Robert van der Veen

Post-Productivism and Welfare States: A Comparative Analysis

This article provides operational measures for comparing welfare states in terms of the concept of post-productivism, as pioneered by Goodin in this Journal, and discusses the normative relevance of such comparisons. Post-productivism holds that it is desirable to grant people a high level of personal autonomy, through the welfare state’s labor-market institutions and transfer system, and maintains that on average, people would choose to make use of their autonomy by working less, hence earning less and having more free time. By contrast, existing welfare states, for example as classified in Esping-Andersen’s three-way split of liberal, social-democratic and corporatist regimes, are largely ‘productivist’, as their policies try to design social rights so as ensure economic self-reliance through full-time work. The question is whether they actually succeed in doing so. With a limited dataset of thirteen OECD countries for 1993, three conditions of personal autonomy – income adequacy, temporal adequacy and absence of welfare – work conditionality – are discussed in terms of policy outputs, which can be read off from easily accessible OECD statistics. Two closely related concepts are explored: comprehensive post-productivism, measuring the extent to which welfare states approximate the ideal of personal autonomy, and restricted post-productivism, which follows from two common goals shared by all welfare states (avoidance of poverty and reduction of involuntary underemployment), and expressly focuses on the policy outputs on which the productivist and post-productivist perspectives specifically disagree: welfare–work unconditionality, voluntary underemployment and average annual hours of work per employee. After showing that ranking the thirteen cases puts the Netherlands at the top and the United States at the bottom, in conformity with Goodin’s earlier work, it is shown that restricted post-productivism is not positively associated with the poverty rate, and negatively with the rate of involuntary underemployment. This finding sets the stage for our discussion of normative issues underlying a preference for either productivist or post-productivist arrangements of work and welfare. Suggestions for further research are given in the final section.

Three Worlds of Social Insurance: On the Validity of Esping-Andersen's Welfare Regime Dimensions

Esping-Andersen developed a typology of welfare regimes: conservative, liberal and social democratic, which are measured on the basis of seven indicators. We re-examine Esping-Andersens data as well as replication data compiled by Scruggs and Allan to show that the seven indicators do not form valid measures of these welfare regimes. In addition to divergences in their measurement, the seven indicators are a mixture of institutional characteristics of welfare systems and outcome measures of social stratification. A measurement model based on the five institutional characteristics of welfare regimes that pertain to social insurance, however, does fit both the original and replication data. This article therefore proposes a three-dimensional model of conservative and liberal social insurance, which treats universal insurance coverage as the third dimension, instead of Esping-Andersens ‘socialist’ regime. Although this does not fundamentally alter the typology of countries, it has implications for previous studies that employ country scores based on Esping-Andersens method as independent variables in causal models. To illustrate these implications, this article re-examines a study by Noel and Therien and calls into question their conclusions on the causal connections between the social democratic welfare state and levels of foreign aid.

Reasonable partiality for compatriots and the global responsibility gap

According to David Miller, duties of domestic national and global justice are of equal importance, given that nationhood is both intrinsically valuable and not inherently an unjust way of excluding outsiders. The consequence of this ‘split‐level’ view is that it may be reasonable to prioritize domestic justice in some cases, while letting demands of global justice take precedence in others, depending on a weighting model which seeks to account for the relative urgency of domestic and global claims and the extent to which agents are more closely attached to compatriots than to outsiders. In this chapter, I argue against this weighting model on grounds of internal coherence with the theory set out in National responsibility and global justice (NRGJ). I first inquire into the conditions under which justice at home conflicts with justice in the world at large, according to Miller’s main principle of global justice – respect for basic human rights. I then show that on Miller’s own understanding of the various duties of global and domestic justice, cases of conflict rarely arise, and that when they do, there is a powerful argument for prioritizing global duties on grounds of urgency, which contradicts the reasoning of the weighting model. Finally, I address a problem arising from Miller’s basic assumption that under‐fulfillment of basic human rights in poor countries only generates claims of global justice to which rich nations are under a duty to respond, following the acceptance of a scheme of remedial responsibilities to provide aid by each of these nations. The normative structure of the split‐level view set out in NRGJ needs to be clarified with respect to the key question of whether nations can be held to be under a duty of justice to bring such a scheme into existence in the first place.

Limiting the scope of the weighting model: a reply to David Miller

In a recent paper (van der Veen 2008) I criticized David Miller’s proposal of a ‘weighting model’ for resolving conflicts between positive duties to protect the basic human rights of outsiders, and positive duties of associational justice beyond basic human rights which arise within an affluent democratic nation where basic human rights are satisfied. 1 According to the weighting model, these ‘non-basic’ domestic duties take precedence whenever the degree of attachment that members of the nation feel for their compatriots outweighs the difference in urgency involved in meeting the needs of individuals at home and elsewhere. The weighting model thus assumes that the magnitudes of differences in ‘closeness of attachment’ and ‘urgency of need-satisfaction’ under the two conflicting duties can be directly compared. The comparison is to be performed by the responsible collective agent – the national government – in order to decide which duty is given priority. The need for this kind of decision procedure arises within Miller’s split-level framework of morality , in which claims of domestic justice arising from special obligations between members of the national association sometimes have to be balanced against claims of global justice which arise from potentially enforceable general obligations. One may perhaps question how the weighting model is supposed to work. Miller is not very explicit about how the detailed information regarding urgency and closeness of attachment becomes available to the government. For present purposes, however, I shall assume that the weighting model can be satisfactorily spelled out as a way of dealing with conflicts between global and local duties of justice within a national democracy. My main criticism is that Miller’s most important principle of global justice – to protect basic human rights – is in fatal tension with the weighting model. In the paper, I claimed that from the perspective of the split-level moral agent, the global duty should prevail in the conflict described above, and that

Justice as fairness and bad luck

Abstract One major way of arguing for the moral attractiveness of luck egalitarianism is indirect; it consists in showing that the view follows from competing views on distributive justice which one actually endorses. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (KLR) claims that luck egalitarianism is indirectly supported in this way by Rawls’s intuitive argument for the difference principle. That argument begins by asserting that the impact of social and natural contingencies on distributive shares is unjust. After clarifying the notion of indirect support, I argue against KLR’s claim. Whether the argument goes on to support luck egalitarianism is a matter of interpretation which can only be decided by looking closer at what Rawls has to say about the difference principle than KLR’s own treatment of the argument allows. In its most plausible reading, the intuitive argument veers away from luck egalitarianism in favor of a non-egalitarian view of the difference principle as a principle of compensating advantage. On this view, inequality due to bad luck is not in any respect unjust when the least advantaged cannot be made better off under alternative arrangements. In conclusion I explain why there are good reasons of fairness to understand the difference principle in this way.One major way of arguing for the moral attractiveness of luck egalitarianism is indirect; it consists in showing that the view follows from competing views on distributive justice which one actuall...