Lektion 14: Welfare state Flashcards
What is the definition of the welfare state?
Harold L. Wilensky:
The essence of the welfare state as “government-protected minimum standards of income, nutrition, health, housing and education, assured to every citizen as a political right, not charity”.
Other definitions:
Stress protection oagainst social risks and distribution of life chances rather than income security and equality.
FRA SLIDE:
! State-provided guarantee of fundamental need satisfaction
! Rights-based, not charity!
! Neglects important private sources of protection
! Welfare regime perspective
Which theories/models explane the welfare state development?
Three theoretical suggestions:
- a functionalist approach
- a class mobilization explanation
(3. a literature emphasizing the impact of state institutions and the relative autonomy of bureaucratic elites.) - Inddrages ikke i slide
How is the welfare state measured in Comparative politics?
GDP
What is a ”welfare regime”?
It is the specific institutional mixture og market, state and family that characterizes how a nation provides work and welfare to its citizens and various nations do this in different ways.
→ The interaction of these three institutions in the provision of work and welfare is called a welfare regime.
Welfare regimes refer to particular combinations of the welfare state, the family and the labour market.
What does the functionalist approach say?
The welfare state is an answer to the problems created by the capitalist industrialization.
The new industrialization with the urbanization created many new diseases and social risks → industrial work accidents etc. SO it was a protection from the modern risks.
Modernization was seen as causing social disintegration. The welfare state was steps in to solve problems of social integration (tænk Durkheim)
! Welfare state development drive by macro trends
! Criticism I: neglects conflict and agency
! Criticism II: empirically not accurate
What does the class mobilization explanation say?
The welfare state is seen as the outcome of a struggle between social classes and their political organizations each with their own power base.
The main task of the welfare state seemed to lie in decommodifying labour e.g. in granting labour temporal relief from the pressure to sell itself in the labour market.
Variation among welfare states across countries was explained by these approaches: the more powerful labour was, the more elaborate the welfare state tended to be.
(What does the third literature inspired approach say)?
this approach empathized the “state building” aspect in welfare states. When countries were confronted with the modern social problems, it mattered whether their bureaucratic elite was relatively autonomous as in Sweden, or whether the lack of bureaucracy autonomy lead to a politization of the welfare state formation and to welfare clientism.
Which one of the theoretical approaches is the best?
The class mobilization explanation – also called something with power-resource-theory. Because: there is no simple law of industrialism that leads to welfare states developing
What is the Criticism of power resource theory
! Cross-class alliances ! Christian democracy ! Macro trends remain important
What was a developed welfarestate interpreted as an evidence of?
A decisive shift in the balance of power in favour of the working class and social democracy
Variance in welfare states are what CP care about; which dimensions of variation can be distinguished?
- is the welfare tax-financed or contribution-financed?
- Is every citizen protected or is every worker (and his or hers dependent) insured?
- Are benefits a right, gained either through previous contributions to social insurance programmes or attached to to the status of citizenship, or do benefits depend on proven need, i.e. are they conditional on means testing?
- Are benefits uniform (flat rate) or do they reflect prior income, I,e. are pension or unemployment payments temporary substitutes for wages or do they aim at securing some minimum standard of living?
FRA SLIDE
- size vs. qualitative measures
- financing
- eligibility
- types of benefits
Mention the Effects of the welfare state
! Does the welfare state… ! Avoid poverty and social risks? ! Reduce income differences? ! Improve social mobility? ! Harm economic performance?
What are three models of welfare states?
- the residual welfare model – in which social protection comes to play only after the breakdown of the private market and the family for the fulfilment of social needs.
- the industrial achievement performance model – in which welfare rights and benefits are linked to the employment relation and reflect MERIT work performance and productivity.
- An institutional redistributive model – in which social welfare institutions are an integral part of society, providing universalist services outside the market.
What is The liberal regime (anglo-Saxon)
Benefits = low and flat rate = are granted with means testing.
Taxfinanced
Encompassing social protection has to be purchased individually through market
State protects only the most needy
Right-wing strong
What is the Scandinavian regime (social democratic)
Taxfinanced
Benefits are for ALL, citizens right
Welfare state is huge
Left-wing power
