World of welfare Flashcards
Decommodification
The level to which citizens are freed from the compulsion to work.
the extent to which an individual’s welfare is reliant upon the market, particularly in terms of pensions, unemployment benefit and sickness insurance
Corporatism
is a political system of interest representation and policymaking whereby corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, business, scientific, or guild associations, come together on and negotiate contracts or policy on the basis of their common interests.- in some welfare states, organized labor and employers’ associations may have a formal role in administering social insurance programs or negotiating welfare reforms with the government.
etatism
state intervention to address social issues and maintain social order. Control of state over citizens and the economy- a belief in the supremacy and intervention of the state in economic and social affair. Bismarck’s welfare policies were not driven by altruism but rather by pragmatic concerns to co-opt the working class and undermine the appeal of socialist and liberal movements. By providing social protections, Bismarck aimed to stabilize society, promote national unity, and preserve the conservative order.
Social insurance
a form of welfare provision that aims to protect individuals and families against economic risks and uncertainties, such as illness, disability, unemployment, old age, and maternity. Unlike means-tested assistance programs that are based on financial need, social insurance programs are typically contributory schemes where individuals and employers make regular payments into a fund, and in return, they are entitled to specific benefits when they face qualifying events or circumstances.
Defamilisation
refers to the process by which individuals and families become less reliant on the family as a primary source of economic and social support, and more dependent on formal institutions and mechanisms provided by the state or other organizations. – often a prerequisite for women entering the workforce and becoming commodified
Regime
unifying logic to it. More than the sum of parts, unifying logic that unifies values and political economy. Unifying, historically embedded construct
why is typifying useful
Why is typifying useful- simplifies it to create a simple understanding, explanatory value – independent variable- does regime type matter for analysis? Can we use it to explain? And finally, does it paint a picture of reality in some way? – most would argue for the former two but say it falls short when painting a picture of reality.
- Keiser – empirical consistency to how regimes are classified and so it does paint an accurate picture of reality
Esping-Anderson- welfare regimes as historically relevant
, welfare regimes are the product of past political battles
o One cannot understand changes in the welfare state without theorizing the way its existing structure provides key actors - and the state itself - differing capacities and power.
o rejects the idea that welfare states are an automatic by-product of either capitalist needs or economically determined democratic demands, breaking with Marixist and “logic of industrialism” theses. However, welfare states are also not an undifferentiated product of strong labour movements; rather, the welfare state follows from the way in which labour and social democratic movements join (or fail to join) with other social actors (i.e. it rests on the historic alignment of societal groups)
Esping-Anderson- state market institutions and the welfare state
once established, state-market institutions themselves conditioned their own differential trajectory via two key political mechanisms: they shaped the structure of electoral support for the state, and they shaped the structural power of the Left (organized labor and Social Democratic parties).
Esping -Anderson - consequences of different regimes
o He argues that the broad encompassing structure of Social Democratic welfare regimes should breed public support for the state and defuse class conflict, thus perpetuating their generous structures, while Liberal welfare states generate lower levels of support and more extensive conflict across groups.
Liberal regimes
decommodification low, stratification high
Interference creates elitism and paternalism, therefore avoids all interference.
modest, means-tested assistance, and targeted at low-income, usually working-class recipients.
o the poor are the only people who rely on them. The middle classes rely on social insurance. The upper classes rely on the market.
Their strict entitlement rules are often associated with stigma- narrow definition of who is eligible
Adheres to a more narrow conception of what risks are social eg lack of universal healthcare in USA
encourages market solutions to social problems— either passively, by guaranteeing only a minimum, or actively, by directly subsidising private welfare schemes. – believe the free market is the best path to reducing inequality
forces those in need to look for work- doesn’t want to disrupt the market. Welfare as a last resort.
Liberals cannot purely oppose decommodification as non-workers and those with the potential to work must be cared for.
Liberal welfare regime states
Australia, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, USA
Conservative regimes
decommodification moderate, stratification high
typically shaped by traditional family values and tend to encourage family-based assistance dynamics.
Social insurance in this model typically excludes non-working wives, and family benefits encourage motherhood.
the belief that central authority should not do what could be done on a local level.
State assistance will typically only step in when the family’s capacity to aid its members is exhausted.
Corporatism prevents the expansion and consolidation of the welfare state. This leads to services such as healthcare having as many as 1,200 different funds in Germany.
Like in Liberal regimes, welfare is a last resort, but for the purpose of failing families not bad risks or market failures
As in liberal states, conservative states do little to interfere with the employment market. Gives strong protection for male breadwinners in employment. In conservative states the answer to this is family support or reduction of labour supply by moving women out of the workforce
Conservative regime states
Austria, Belgium, France, Germany Italy
Social Democratic regimes
High decommodification and low stratification
universalistic systems that promote an equality of high standards, rather than an equality of minimal needs. - Rights are attached to citizenship not need or contribution
decommodifying welfare services, to reduce the division introduced by market-based access to welfare services, as well as preemptively socializing the costs of caring for children, the aged, and the helpless, instead of then waiting until the family’s capacity to support them is depleted.
results in a commitment to a heavy social service burden, which introduces an imperative to minimize social problems, thereby aligning the system’s goals with the welfare and emancipation (typically via full employment policies) of those it supports.
use welfare to strengthen the working class, rather than appeasing them.
Gets involved in labour market- creates public jobs for those without them
Countries that belong to this type of welfare state regime are generally dedicated to full employment. Only by making sure that as many people as possible have a job is it possible to maintain such a high-level solidaristic welfare system
States that are social democratic regimes
Denmark, Finland, Netherland, Norway, Sweden
who argued that there is value to Esping Anderson even though there are hybrids
Arts and Gelissen
pure welfare regimes are not empirical truth
- Contrary to the ideal world of welfare states, the real world is likely to exhibit hybrid forms. There are no one-dimensional nations in the sense of a pure case. Today, every country presents a system mix.
Esping -Anderson on value despite hybrids
- Esping-Andersen (1997: 171) argues that despite this it is fruitful to construct ideal- types … see the forest rather than the myriad of unique trees. However, he warns of the danger that the resulting forest may bear little resemblance to reality.
- By comparing an impure welfare state with an ideal- typical one – both considered as a whole – the deviations of the former from the latter are thrown into relief. It is the simultaneous knowledge of both the ideal-type and the real- type that enables holistic ideal-types to be used ‘as conceptual instruments for comparison with and measurement of reality’
welfare regimes as enforcing
- Esping-Andersen views welfare state regime types (liberal, conservative, social democratic) not only as outcomes (dependent variables) shaped by various factors but also as factors themselves (independent variables) that influence other outcomes. In this context, welfare state regimes can both be influenced by and influence cross-national variations in social behavior and attitudes.
- Esping-Andersen uses the typology to explain how existing welfare state arrangements can create positive feedback loops. This means that once a particular welfare regime is established and its policies are in place, they can reinforce certain behaviors, attitudes, and policy directions, making it difficult to change or deviate from that path.
trajectories of welfare states
- Esping Anderson says If you look at the history of so-called welfare states you find three ideal- typical trajectories, a liberal, a conservative and a social-democratic one. This framework can be seen as a way to transcend or complement the historical determinism emphasized by Esping-Andersen by focusing on the underlying principles, values, and social dynamics that drive welfare state development and differentiation across countries
Arts and Gelissen against Esping -Anersens historical approach
you don’t need to go back in history you just need to classify them according to
1. The degree of decommodification, i.e. the degree to which a (social) service is rendered as a matter of right, and the degree to which a person can maintain a livelihood without reliance on the market.
2. The kind of social stratification and solidarities, i.e. which social stratification system is promoted by social policy and does the welfare state build narrow or broad solidarities?
feminist critique of Esping Anderson
de-commodification doesn’t make sense for women as their labour is often unpaid and in the home.
- no serious treatment of the degree to which women are excluded from or included in the labour market:
reflection of gender in Esping Anderson- between regimes
- Gornick and Jacobs (1998) found that Esping-Andersen’s regime-types do capture important distinctions among contemporary welfare states. Their results showed that the size of the public sector, the extent of the public-sector earnings premium and the impact of the public sector on gender differentials in wages all varied more across regimes than within them. In this way, they showed the fruitfulness of emphasizing the gender perspective in Esping-Andersen’s classification of welfare states.
reflection of gender in Esping Anderson- decommodification is useful
- Trifiletti (1999) incorporated a gender perspective into Esping- Andersen’s classification by showing that a systematic relationship exists between the level of decommodification and whether the state treats women as wives and mothers or as workers
decomm- level to whihc women are liberated from the market- so benefits are not contingent on market - higher levels of decomm= greater autonomy regardless of their roles as wives or mothers
Esping-Anderson defamiliarisation is linked to gender
In the US where cheap labour is available families are able to substitute public or family childcare with the market, leading more women in the workforce and higher fertility rates, this only works for the middle classes and leads to large problems for the poor who cannot afford these services. In other nations, families are priced out of child-care with is costing upwards of 15% of double earner household income. This leads to high levels of kin-care, 83% in the UK.
A hallmark of new, emerging family forms is that they suffer from a scarcity of time.’ The time cost of raising a child is high, up to a 30% increase in unpaid labour. The vast majority of this is done by women. The data shows that to increase female employment the answer is to provide daycare services for children, rather than ask fathers to provide more care.
familiarisation and babies
- Defamiliarization = more babies- There is a disconnect between female employment and fertility levels, logic would presume that higher female employment would lead to lower fertility levels, the opposite is true for developed nations. We can see that the compatibility between careers and having children is far higher in Scandi nations than it is in Southern European ones. One explanation for this is the fact that these nations have a culture of self-employment which makes this easier. These low fertility levels are increased further in familialistic countries by youth unemployment and young people living with their parents until later in life, delaying the starting of families.
the fertility effect of a ‘service‐biased’ welfare state is quite strong and positive, while youth unemployment rates pull the other way. Arguably, increasing the service intensity of welfare states should help reduce unemployment.’
Critique of Esping Anderson’s focus on social provision
Ciccia and Sainsbury
criticized for neglecting the role of the family, unequal gender division of labor, and the social rights of financially dependent citizens (its effects on women’s ability to claim many decommmodifying benefits)
- By focusing on social provisions most relevant for the (male) citizen- worker, Esping-Andersen neglected the social rights of citizens who were financially dependent on other family members, the vast majority being women.
divide between Esping anderson and feminists on familiarisation
- Feminists used defamilialisation as synonymous with individualisation or the ability to make claims on the state independently of one’s position within the family, thus emphasising the importance of considering care and family dependency on a par with other principles of entitlement. However, when Esping-Andersen used defamilialisation – without properly crediting feminists – he focused on the importance of the availability of care outside the home, in particular, childcare. This was considered an essential prerequisite of women’s commodification (being in paid employment), and thus their ability to claim social rights based on their status as workers (commodification), in this way re-establishing the superiority of work over other entitlements.
defamiliarisation and increases to other inequalities
- The expanding literature on care and immigration in the wake of globalisation demonstrates that the social organisation of care is also inextricably linked with other relations of inequality, in particular, ethnicity and class… attention eventually shifted to the dynamics between welfare state policies and immigrant women care and domestic workers across countries. Comparative studies on care and labour market policies have revealed the significance of policy variations in the development of informal care markets, where immigrant workers are a growing supply of labour (Williams and Gavanas, 2008; Simonazzi, 2009). Informalisation, in turn, produces new inequalities in the receiving societies by limiting the social rights of immigrant care workers and their access to social benefits.
- The transfer of informal care to immigrant domestic workers in the home allows wives, mothers and daughters to join the workforce, but it also reaffirms the home as the site of care and the gendered nature of care since caring tasks and household chores remain largely in the hands of women.
revisionist approach- Nancy Fraser
- Nancy Fraser’s (1994) work on the universal caregiver ideal has often been taken as a point of reference This ideal envisions a society in which gender roles are transformed inside and outside the labour market so that care is no longer something that only women do. This idea had a strong impact on the field because it identified a third possibility to sameness versus difference: transforming men to become more like women, that is, primary caregivers
Orloff’s revisionism
- Orloff does not want to lay out an alternative utopia, she argues for an egalitarian vision that accommodates different kinds of peoples, including those who would not choose a 50/50 sharing of work and care even if they could.
Orloff- issue of social provision
- In most systems of social provision, men’s claims are based on paid work, while far fewer women make such claims
o Contribution from wages to social insurance funds bring entitlement to benefits, and even in the case of needs-based or universal entitlements, men’s claims are usually made because of loss of paid employment
o Most women’s claims are based on familial or marital roles (i.e. on the basis of unpaid domestic and caring work)
o In all systems of social provision, claims based on motherhood or marriage to a covered wage owner are associated with lower benefit levels than are direct, work-based claims
US welfare state - exemplifies two tier system of men and women
- many more women are indirectly incorporated in the welfare state on the basis of their husbands’ contributions than claim benefits as needy carers - wives or widows (with or without children) who receive social security are treated as “rights-bearers” rather than as clients where their marital tie to a covered breadwinner entitles them to the same treatment accorded to men who receive social security
- These women are better off than women who depend on welfare, but are also worse off relative to men within the same program because dependents’’ benefits are only 50% of the main beneficiary’s entitlement
issue with decommodification and women
- Social benefits that decommodify labour affect women and men in different ways because their patterns of participation in paid and unpaid labour differ:
o Taking parental leave may reduce a working woman’s earning capacity because continuous service with an employer often pays off in increased wages
Esping Anderson’s focus on the family
o Conservative-corporatist regimes respect the principle of subsidiarity - the “state will only interfere when the family’s capacity to serve its members is exhausted” but will not provide services that enable mothers to enter the paid labour force; thus reinforcing traditional family relations
o In liberal regimes, “concerns of gender matter less than the sanctity of the market”
o Social democratic regimes attempt to “preemptively socialize the costs of familyhood”, e.g. by assuming partial responsibility for care of the aged
Esping-Anderon’s lack of focus on provision of care
Orloff: his classification scheme does not reflect differences in how care is provided
o Among social-democratic states, services are not the same: Women in Sweden are likely to work outside the home, whereas Norway’s day-care provision is much less developed than Sweden’s and relatively more Norwegian mothers stay at home
Esping Anderson’s model does not predict equality of sexes in employment
o Provision of services is important to the Swedish welfare state, and this provides a multiplier-effect for female employment: Social services both allow women to work, and create a large labour-market within which they can find employment
* Sweden has the highest level of sex segregation in occupations, part-time employment and women doing the bulk of unpaid domestic work; occupational upgrading was accompanied by continued segregation
o Women’s employment in the USA has increased sharply, driven by market forces, in spite of the dearth of public services
* USA has the strongest sex desegregation
* Working wives in Sweden do about 72% of housework compared to 74% in the USA (Wright et al., 1992)
Esping -Anderson’s issue with assuming services lead to more females in work
sees women as choosing between work and the household, with work possible for most women only if state services are widely available
o Women do not choose between paid work and unpaid housewifery as exclusive activities (Hobson, 1991a) - they can choose to be stay-at-home wives and mothers only or combine paid work with their domestic work
Nowhere in the industrialized West can married women and mothers choose not to engage in caring and domestic labour unless they are wealthy enough to purchase the services of others - women perform most domestic work whether or not they work for pay
Orloff - two important dimensions needed to properly assess gender relations
- Access to paid work - Captures the extent to which women, particularly married women and mothers, are assured employment - a significant source of economic and political power
- The capacity to form and maintain an autonomous household: the extent of women’s freedom from compulsion to enter or stay in marriages in order to obtain economic support
Transfers versus services
Jensen
Transfers are less good for gender equality.
Transfers for decommodification, services for defamiliarization
transfers
o “transfer” refers to payments made by the government to individuals or groups without receiving any goods or services in return. These transfer payments are typically aimed at redistributing income, providing financial assistance, or addressing specific social or economic policy objectives.