Philip Manow

The welfare state

Social Needs, Risks, and Disruptions in Permanently Modernizing Capitalist Nations The history of the welfare state and its reform is a history of political actors struggling to cope with social needs, risks, and disruptions caused by rapid social and economic development. Paying attention to the “objective” problem pressure to which political actors respond is crucial for explaining past and contemporary welfare state reform. History may never repeat itself, but in many ways and irrespective of regime form or level of development, the problems of societal disruption, social needs, and risks that tend to emerge in the wake of what we conveniently call “modernization,” as well as the social and political struggles to deal with them, are strikingly similar across time and space (Wilensky and Lebeaux 1965 [1958]; Flora and Alber 1981; Flora and Heidenheimer 1981b). Take as an illustration the following quotation from a recent study of social policy in China and read it while keeping 19th-century Britain or Germany in mind: Chinese leaders should … be ashamed of a high degree of capitalist exploitation and class suppression in the process of economic modernisation. Over the past three decades, China’s economic growth has been achieved at the expense of the well-being of hundreds of thousands of members of deprived groups: poor rural residents are always worried about medical care and retirement; urban migrant workers have been excluded from accessing urban public services; many factory workers are working long hours in extremely hazardous work environments; farmers whose land was expropriated have not received proper compensation; and thousands of poor patients are unable to afford treatment. The commonly perceived “gradual economic reforms” have actually brought about tremendous changes in welfare provisions and have rapidly destroyed China’s socialist welfare system, leaving millions of poor people unprotected. There is obviously a gap between China’s economic development and its social development. (Chan et al. 2008: xiii) The social needs, risks, and injustice described are not identical with but are still very similar to what we see described in, say, Marx’s analysis of the struggle over the working day in Das Kapital (1867, chapter 10), in Engels’s examination of the suffering of the working class in Victorian England in Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England (1844), or, much later, in Polanyi’s study of the impact and the reaction to the social dislocation caused by the unrestrained capitalist free market in The Great Transformation (1944).

Comparing Welfare Capitalism: Social Policy and Political Economy in Europe, Japan and the USA

Estimates of the comparative health of the North Americanand Western European economies and societies have had their fashion cycles -from Servain-Schreibers warnings that Europe was falling behind, rather thancatching up with, American technological leadership in the 1960s, to Europeanexasperation over American trade and budget deficits in the 1970s, to anxietiesover Eurosclerosis in the early 1980s and over the American loss ofinternational competitiveness in the late 1980s. Presently, by all accounts, thesick man is again Europe, with higher unemployment and much lower rates of jobcreation over the last two decades or so. The main problem is a rising level oflong-term unemployment that mainly affects unskilled workers and, in mostcountries, young job seekers with low levels of schooling.This book challenges the popular thesis of a downward trend in the viability of welfare states in competitive market economies. With approaches ranging from historical case studies to cross-national analyses, the contributors explore various aspects of the relationships between welfare states, industrial relations, financial government and production systems. Building upon and combining comparative studies of both the varieties of capitalism and the worlds of welfare state regimes, the book considers issues such as the role of employers and unions in social policy, the interdependencies between financial markets and pension systems, and the current welfare reform process. Comparing Welfare Capitalism sheds new light on the tenuous relationship between social policies and market economies.

Adapting the Welfare State The Case of Health Care Reform in Britain, Germany, and the United States

Welfare states in all advanced industrialized countries are under severe financial stress. Many observers argue that in responding to such pressures, governments are converging on a path of marketization and privatization of social risks, which ultimately leads to the unraveling of solidarity. Recent health care reforms in Britain, Germany, and the United States serve as case studies that challenge this argument. Far from converging on a market path, each country has pursued a distinctive reform response combining markets with other policy instruments. Moreover, where state actors lead the way in constructing health care markets, the extent of desolidarity is limited. The structure of each nations health care system shapes the policy preferences and reform strategies of key actors, and thereby helps explain the distinctiveness of health care reform patterns.

Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare States

This book radically revises established knowledge in comparative welfare state studies and introduces a new perspective on how religion shaped modern social protection systems. The interplay of societal cleavage structures and electoral rules produced the different political class coalitions sustaining the three welfare regimes of the Western world. In countries with proportional electoral systems, the absence or presence of state–church conflicts decided whether class remained the dominant source of coalition building or whether a political logic not exclusively based on socioeconomic interests (e.g., religion) was introduced into politics, particularly social policy. The political class coalitions in countries with majoritarian systems, in contrast, allowed for the residual-liberal welfare state to emerge, as in the United States or the UK. This book also reconsiders the role of Protestantism. Reformed Protestantism substantially delayed and restricted modern social policy. The Lutheran state churches positively contributed to the introduction of social protection programs.

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.

Legislative Self-Restraint under Divided Government in Germany, 1976-2002

Using the Vanberg (1998) model of legislative autolimitation from the judicial review literature, we investigated the impact of divided government on the strategic choices of government and opposition. The main prediction of the model is that a strong opposition dominance in the second chamber (Bundesrat) usually does not lead to open party-political conflict, but rather to a governments legislative self-restraint. We tested the hypotheses following from the model on a detailed dataset comprising all legislative bills in Germany between 1976 and 2002. The results show that the main effects of divided government are, in fact, indirect and anticipatory. We conclude that when majorities in the Bundestag and Bundesrat diverge, the impact on legislation is substantial.

Electoral and Mechanical Causes of Divided Government in the European Union

Voters who participate in elections to the European Parliament (EP) apparently use these elections to punish their domestic governing parties. Many students of the EU therefore claim that the party—political composition of the Parliament should systematically differ from that of the EU Council. This study shows that opposed majorities between council and parliament may have other than simply electoral causes. The logic of domestic government formation works against the representation of more extreme and EU-skeptic parties in the Council, whereas voters in EP elections vote more often for these parties. The different locations of Council and Parliament are therefore caused by two effects: a mechanical effect—relevant for the composition of the Council—when national votes are translated into office and an electoral effect in European elections. The article discusses the implications of this finding for our understanding of the political system of the EU and of its democratic legitimacy.

Introduction: Studying Varieties of Welfare Capitalism

Estimates of the comparative health of the North Americanand Western European economies and societies have had their fashion cycles -from Servain-Schreibers warnings that Europe was falling behind, rather thancatching up with, American technological leadership in the 1960s, to Europeanexasperation over American trade and budget deficits in the 1970s, to anxietiesover Eurosclerosis in the early 1980s and over the American loss ofinternational competitiveness in the late 1980s. Presently, by all accounts, thesick man is again Europe, with higher unemployment and much lower rates of jobcreation over the last two decades or so. The main problem is a rising level oflong-term unemployment that mainly affects unskilled workers and, in mostcountries, young job seekers with low levels of schooling.This book challenges the popular thesis of a downward trend in the viability of welfare states in competitive market economies. With approaches ranging from historical case studies to cross-national analyses, the contributors explore various aspects of the relationships between welfare states, industrial relations, financial government and production systems. Building upon and combining comparative studies of both the varieties of capitalism and the worlds of welfare state regimes, the book considers issues such as the role of employers and unions in social policy, the interdependencies between financial markets and pension systems, and the current welfare reform process. Comparing Welfare Capitalism sheds new light on the tenuous relationship between social policies and market economies.

Religion and the gender vote gap : women’s changed political preferences from the 1970s to 2010

For many years women tended to vote more conservative than men, but since the 1980s this gap has shifted direction: women in many countries are more likely than men to support left parties. The literature largely agrees on a set of political-economic factors explaining the change in women’s political orientation. In this article we demonstrate that these conventional factors fall short in explaining the gender vote gap. We highlight the importance of a religious cleavage in the party system across Western European countries, restricting the free flow of religious voters between left and right parties. Given that surveys show us a constantly higher degree of religiosity among women and a persistent impact of religion on vote choice, religion explains a substantial part of the temporal as well as cross-country variation in the transition from the more conservative to the more progressive voting behavior of women.

Workers, farmers and Catholicism: A history of political class coalitions and the south-European welfare state regime

The explanatory model behind Esping-Andersen’s ‘three-regime’ typology points to the variance in ‘political coalition building in the transition from a rural economy to a middle-class society’, particularly to whether or not farmers and workers were able to form coalitions during this transition. The article reconsiders the relation between party systems and welfare state regimes. It highlights the systematic variation among European party systems with respect to the electoral success of communist parties. The electoral strength of communist parties is argued to be related to the intensity of past conflicts between the nation-state and the Catholic church in the mono-denominational countries of Europe’s south. These conflicts rendered a coalition between pious farmers and the anticlerical worker’s movement unthinkable and furthered the radicalization of the left. The article argues that the split on the left explains much of what is distinctive about southern Europe’s postwar political economies.