An accepted framework for ‘gendering’ the analysis of welfare regimes compares countries by degrees of ‘defamilialization’ or how far their family policies support or undermine women’s employment ...participation. This article develops an alternative framework that explicitly spotlights women’s labour market outcomes rather than policies. Using hierarchical clustering on principal components, it groups 24 industrialized countries by their simultaneous performance across multiple gendered employment outcomes spanning segregation and inequalities in employment participation, intensity, and pay, with further differences by class. The three core ‘worlds’ of welfare (social-democratic, corporatist, liberal) each displays a distinctive pattern of gendered employment outcomes. Only France diverges from expectations, as large gender pay gaps across the educational divide – likely due to fragmented wage-bargaining – place it with Anglophone countries. Nevertheless, the outcome-based clustering fails to support the idea of a homogeneous Mediterranean grouping or a singular Eastern European cluster. Furthermore, results underscore the complexity and idiosyncrasy of gender inequality: while certain groups of countries are ‘better’ overall performers, all have their flaws. Even the Nordics fall behind on some measures of segregation, despite narrow participatory and pay gaps for lower- and high-skilled groups. Accordingly, separately monitoring multiple measures of gender inequality, rather than relying on ‘headline’ indicators or gender equality indices, matters.
This book explores the delegation of authority over American social programs to private actors. In the development of the American welfare state, policy-makers have often avoided direct governmental ...provision of benefits and services, turning instead to private actors for the governance of social programs. More recent versions of delegated governance seek also to create social welfare marketplaces in which consumers can choose from an array of private providers. This book examines both the reasons behind this persistent delegation of authority and the consequences. Focusing on the case study of Medicare—and, in particular, the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act—the book argues that fundamental contradictions in American public opinion help explain the prevalence of delegated governance. Americans want both social programs and small government, leaving policy-makers in a bind. To square the circle, policy-makers have contracted out public programs to non-state actors, including voluntary organizations and for-profit entities, as a way to mask the role of the state. Such arrangements also pull in interest group allies—the providers of these programs—who can help pass policies in a political landscape that is fraught with obstacles. Although delegated governance has been politically expedient, it has frequently come at the cost of effective administration and created problems of fraud and abuse. Social welfare marketplaces also suffer from the difficulties individuals have in making choices about the benefits they need. In probing both the causes and consequences of delegated governance, this book offers a novel interpretation of both American social welfare politics and the nature of the American state.
Um unseren Sozialstaat jetzt zukunftsfest zu machen, gilt es, aus den Erfahrungen der Corona-Pandemie zu lernen und auf Basis einer eingehenden Analyse die richtigen sozialpolitischen Lehren zu ...ziehen und entsprechende Maßnahmen auf den verschiedenen Handlungsfeldern zu ergreifen.
Rapid technological change – the digitalization and automation of work – is challenging contemporary welfare states. Most of the existing research, however, focuses on its effect on labor market ...outcomes, such as employment or wage levels. In contrast, this paper studies the implications of technological change for welfare state attitudes and preferences. Compared to previous work on this topic, this paper adopts a much broader perspective regarding different kinds of social policy. Using data from the European Social Survey, we find that individual automation risk is positively associated with support for redistribution, but negatively with support for social investment policies (partly depending on the specific measure of automation risk that is used), while there is no statistically significant association with support for basic income. We also find a moderating effect of the overall size of the welfare state on the micro-level association between risk and preferences.
This review paper systematically queries the Sustainability Transitions literature to unpack the concept of ‘experimentation’. We define an experiment as an inclusive, practice-based and ...challenge-led initiative, which is designed to promote system innovation through social learning under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity. A distinction is made between various terms (niche experiments, bounded socio-technical experiments, transition experiments, sustainability experiments and grassroots experiments), each with their own theoretical backgrounds and discursive and empirical focal points. Observed patterns and trends in the literature are discussed, as well as promising lines of enquiry for further exploration of- and a reflection on experimenting for sustainability transitions in the context of the welfare state.
•‘Experimentation’ is a central concept in field of sustainability transitions.•Various types of experiments are identified and their genealogy is traced.•A comprehensive over-arching definition of an experiment is presented.•Critical reflection and a future research agenda on the study of experimentation are provided.
This book provides an extensive and comparative account of all welfare reforms that occurred during the last three decades in Continental European countries. It reveals unexpected important ...structural reforms, to be understood as the culmination of a long reform trajectory, analyzed in detail with the tools of comparative historical institutionalism. With these reforms, Bismarckian welfare systems have lost their encompassing capacities, have partially turned to employment-friendliness and weakened the strongest elements of their male breadwinner bias.
In this crosscurrent contribution, we approach the notion of welfare through the lens of the data welfare state. We, further, suggest that datafied welfare can be fruitfully studied with the ...capabilities approach to better understand how ideas and values of data welfare intersect with and may allow for the ‘good’ life and human flourishing. The main aim is to highlight the deep-seated changes of the welfare state that emerge with the delegation of care and control tasks to algorithmic systems and the automation based on datafication practices. Welfare provision is undergoing major shifts that imply fundamentally rethinking the role of technology that supports and enhances welfare with the help of data.
Environmental problems – particularly climate change – have become increasingly important to governments and social researchers in recent decades. Debates about their implications for social policies ...and welfare reforms are now moving towards centre stage. What has been missing from such debates is an account of the history of the welfare state in relation to environmental issues and green ideas.
A Green History of the Welfare State fills this gap. How have the environmental and social policy agendas developed? To what extent have welfare systems been informed by the principles of environmental ethics and politics? How effective has the welfare state been at addressing environmental problems? How might the history of social policies be reimagined? With its lively, chronological narrative, this book provides answers to these questions. Through overviews of key periods, politicians and reforms the book weaves together a range of subjects into a new kind of historical tapestry, including: social policy, economics, party politics, government action and legislation, and environmental issues.
This book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of environmental policy and history, social and public policy, social history, sociology and politics.
Employing new and original survey data collected in three waves (April/May and November 2020 as well as May 2021) in Germany, this paper studies the dynamics of individual-level support for ...additional health care spending. A first major finding is that, so far, health care spending preferences have not radically changed during the Covid-19 pandemic, at least at the aggregate level. A more detailed analysis reveals, secondly, that individual-level support for additional spending on health care is strongly conditioned by performance perceptions and, to a lesser extent, general political trust. Citizens who regard the system as badly (well) prepared to cope with the crisis are more likely to support (oppose) additional spending. Higher levels of political trust are also positively associated with spending support, but to a lesser degree. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for policy-making and welfare state politics in the post-pandemic era.
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