Antonia Keung

Exploring the Culture—Welfare Nexus: Key Trends, Key Cases

In this chapter we focus in greater depth on some key trends and key cases highlighted in chapters. More specifically, we examine four issues: the Conservative/Corporatist regime puzzle; the Liberal regime bifurcation; the meaning of traditional family values; and, the significance of optimistic values. In exploring these issues we demonstrate how more detailed exploration of case study evidence may help understand how the culture-welfare nexus operates in practice, offering a more nuanced perspective than is possible through broad-brushed macro-level comparisons alone. We also explore some of the methodological challenges uncovered in Chapters 2 and 3, pointing to refinements to our approach that may be taken forward in future research.

Conclusion: Bringing Culture ‘Back In’ to Comparative Social Policy Analysis

In this chapter we draw the book to a close, pulling together the key arguments advanced across each chapter. We suggest that there is considerable value in bringing culture ‘back in’ to debates about cross-national variations in social policy and that the exploration of societal values may help us to understand more not only about how and why welfare states differ but also how and why their long-term paths may change over time too. However, there are considerable methodological challenges faced in exploring the culture-welfare nexus empirically and we reflect on some of the key challenges here.

Exploring the Cultural Context of Welfare Policy Making

After reviewing debates on the role of culture in shaping cross-national variations in social policy, we argue that culture is best viewed as a significant but not decisive influence on patterns of welfare. We argue that empirical analysis has been somewhat constrained by conceptions of culture that are either too broad or too narrow, offering an ‘in-between approach’ that identifies stable patterns of societal values that we suggest can act as useful proxy measures for the cultural context of policy making. Examining European Values Study /World Values Survey data covering a period from 1981 to 2009 we identify eight examples of societal values on which we build in the remainder of the book.