Kees van Kersbergen

Two decades of change in Europe: The emergence of the social investment state

Since the late1970s, the developed welfare states of the European Union have been recasting the policy mix on which their systems of social protection were built. They have adopted a new policy orthodoxy that could be summarised as the social investment strategy. Here we trace its origins and major developments. The shift is characterised by a move away from passive transfers and towards the maximalisation of employability and employment, but there are significant national distinctions and regime specific trajectories. We discuss some caveats, focusing on the question whether the new policy paradigm has been established at the expense of social policies that mitigate poverty and inequality.

Religion and the Western Welfare State : the Theoretical Context

INTRODUCTION Most comparativists who study welfare state development agree that religion has played a role in the development of modern social protection systems. The early protagonists of the power resources approach, however, had only stressed the causal impact of Socialist working-class mobilization on modern social policy (see Esping-Andersen and van Kersbergen 1992). In their view, it was the working class and its Socialist organizations that had been the driving force behind the ‘social democratization’ of capitalism via the welfare state. To them, it came as a surprise that both Social Democracy and (social) Catholicism promoted welfare state development. John D. Stephens (1979: 100), one of the leading spokesmen of this approach, put it in prudent terms when he argued that ‘it seemed possible that anti-capitalist aspects of catholic ideology – such as notions of fair wage or prohibitions of usury – as well as the generally positive attitude of the catholic church towards welfare for the poor might encourage government welfare spending.’ Similarly, Schmidt (1980, 1982) asserted that Social Democracy and Christian Democracy were functionally equivalent for welfare state expansion, at least during periods of economic prosperity. Wilensky (1981) argued that the two movements overlapped considerably in ideological terms and that Catholicism indeed constituted an even more important determinant of welfare statism than left power did. Catholic social doctrine called for a correction of the most abhorrent societal effects of the capitalist order. The Catholic principle of subsidiarity, moreover, posited that in the last instance the (nation-) state had a duty to intervene to correct for morally unacceptable market outcomes.

Do mainstream parties adapt to the welfare chauvinism of populist parties

Populist parties increasingly take a welfare chauvinistic position. They criticize mainstream parties for cutting and slashing welfare at the expense of the ‘native’ population and to the benefit of the ‘undeserving’ immigrant. Given the electoral success of populist parties, we investigate whether and when mainstream parties ignore, attack or accommodate welfare chauvinism. Using key theories of party behaviour, we test whether mainstream parties (1) respond immediately to populist parties, (2) respond with a time lag, or (3) respond only when they lose elections or are in opposition. Our quantitative analyses of party manifestos, speeches and policies of European mainstream and populist parties (1980–2012) show that mainstream parties adapt to populist parties on welfare chauvinism, but which parties adapt and when varies significantly. In our in-depth examinations of the Dutch and Danish cases, we highlight important cross-country and cross-party differences.

Comparative welfare state politics: Development, opportunities, and reform

Introduction. The political opportunities and constraints of welfare state reform 1. The welfare state: dynamic development, crisis, resilience, and change 2. The logics of the welfare state: why did we need a welfare state in the first place and how did we get it? 3. Welfare state regimes: why did we get different worlds of welfare and do we still have them? 4. What do welfare states actually do? How welfare states protect against social risks and fight poverty and inequality 5. Toward an open functional approach to welfare state reform 6. Why do we need to reform the welfare state?: Part I. Globalization as a functional pressure coming from the outside 7. Why do we need to reform the welfare state: Part II. Post-industrial society and the functional pressures to reform coming from within 8. Why do politicians and governments pursue risky reforms? 9. Can and will the welfare state survive the great recession?

Three worlds’ typology: Moving beyond normal science?

There is no doubt that Esping-Andersen’s three worlds’ typology has been extremely valuable. However, the literature inspired by it shows signs of Kuhnian normal science, which is impairing empirical and theoretical progress. We explain normal science, demonstrate that it characterizes recent empirical regime studies and ask why this has come about. We show that the welfare regime literature has a tendency to confuse the terms ‘typology’ and ‘ideal-types’. This has prevented the emergence of anomalies that are needed for progress. We argue that normal science is fostered by the combination of researchers’ tendency to prefer certainty (e.g. to address solvable research problems) and the environmental pressures they face (especially the ‘publish or perish’ culture and the need to frame research problems in terms of variation rather than similarity). In the discussion section, we suggest several routes by which the welfare state literature can move beyond normal science.

Peeping at the corpus – What is really going on behind the equality and welfare items of the Manifesto project?

The Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data set quantifies how much parties emphasize certain topics and positions and is very popular in the study of political parties. The data set is also increasingly applied in comparative political economy and welfare state studies that use the welfare-specific items rather than the CMP’s left–right scale to test hypotheses on the impact of political parties on social policies, (in)equality and the welfare state. But do these items provide a valid basis for descriptive and causal inferences? What do the items precisely capture? To answer these questions on concept validity, we use the new manifesto corpus data for German parties 2002–2013 and, to provide a further test, for US parties 2004–2012. Corpus data are the digitalized, originally hand-annotated and coded texts of electoral programmes. We assess the validity of the codings directly at the level of quasi-sentences by re-categorizing and subcategorizing the originally coded statements on equality, social justice and welfare state expansion. Although concept validity concerns about the data seem exaggerated, we find that theoretically relevant and meaningful variation is ‘hidden’ behind the original categories. Hence, our approach allows researchers to assess the substantive meaning of the CMP data directly, and we offer an efficient new strategy for testing more specific hypotheses on the impact of political parties on policy.

Comparative Welfare State Politics: Welfare State Regimes

Introduction In Chapter 3, we discussed the rationales or logics of the welfare state in order to grasp its various driving forces. So far, we have largely abstracted from the substantial empirical differences between welfare states. This chapter explains that there is no such thing as the welfare state, but that there are distinctive worlds of welfare. We analyze the differences between welfare states and their social and political origins, foundation, and development. We ask two big questions: (1) why did we get different worlds of welfare, and (2) do we still have them? Answering these questions enables us to understand welfare state variation. The field of comparative welfare state research is dominated by, and greatly indebted to, the work of Gosta Esping-Andersen, whose landmark study The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) revolutionized the way social scientists look at the welfare state. Two innovations were particularly powerful. First, Esping-Andersen introduced the concept of a welfare regime that allowed a much broader and better understanding of the variety of ways in which the major institutions of society (state, market, and family) interacted to produce specific patterns of work and welfare. In this way he not only helped to remove the field’s exclusive and theoretically unsatisfying preoccupation with social spending as the indicator of welfare state generosity (for a discussion of this so-called dependent variable problem, see Green-Pedersen 2004 and Clasen and Siegel 2007) but also opened up a whole new area for systematic comparative research. Second, Esping-Andersen introduced, documented, and explained the qualitative variation in welfare regimes (as the dependent variable), showing how these regimes (as the independent variable) were systematically related to differences in social outcomes that really matter, particularly in terms of employment structure and labor market behavior – and recently also at the micro-level of welfare state outcomes (e.g., Kammer et al. 2012).

Yardsticks of inequality: Preferences for redistribution in advanced democracies

This article explores how preferences for redistribution among voters are affected by the structure of inequality. There are strong theoretical reasons to believe that some voter segments matter more than others, not least the so-called median-income voter, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to directly analysing distinct income groups’ redistributive preferences. In addition, while much of the previous literature has focused on broad levels of inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, it is likely that individuals respond to different types of inequality in different ways. To rectify this gap, we use data from the European Social Survey and Eurostat to examine the interactive effect of income deciles and various measures of inequality. Results suggest that inequality especially affects the middle-income groups – that is, the assumed median-income voters. Moreover, not all inequality matters equally: it is inequality vis-à-vis those around the 80th percentile that shapes redistributive preferences.

Comparative Welfare State Politics: The Logics of the Welfare State

Introduction Looking back at history, we have a tendency to impute values to welfare state arrangements that were not necessarily part of the motivation of political actors when they designed and implemented social policy. For instance, for many people the first and foremost association with the welfare state concerns values such as equality, solidarity, and social justice. And surely, socialists used to underpin their reform proposals with references to these values. For others, however, the welfare state is primarily about collective solutions to social needs and misery, and about social order. And indeed, many of the liberal, conservative, and Christian social reformers saw themselves as pragmatic politicians experimenting with social laws that would substitute for charity and other traditional forms of social security. Still others tend to stress the social control and discipline that are exerted through social legislation. And yes, the rich did see poverty and deficient urban sanitation as threats to their own safety and health, and they did fear the revolting masses and hoped to quiet them down with social policy. Such considerations can be seen as social actors’ motivations or as important effects and forms of modern social policy in the welfare state. With the benefit of hindsight and with better theoretical understanding of developments in various nations, we may be able to capture what we propose to call the rationales or logics of the welfare state: a conscious reconstruction by us as researchers of what we consider to be the main motivations, driving forces, considerations, values, and causal mechanisms behind welfare state development. With the idea of a rationale or logic, we do not claim any historical specificity or possibility of social scientific generalization. Rather, we introduce a heuristic device that can help us reveal and stylize analytically the complex political interconnections between the motivations of social and political actors (ideas, interests, power, etc.), driving forces (demographics, democratization, globalization, etc.), public policy considerations (security, health, efficiency, affluence, etc.), values (equality, solidarity, freedom, autonomy, etc.), and causal mechanisms (power mobilization, elections, policy learning, etc.). With these logics, we can sketch the broader context of the political opportunities and constraints of welfare state reform and answer the first big question: why did we need a welfare state in the first place and how did we get it?

Bruno Palier (ed.) A Long Goodbye to Bismarck? The Politics of Welfare Reform in Continental Europe, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2010:

This edited volume consists of country studies of social policy reforms in most continental European – or ‘Bismarckian’ – welfare states over the past decade and a half. In addition, it contains chapters on financing the welfare state, employment policy, and the role of social partners in administering social policy, an introduction and summarizing conclusion by the editor, and a prologue by Gosta Esping-Andersen. It is the companion volume to Palier and Martin (2008). In that volume, the chapters are cross-country comparative analyses of policy areas (pensions, healthcare, and so on) (...).