Herbert Obinger

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.

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.

Families of nations and public policy.

Employing cluster analysis, this article reconsiders a concept formulated by Francis G. Castles that stresses the existence of four families of nations, which markedly differ in respect of public policy‐making. For two policy fields — social and economic policy — the hypothesised families of nations can be shown to exist, and they are quite robust and stable over time. Cluster analysis also reveals different paths towards modernity. On the one hand, there are more state‐oriented versus more market‐oriented models of public policy‐making; on the other, there is a cleavage in public policy‐making between rich countries located at the centre and somewhat poorer countries located at the periphery.

Social Expenditure and the politics of redistribution

This article offers a critique and analysis of recent OECD research by Adema and Ladaique identifying the impact of taxes and private benefits on social spending. By using the techniques of multivariate modelling, we show that both gross public and net private expenditures are strongly influenced by partisan incumbency, although in opposite directions, and that the more we net out the effect of taxes, the less politics matters and the more spending is shaped by socio-economic forces. In a second stage of the analysis, we show that the crucial mechanism of welfare state redistribution is the taxation of gross social expenditure and demonstrate that this effect is almost entirely political in nature.

Federalism, Direct Democracy, and Welfare State Development in Switzerland

Inspired by the New Institutionalism in political science, the article examines the impact of political institutions on welfare state development in Switzerland. This article suggests that the strength of federalism and direct democracy have proved to be stumbling blocks for the expansion of the Swiss welfare state. Direct democracy and federalism have not only geared the path of welfare state evolution in a more liberal direction, but have also dampened social expenditures.

Bypasses to a social Europe? Lessons from federal experience

Abstract This paper uses the findings of a very recent major international research collaboration on the impact of federal arrangements on the development of the welfare state to explore the possibilities of progress beyond Europes present diversity of nation-state welfare standards. These findings – based on the long-term historical experience of the OECDs oldest federations – suggest that federal arrangements tend to slow down welfare state consolidation, but that much depends on the context of historical development. The emergence of bypass mechanisms circumventing federal veto-points is located as the key to welfare progress, and the role of regulation in European integration and the special role of the ECJ as well as that of ‘the open method of co-ordination’ are tentatively identified as possible EU bypass equivalents.

Partisan Politics and Privatization in OECD Countries

Many scholars have argued that partisan differences have disappeared since the 1980s because of the ever-increasing economic globalization and the deepening of European integration. Using a new primary data set on public ownership that contains detailed information on privatization in 20 countries between 1980 and 2007, we test these claims empirically in relation to state ownership. We pay special attention to the question of whether changes in the international political economy, notably globalization and different aspects of European integration, condition partisan politics. Our empirical findings suggest that political parties have continued to significantly shape national privatization trajectories in line with the classic partisan hypothesis. While partisan differences are somewhat reduced by the liberalizing and market-building efforts of the European Union, globalization does not condition partisan effects. Moreover, the run-up to the European Monetary Union even seems to have reinforced partisan differences.

The Real Race to the Bottom: What Happened to Economic Affairs Expenditure After 1980?

Edited by Francis G. Castles, a leading authority in the field, and bringing together an outstanding group of British, German and American scholars, it examines trends in non-social or ‘core’ spending on public administration, defence, public order, education, economic affairs and debt financing and in the regulatory ordering of the economic sphere. The book not only opens up new areas of comparative public policy research, but also demonstrates clearly that there have been real reductions in the reach of state in some areas, although patterns of causation are more complex and varied than generally presumed by the retrenchment literature.