Daniel Wincott

The Political Economy of European Welfare Capitalism

A state-of-the-art assessment of welfare provision, policy and reform at national and at EU level which spans the whole of Europe - East, West and Central. Uniquely broad-ranging in scope, and covering the latest research findings and theoretical debates, it provides a genuinely comparative overview text for students of twenty-first-century Europe.

England, Englishness and Brexit

In the 1975 referendum England provided the strongest support for European integration, with a much smaller margin for membership in Scotland and Northern Ireland. By 2015 the rank order of ‘national’ attitudes to European integration had reversed. Now, England is the UKs most eurosceptic nation and may vote ‘Leave’, while Scotland seems set to generate a clear margin for ‘Remain’. The UK as a whole is a Brexit marginal. To understand the campaign, we need to make sense of the dynamics of public attitudes in each nation. We take an ‘archaeological’ approach to a limited evidence-base, to trace the development of attitudes to Europe in England since 1975. We find evidence of a link between English nationalism and euroscepticism. Whatever the result in 2016, contrasting outcomes in England and Scotland will exacerbate tensions in the UKs territorial constitution and could lead to the break-up of Britain.

Images of Welfare in Law and Society: The British Welfare State in Comparative Perspective

Designed by Beveridge and built by Attlees post-war Labour government, the welfare state was created during the 1940s. Britain has been seen – in domestic debates and internationally – as a world first: the place where both the idea and the practice of the welfare state were invented. I draw together comparative welfare state analysis with law and society scholarship (previously largely developed in isolation from one another) – as well as using British political cartoons as a source – to develop a revisionist historical critique of this conventional wisdom. First, the British welfare state has always been comparatively parsimonious. Second, the idea of the welfare state seems to have its origins outside the United Kingdom and this terminology was adopted relatively late and with some ambivalence in public debate and scholarly analysis. Third, a large body of socio-legal scholarship shows that robust ‘welfare rights’ were never embedded in the British ‘welfare state’.

Envisioning the Third Sector's Welfare Role: Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Post‐Devolution’ Public Policy in the UK 1998–2012

Welfare state theory has struggled to come to terms with the role of the third sector. It has often categorized welfare states in terms of the pattern of interplay between state social policies and the structure of the labour market. Moreover, it has frequently offered an exclusive focus on state policy – thereby failing to substantially recognize the role of the formally organized third sector. This study offers a corrective view. Against the backdrop of the international shift to multi-level governance, it analyses the policy discourse of third sector involvement in welfare governance following devolution in the UK. It reveals the changing and contrasting ways in which post-devolution territorial politics envisions the sectors role as a welfare provider. The mixed methods analysis compares policy framing and the structural narratives associated with the development of the third sector across the four constituent polities of the UK since 1998. The findings reveal how devolution has introduced a new spatial policy dynamic. Whilst there are elements of continuity between polities – such as the increasing salience of the third sector in welfare provision – policy narratives also provide evidence of the territorialization of third sector policy. From a methodological standpoint, this underlines the distinctive and complementary role discourse-based analysis can play in understanding contemporary patterns and processes shaping welfare governance.

How Brexit was made in England

The Leave majority recorded in England was decisive in determining the UK-wide referendum result. Brexit was made in England. We take this as a prompt to challenge the conventional Anglo-British mindset that animates most studies of ‘British politics’ and has shaped public attitudes research on the United Kingdom. We explore the persistence of distinctive Eurosceptic views in England and their relationship to English national identity prior to the referendum. We then model referendum vote choice using data from the Future of England Survey. Our analysis shows that immigration concerns played a major role in the Brexit referendum, alongside a general willingness to take risks, right-wing views, older age, and English national identity. Therefore, Brexit was not just made in England, but Englishness was also a significant driver of the choice for Leave.

Slippery Concepts, Shifting Context: (National) States and Welfare in the Veit‐Wilson/Atherton Debate

The debate between Veit-Wilson and Atherton raises key conceptual questions for the analysis of welfare states. Veit-Wilson, in particular, focuses on the important, but strangely neglected question of when and why a state qualifies as a welfare state. Atherton usefully draws attention to historical debates about the legitimate purposes of state welfare policies and worthy recipients of state benefits, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries. His contribution may draw our attention to the shifting meaning of concepts (such as poverty) over time. In this contribution I seek to broaden the debate. First, without underestimating the importance of such criteria, rather than presenting one single (normatively based) “discriminating criterion” defining welfare statehood, I argue that other conceptions of “the welfare state” may be useful as well—so long as analysts are clear and explicit about how they are using the phrase. Second, in the current conjuncture of the perceived “transformation” perhaps even “destruction” of the welfare state, historical and comparative research grounded on clear and explicit concepts is crucial.

Introduction: Studying Brexit’s causes and consequences:

The choice made by voters in the United Kingdom on 23 June 2016 to leave the European Union (EU) caused a political earthquake in more ways than one. A profound sense of surprise or shock at the outcome of the vote was evident on all sides. Many had the sense of having woken up in a different country, one that had ‘changed utterly’ (GormleyHeenan and Aughey, 2017). The choice for Brexit also set off a series of other dramatic events. The referendum as an event triggered the Brexit process—or processes. During the first few months after the referendum, that process had already been punctuated by other surprising political moments and episodes in the United Kingdom, from the resignation of David Cameron as Prime Minister, by way of subsequent rivalrous infighting among Prime Ministerial pretenders and Theresa May’s emergence unchallenged as Cameron’s heir apparent. It also extended to the collapse of power-sharing in Northern Ireland and a strong snap election showing for Sinn Fein, to calls for a second referendum on Scottish independence (the first was held in 2014), and to May’s switch from resolute determination not to cut and run electorally to her announcement on 18 April of a snap General Election for 8 June 2017. May justified this decision as necessary to give her a strong mandate to negotiate Brexit. Brexit presents new, daunting analytical tasks to social and political scientists. This Special Issue collects articles that contribute to completing these new tasks, across a range of domestic, comparative and international dimensions. We focus on three broad areas: the path that led to the referendum; explaining and interpreting the vote for Brexit; and assessing its consequences.

Brexit dilemmas: New opportunities and tough choices in unsettled times:

Concluding the British Journal of Politics and International Relations’ (BJPIR) Brexit Special Issue, this article seeks to set the unsettled times and unexpected events associated with the Brexit in historic context and tease out the prospects for a ‘bespoke’ UK exit agreement. Drawing on classics of social science history—by Barrington Moore, Gourevitch and Davis—it reflects on ‘suppressed historic choices’ and historical periodisations. Three key dilemmas are interrogated: the Brexit dilemma (control of immigration/regaining of sovereignty vs European Union (EU) market access), the Brexiteers’ dilemma (sustaining economic prosperity while restricting immigration) and the Remainers/soft Brexit dilemma (of weakening Parliamentary democracy by staying in the Single Market).

Exploring the 'legal' in socio-legal studies

This chapter considers the place of law in current political debates about how best to address problems of social justice, with particular reference to sex/gender and sexuality. In examining recent ‘moments’ of successful law reform around issues of sex/gender and sexuality, I will argue that the contemporary thirst for law as a route to equality does not address deeper, more structural questions of inequality. Accommodation and assimilation of ‘others’ within the existing legal system will always leave open the question of what social justice could look like were it not understood autopoietically — solely and self-referentially within the confines of existing frameworks of legal rights and responsibilities. What is more, recent moments of sex/gender and sexuality law reform tell us something not only about the gap between law and ‘the social’ but also about the power of law and legal techniques. In this chapter I will explore what happens when, first, legal tools are used to adapt existing doctrinal approaches to include — co-opt — those who previously have fallen outwith the protection of the law; and second, how such techniques fail to deliver justice, despite the good intentions of those who aim for equality (albeit without the kind of radical rethinking that activists and critical scholars might desire).

Conclusion: Citizenship After the Nation State: The 2009 Survey and Beyond

We took a large step into the dark when we first sought to develop the Citizenship after the Nation-State (CANS) project. Multi-team comparative social science is a notoriously complex business — and while the collaborative design of a single survey research instrument to be fielded across linguistic and political borders was fascinating, it was also very demanding. The complexity of these challenges was increased because this kind of research had never before been attempted at the regional level. In attempting to do so, we had to challenge scepticism — or even hostility — of two intertwined kinds. The first is a species of normative hostility. Many commentators treat regions as atavistic, normatively dubious political throwbacks. So, for example, Ralf Dahrendorf called regionalism ‘the worst formula of all’ because ‘it takes us back to tribes on the one hand and forward to provisions without entitlements on the other’ (1994, p. 17). While making an important call for more empirical research, geographer Joe Painter echoed this normative anxiety when he referred to ‘ethnic regionalism of an essentialist or primordial type’ (2002, p. 109).