Mi Ah Schoyen

The Nordic Welfare Model in the Twenty-First Century: The Bumble-Bee Still Flies!

The Nordic countries are admired for high employment, low levels of poverty and inequality, encompassing welfare states, and peaceful industrial relations. Yet the model is criticised for hampering the employment opportunities of vulnerable groups. The literature identifies several potential mechanisms of exclusion. Compressed wage structures may make employers reluctant to hire certain workers for fear that their productivity is too low to justify the cost. Second, generous benefits lower individuals’ incentive to work. Third, businesses increasingly specialise in high-skill activities. We explore these arguments comparatively by considering the employment chances of two vulnerable groups: disabled persons and migrants. The Nordic countries are compared with other rich democracies that take different approaches to social protection and wage dispersion. The Nordic countries do not perform systematically worse than other ‘varieties of capitalism’. In line with recent research, we also find that there is considerable intra-Nordic variation, which calls for further study.

Moral economies of the welfare state: A qualitative comparative study

This paper uses innovative democratic forums carried out in Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom to examine people’s ideas about welfare-state priorities and future prospects. We use a moral economy framework in the context of regime differences and the move towards neo-liberalism across Europe. Broadly speaking, attitudes reflect regime differences, with distinctive emphasis on reciprocity and the value of work in Germany, inclusion and equality in Norway, and individual responsibility and the work-ethic in the UK. Neo-liberal market-centred ideas appear to have made little headway in regard to popular attitudes, except in the already liberal-leaning UK. There is also a striking assumption by UK participants that welfare is threatened externally by immigrants who take jobs from established workers and internally by the work-shy who undermine the work-ethic. A key role of the welfare state is repressive rather than enabling: to protect against threats to well-being rather than provide benefits for citizens. UK participants also anticipate major decline in state provision. In all three countries there is strong support for continuing and expanding social investment policies, but for different reasons: to enable contribution in Germany, to promote equality and mobility in Norway, and to facilitate self-responsibility in the UK.

Intergenerational Solidarity and the Sustainability of State Welfare

This chapter shows real differences in how the intergenerational contract is seen by young and old in five European welfare states. There is a general consensus on the importance of combating old-age poverty, although most people expected the state safety net to weaken. In the UK in particular and in Denmark and Norway people anticipated greater individual responsibility, while in Slovenia they wanted more from the state. Conversely there was strong support by both older and younger participants for social investment, and it was striking how in all countries older people were willing to sacrifice income to provide better opportunities for their children’s generation. The UK stands out in the expectation that government will be unable to cope with the rising cost of pensions, the NHS and social care. Although people want them, these services are seen as simply unsustainable.

Dividing the pie in the eco-social state: Exploring the relationship between public support for environmental and welfare policies

Recent theoretical literature in social policy argued that climate change posed a new risk to the states and called for transformation from a traditional welfare state to an ‘eco’ state. From a theoretical point of view, different welfare regimes may manage environmental/climate change risks in a similar way to social risks. However, not much has been done to explore the issue empirically. To this end, this paper aims to investigate public attitudes towards environmental and traditional welfare policies given that environmental change is a new social risk the welfare states have to address. Do individuals that care for one area also care for the other? That is, do the preferences in these two policy spheres complement or substitute one another? We test these hypotheses both at the individual- and country-level, using data from 14 countries included in all three waves (1993, 2000, and 2010) of the environmental module in the International Social Survey Programme. Specifically, we investigate the relationship between attitudes towards income redistribution (indicator of support for welfare policy) and willingness to pay for environmental protection (indicator of support for environmental policy). Our findings suggest that attitudes in the two areas are substitutes in the total sample, but that the relationship is very small and only statistically significant in some specifications. When we explore country differentials, we observe clear heterogeneity in the relationship, which can be explained by differences in political and historical contexts across countries.

Sustainable Welfare in the EU: Promoting Synergies between Climate and Social Policies

The commentary addresses the scope for synergy between climate change policy and social policy in the European Union (EU) from a ‘sustainable welfare’ perspective. The emerging sustainable welfare approach is oriented to the satisfaction of human needs within ecological limits, in an intergenerational and global perspective. While the overall goals of EU climate policy and EU welfare policies largely reflect this orientation, there are significant differences in policy priorities. A ‘policy auditing’ approach towards sustainable welfare defines critical thresholds for matter and energy throughput to identify how much room there is for economic and societal development. However, the EU refrains from prioritizing environmental over other, especially economic, goals and displays a remarkable degree of optimism in relation to the extent to which one can make these different policy goals compatible.