on a universal basic income (UBI) not only by investigating the role of basic human values in influencing support for UBI but also by examining the moderating role of welfare state development in the association between basic human values and UBI support. Using the European Social Survey (ESS) Round 8 in 2016, which has an item asking whether to support UBI and the 21-item measure of human values that is based on the Schwartz theory of basic human values, the results show that individual universalism that is a self-transcendence value is positively and significantly associated with support for UBI, while the other self-transcendence value, benevolence, has a negative relationship with that; the two self-enhancement values, power and achievement, are positively linked to support for UBI. Additionally, in advanced welfare states, people who are more inclined towards individual universalism are more likely to support UBI; by contrast, in underdeveloped welfare states, this relationship is not apparent.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Poverty: Culture and Welfare State Development in Britain, Denmark and France

Why did historical anti-poverty programs in Britain, Denmark and France differ so dramatically in their goals, beneficiaries and agents for addressing poverty? Different cultural views of poverty contributed to how policy makers envisioned anti-poverty reforms. Danish elites articulated social investments in peasants as necessary to economic growth, political stability and societal strength. British elites viewed the lower classes as a challenge to these goals. The French perceived the poor as an opportunity for Christian charity. Fiction writers are overlooked political agents who engage in policy struggles. Collectively, writers contribute to a country's distinctive ‘cultural constraint’, or symbols and narratives, which appears in the national-level aggregation of literature. To assess cross-national variations in cultural depictions of poverty, this article uses historical case studies and quantitative textual analyses of 562 British, 521 Danish and 498 French fictional works from 1770 to 1920.

Emergence of a mortality disparity between a marginal rural area and the rest of Denmark, 1968-2017

Background Lolland-Falster is a rural area of Denmark, where the life expectancy is presently almost six years lower than in the rich capital suburbs. To determine the origin of this disparity, we analysed changes in mortality during 50 years in Lolland-Falster. Methods Annual population number and number of deaths at municipality level were retrieved from StatBank Denmark and from Statistics Denmark publications, 1968–2017. For 1974–2017, life expectancy at birth by sex and 5-year calendar period was calculated. From 1968 to 2017, standardised mortality ratio (SMR) for all-cause mortality was calculated by sex, 5-year calendar period and municipality, with Denmark as standard and including 95% confidence intervals (CI). Results In 1968–2017, life expectancy in Lolland-Falster increased, but less so than in the rest of Denmark. Fifty years ago, Lolland-Falster had a mortality similar to the rest of Denmark. The increasing mortality disparity developed gradually starting in the late 1980s, earlier in Lolland municipality (western part) than in Guldborgsund municipality (eastern part), and earlier for men than for women. By 2013–2017, the SMR had reached 1.25 (95% CI 1.19–1.31) for men in the western part, and 1.11 (95% CI 1.08–1.16) for women in the eastern part. Increasing mortality disparity was particularly seen in people aged 20–69 years. Conclusions This study is the first to report on increasing geographical segregation in all-cause mortality in a Nordic welfare state. Development of the mortality disparity between Lolland-Falster and the rest of Denmark followed changes in agriculture, industrial company closure, a shipyard close-down, administrative centralisation, and a decreasing population size.

Mapping Welfare State Development in post-Neoliberal Latin America

Why have some countries in Latin America and the Caribbean developed more comprehensive welfare systems than others? Do political and economic factors help us signal the (un) favourable paths taken by countries with different degrees of welfare state development in the XXI century? This paper addresses limitations of previous comparative research to continue (re) searching the conditions of welfare state development. A composite multidimensional welfare state development index (WeSDI) is constructed for 18 countries between 2000–2015. The four dimensions are the magnitude of social expenditure, the scope of coverage of welfare programmes, quality of the coverage of welfare programmes and outcomes of welfare institutions. The WeSDI uses goalposts (i.e. natural zeros and aspirational targets) to normalise individual indices and avoid the “relativity problems” of results. We use crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to test how necessary and/or sufficient eight political and economic conditions are (alone or in combination) to foster multidimensional welfare state development in the region. The causal conditions are openness to external shocks, debt obligations, revenue-collection capabilities, labour movement strength, strength of the left, policy legacies of welfare institutions, size of the outsider population and quality of democracy. The paper confirms the relevance of democratic strength, revenue-collection capabilities (and to a lesser degree policy legacy of welfare institutions) as sufficient conditions of high and medium levels of welfare state development in the (post) neoliberal era. In addition to labour movement strength, these same economic and political factors are relevant to understand the conditions behind very low levels of welfare state development.