This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Automation, digitalisation, the post-industrial ...transition and climate change are creating new social risks which are not adequately supported by established welfare state institutions. In this timely book, Maurizio Ferrera, Joan Miró and Stefano Ronchi propose critical social and institutional policy reform in response to the nation state’s inability to maintain a balanced ecosystem between democracy, the market economy, welfare and the rule of law.
While social welfare programs, often inspired by international organizations, are spreading throughout the world, the more far-reaching notion of governmental responsibility for the basic well-being ...of all members of a political society is not, although it remains a feature of Europe and the former British Commonwealth. The welfare state in the European sense is not simply an administrative arrangement of various measures of social protection but a political project embedded in distinct cultural traditions. Offering the first accessible account in English of the historical development of the European idea of the welfare state, this book reviews the intellectual foundations which underpinned the road towards the European welfare state, formulates some basic concepts for its understanding, and highlights the differences in the underlying structural and philosophical conditions between continental Europe and the English-speaking world.
Eastern welfare systems have largely been neglected by Western social policy. There is very little information in the West about their operation and the differences between them. Yet, as China and ...South-East Asia emerge as a major regional economic block, it is vital to understand the social models that are in operation there and how they are developing. This book puts the spotlight on the Chinese and South-East Asian welfare systems, providing an up-to-date assessment of their character and development. In particular it examines the underlying assumptions of these systems and how the processes of globalisation are impacting on them. As well as specific country case studies, there is a valuable comparative analysis of Eastern and Western welfare states. The book provides a unique insight into the main South-East Asian welfare systems written by experts living and working within them. It focuses on 'Confucianism' and globalisation to provide an account of tradition and change within the South-East Asian cultural context. Eastern welfare states in transition will be essential reading for students of social policy requiring an understanding of non-Western welfare systems. Policy makers and practitioners who are interested in how Eastern welfare systems are adapting to globalisation will also find it an important read.
Analysing two major surveys of 14 different migrant groups connected to Danish register data, this insightful book explores what migrants think of the welfare state. It investigates the question of ...whether migrants assimilate to the ideas of extensive state intervention in markets and families or if they retain the attitudes and values that are prevalent in their countries of origin.
Welfare state reform in times of austerity is notoriously difficult because most citizens oppose retrenchment of social benefits. Governments, thus, tend to combine cutbacks with selective benefit ...expansions, thereby creating trade-offs: to secure new advantages, citizens must accept painful cutbacks. Prior research has been unable to assess the effectiveness of compensating components in restrictive welfare reforms. We provide novel evidence on feasible reform strategies by applying conjoint survey analysis to a highly realistic direct democratic setting of multidimensional welfare state reform. Drawing on an original survey of Swiss citizens’ attitudes toward comprehensive pension reform, we empirically demonstrate that built-in trade-offs strongly enhance the prospects of restrictive welfare reforms. Our findings indicate that agency matters: governments and policy makers can and must grant the right compensations to the relevant opposition groups to overcome institutional inertia.
In The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey, author Erdem Yörük provides a politics-based explanation for the post-1980 transformation of the Turkish welfare system, in which poor relief policies ...have replaced employment-based social security. This book is one of the results of Yörük’s European Research Council-funded project, which compares the political dynamics in several emerging markets in order to develop a new political theory of welfare in the global south. As such, this book is an ambitious analytical and empirical contribution to understanding the causes of a sweeping shift in the nature of state welfare provision in Turkey during the recent decades—part of a global trend that extends far beyond Turkey. Most scholarship about Turkey and similar countries has explained this shift toward poor relief as a response to demographic and structural changes including aging populations, the decline in the economic weight of industry, and the informalization of labor, while ignoring the effect of grassroots politics. In order to overcome these theoretical shortages in the literature, the book revisits concepts of political containment and political mobilization from the earlier literature on the mid-twentieth-century welfare state development and incorporates the effects of grassroots politics in order to understand the recent welfare system shift as it materialized in Turkey, where a new matrix of political dynamics has produced new large-scale social assistance programs.
The Nordic Model is the 20th-century Scandinavian recipe for combining stable democracies, individual freedom, economic growth and comprehensive systems for social security. But what happens when ...Sweden and Finland – two countries topping global indexes for competitiveness, productivity, growth, quality of life, prosperity, and equality – start doubting themselves and their future? Is the Nordic Model at a crossroads? Historically, consensus, continuity, social cohesion, and broad social trust have been hailed as key components for the success and for the self-images of Sweden and Finland. In the contemporary, however, political debates in both countries are increasingly focused on risks, threats, and worry. Social disintegration, political polarization, geopolitical anxieties, and threat of terrorism are often dominant themes. This book focuses on what appears to be a paradox: countries with low income differences, high faith in social institutions, and relatively high cultural homogeneity becoming fixated on the fear of polarization, disintegration, and diminished social trust. Unpacking the presentist discourse of "worry" and a sense of interregnum at the face of geopolitical tensions, digitalization, and globalization, as well as challenges to democracy, the chapters take steps back in time and explore the current conjecture through the eyes of historians and social scientists, addressing key aspects of and challenges to both the contemporary and future Nordic Model. In addition, the functioning and efficacy of the participatory democracy and current protocols of decision-making are debated. This work is essential reading for students and scholars of the welfare state, social reforms, and populism, as well as Nordic and Scandinavian studies.
Social investment has recently received much attention among policy-makers and welfare state scholars, but the existing literature remains focused on policy-making on the macro level. We expand this ...perspective by studying public opinion towards social investment compared to other welfare policies, exploiting new public opinion data from eight European countries. We identify three latent dimensions of welfare state preferences: 'social investment'; 'passive transfers'; and 'workfare' policies. We find that social investment is far more popular compared to the other two. Furthermore, we identify distinct supporting groups: passive transfer policies are most supported by low-income, low-educated people, by individuals leaning towards traditional social values and by those subscribing to left-wing economic attitudes. Social investment policies are supported by a broad coalition of individuals with higher educational backgrounds and left-libertarian views from all economic strata. Workfare policies are most popular with high-income individuals and those subscribing to economically conservative and traditional authoritarian values.
Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing ...thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture.
InCultivating the Masses, David L. Hoffmann examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime, a regime intent on transforming the socioeconomic order and the very nature of its citizens. To analyze Soviet social policies, Hoffmann places them in an international comparative context. He explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world.
The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.
The Internet is a critical part of the societal infrastructure in the Nordic region – giving rise to increasing concerns about the growing power of global tech corporations that supply the foundation ...for the region’s evermore digitalised welfare states. Yet, we lack empirical evidence for understanding, discussing, and ultimately regulating the changing power structures surrounding Internet-based communication. Presenting a novel framework for analysing and comparing the four largest Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden – this book provides nuanced insights into what we think we know about digital power and control. Identifying the main gateways into contemporary digital societies, we follow the constant flows of data – from the individual user connecting to a network operator that then passes the data on through local, terrestrial networks, Internet exchange points, and submarine cable routes, to the servers of a given website and app that in turn send the requested data back and collect a wide range of metadata in the process. This allows us to identify the key market actors and regulatory arrangements that shape the evolution of digital communication systems. What we find is a significant historical shift in the ways basic communication resources are organised and controlled in welfare states. Alongside the rapid digitalisation of Nordic societies, new gatekeepers have entered the stage while former ones have stepped into the background, established regulatory frameworks have lost their previous efficacy, and commercial forms of governance have taken over. Yet, we also find that the four countries – that are so often described as a homogeneous whole – have followed different institutional and infrastructural paths on their way to digitalisation, resulting in different degrees of disruption, globalisation, and state involvement.
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