Francis G. Castles

The future of the welfare state: crisis myths and crisis realities.

Accounts of the future of the welfare state are often presented in crisis terms. Some commentators identify globalization as a force that has already led to a major retreat by the state and is likely to lead to further downsizing of the public sector. Others see the future burden of an aging population as creating huge public expenditure pressures that can be countered only by increased parsimony in most areas of spending. Although both crisis scenarios contain elements of truth, analysis of recent public expenditure trends shows that both are substantially exaggerated as general representations of likely developments over the next two or three decades. However, unnoticed by most commentators, a real, longer-term crisis is beginning to make itself felt. This crisis arises, in part, from the demographic impact of a cultural transformation in the labor market, in progress for several decades. Extreme scenarios of possible consequences over the next 50 to 100 years include population implosion, mass migration, increasingly dangerous eruptions of right-wing populism, and, possibly, territorial conflict between developed and underdeveloped nations. This is not a crisis of the welfare state but rather a crisis for which the welfare state may be an essential part of the answer. The only way Western societies can lessen the future impact of the ongoing cultural transformation of the labor market is through the redesign of welfare state institutions to confront these new challenges.

The World Turned Upside Down: Below Replacement Fertility, Changing Preferences and Family-Friendly Public Policy in 21 OECD Countries

Over the past two decades, a decline in birth rates in advanced industrialized societies to levels well below those required for population replacement has been accompanied by a major change in the cross-national incidence of fertility. This has, in turn, given rise to a massive transformation in traditional cross-national patterns of relationships between fertility and other variables. Whereas previously the countries with the highest period fertility rates were those in which family-oriented cultural traditions were most pronounced and in which womens labour market participation was least, these relationships are now wholly reversed. This study uses data for 21 OECD countries to provide a more thorough and systematic mapping of the linkages between fertility, cultural values, economic structure and social policy than has hitherto been attempted in the literature, while simultaneously addressing some of the theoretical and methodological issues that arise in explaining a reversal of this magnitude. It argues that seemingly anomalous linkages with cultural traditions and employment structure are consequences of womens changing work and family preferences and of cross-national differences in the adoption of family-friendly public policy.

The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State

PART I PHILOSOPHICAL JUSTIFICATIONS AND CRITIQUES OF THE WELFARE STATE PART II HISTORY PART III APPROACHES PART IV INPUTS AND ACTORS PART V POLICIES PART VI POLICY OUTCOMES PART VII WORLDS OF WELFARE PART VIII PROSPECTS

Federalism and the welfare state : new world and European experiences

Preface 1. Introduction: Federalism and the welfare state Herbert Obinger, Francis G. Castles and Stephan Leibfried Part I. New World Experiences: 2. Australia - federal constraints and institutional innovations Francis G. Castles and John Uhr 3. Canada - nation-building in a federal welfare Keith Banting 4. The United States - federalism and counterfactuals Kenneth Finegold Part II. European Experiences: 5. Austria - strong parties in a weak federal system Herbert Obinger 6. Germany - cooperative federalism and the overgrazing of the fiscal commons Philip Manow 7. Switzerland - the marriage of direct democracy and federalism Herbert Obinger, Klaus Armingeon, Giuliano Bonoli and Fabio Bertozzi 8. Conclusion: old and new politics in federal welfare states Stephan Leibfried, Francis G. Castles and Herbert Obinger.

What Welfare States Do: A Disaggregated Expenditure Analysis

This article suggests that an alternative to a social rights of citizenship approach to comparing welfare states is to use disaggregated programme expenditure data to identify the diverse spending priorities of different types of welfare state. An initial descriptive analysis shows that four major categories of social spending (cash spending on older people and those of working age; service spending on health and for other purposes) are almost entirely unrelated to one another and that different welfare state regimes or families of nations exhibit quite different patterns of spending. The article proceeds to demonstrate that both the determinants and the outcomes of these different categories of spending also differ quite radically. In policy terms, most importantly, the article shows that cross-national differences in poverty and inequality among advanced nations are to a very large degree a function of the extent of cash spending on programmes catering to the welfare needs of those of working age.

Convergence towards where: in what ways, if any, are welfare states becoming more similar?

This article examines whether or not OECD welfare states have converged since 1980. Making use of a variety of concepts of convergence, we analyse the development of a broad range of quantitative welfare state indicators, including several expenditure-based indicators, revenue patterns, benefit replacement rates and decommodification. Contrary to what one might expect from much of the theoretical literature, we find that, although there is evidence of moderate welfare state convergence, it is limited in magnitude, various in directionality and contingent upon the indicator under examination. Overall, our findings do not provide any strong evidence either for a race to the bottom or for the Americanization of social policy, the two most common convergence scenarios encountered in supposedly informed public policy commentary.

Worlds, Families, Regimes: Country Clusters in European and OECD Area Public Policy

This article focuses on the notion that the policies and politics of states and nations constitute distinct worlds or clusters. We begin by examining the concept of clustering as it has emerged in the literature on policy regimes and families of nations. We then address a series of empirical questions: whether distinct worlds persist in an era of policy convergence and globalisation, whether policy antecedents cluster in the same ways as policy outcomes and whether the enlargement of the EU has led to an increase in the number of worlds constituting the wider European polity. Our main conclusions are that country clustering is, if anything, more pronounced than in the past, that it is, in large part, structurally determined and that the EU now contains a quite distinct post-Communist family of nations.

On the Political Economy of Recent Public Sector Development

This paper starts from a major contradiction in the literature on recent public sector development. On the one hand, globalization theory is read as implying major tendencies towards the retrenchment of the public sector and a ‘race to the bottom’ in social spending. On the other hand, comparative studies are largely unanimous in arguing that such tendencies have not occurred. To gain greater purchase on the realities of recent public sector trends, we disaggregate data for public expenditure change in 19 OECD countries over the period 1984 to 1997. We then develop a series of models of the factors determining expenditure trends over this period. The findings presented here provide no evidence that exposure to international trade leads governments to down-size their public sectors and suggest that the main influences on contemporary expenditure patterns have been unemployment, economic growth and catch-up from prior expenditure level.

Welfare state development in Southern Europe

The research reported here constitutes a part of a major project on democratic transition in Southern Europe. The article seeks to bring Southern Europe within the ambit of comparative welfare state analysis by (1) developing time‐series models of social insurance growth in Greece, Portugal and Spain and (2) for the first time, incorporating these nations’ social insurance experience into a model of social security development for the advanced nations. The time‐series analysis centres on the formative interaction of democratic transition with socio‐economic, demographic and policy influences. The cross‐national analysis points to the crucial role of both democratisation processes and cultural differences; as well as the standard repertoire of explanations in this field of research.

Developing new measures of welfare state change and reform

. Since the publication of Gosta Esping–Andersens The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Esping–Andersen 1990), which built its typologies on a rich database of detailed programme characteristics, it has been generally accepted that measures of social expenditure are an inferior, and even a misleading, source of information concerning the character of welfare state development. The problem is, however, that the kinds of detailed programme data Esping–Andersen used are not routinely available, while the quality of social expenditure data has been improving rapidly, culminating in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Developments (OECD) now regularly updated and highly disaggregated Social Expenditure Database (SOCX). This article explores the possibility of using SOCX to devise measures of the extent, structure and trajectory of welfare state change and reform in 21 OECD countries over the period 1984 to 1997. On the basis of these measures, it suggests that there has been almost no sign of systematic welfare retrenchment in recent years and only limited evidence of major structural transformation or programmatic reorientation.