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The impact of class coalitions, cleavage structures and church-state conflicts on welfare state development

Authors:

Philip Manow

University of Bremen

Kees van Kersbergen

Aarhus University

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Working Papers Political Science No. 2006/03

Department of Political Science

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam



The impact of class coalitions, cleavage structures and church–state conflicts on welfare state

development

Philip Manow

Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung

pm@mpifg.de

Kees van Kersbergen

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

cj.van.kersbergen@fsw.vu.nl

Abstract

Comparative research on religion and the welfare state has been incomplete because it has

fairly exclusively, but mistakenly, focused on the role of political Catholicism in the

development of social protection systems, wrongly interpreted or simply ignored the role of

Protestantism, failed to differentiate between different strands of Protestantism, and put an

undue emphasis on the impact of religious ideas on welfare state institutions. This paper

proposes an alternative account of the impact of religion on the welfare state. It offers an

adapted model of political class coalitions that takes into account societal cleavage structures

to show how contrasting church–state constellations and conflicts in the north, centre and

south of Europe, and variation in the party-political representation of those cleavages has led

to different coalitions between lower and middle classes. This, in turn, led to distinct

institutional paths of welfare state development in the West.

1. Introduction

Most comparativists who study welfare state development agree today that religion has played

a role in the development of modern social protection systems. The early protagonists of the

power resources approach, however, had only stressed the causal impact of Socialist working

class mobilization on modern social policy (see Esping-Andersen and Van Kersbergen 1992).

In their view it was the working class and its socialist organizations that had been the driving

force behind the ‘social democratization’ of capitalism via the welfare state. To them it came

as a surprise that not only Social Democracy but also (Social) Catholicism promoted welfare

state development. John D. Stephens (1979: 100), one of the leading spokesmen of this

approach, put it in prudent terms when he argued that ‘it seemed possible that anti-capitalist

aspects of catholic ideology – such as notions of fair wage or prohibitions of usury – as well

as the generally positive attitude of the catholic church towards welfare for the poor might

encourage government welfare spending’. Similarly, Schmidt (1980, 1982) asserted that

Social Democracy and Christian Democracy were functionally equivalent for welfare state

expansion, at least during periods of economic prosperity. Wilensky (1981) argued that the

two movements overlapped considerably in ideological terms and that Catholicism indeed

constituted an even more important determinant of welfare statism than “left power” did.

Catholic social doctrine called for a correction of the most abhorrent societal effects of the

capitalist order. The Catholic principle of subsidiarity, moreover, posited that in the last

instance the (nation) state had a duty to intervene to correct for morally unacceptable market

outcomes. At the centre of the doctrine was not the type of workers’ social rights and

emancipation argument that one finds in Social Democratic ideology, but rather the

conviction that people have the Christian obligation to help the poor and that social policy can

help protect a stable and fair social order.

However, it was not only the moral obligations defined in social doctrine and the

preoccupation with the problem of social order that determined the pro-welfare stance of

religious political parties. Stephens also suggested that there were more straightforward

political reasons why Christian Democratic parties were supporters of the welfare state. These

parties operated in the political centre were seeking the working class vote, and hoped to

cooperate with the powerful Catholic unions. Social policies promised to secure the support of

the Catholic working class. Admitting the possibility that other political movements could be

attractive to the working class, however, implied that one of the constitutional assumptions of

the power resources model had to be relaxed; namely, that the political identity attached to

wage labour in capitalism is inherently, and of necessity, Social Democratic. But apparently

workers could be mobilized and organized as Catholics, too. Of course, much of the apparent

contempt for the continental European welfare state in the comparative literature stems from

Marxian notions of a ‘false consciousness’ attached to all forms of political mobilization that

do not follow class-lines.

Through an elaboration of the power resources approach in Esping-Andersen’s (1990)

regime approach and a specification of the association between Christian Democracy and the

welfare state (Van Kersbergen 1995; chapter 2 of this book has an extensive review of the

literature), the literature posited that it was the combination of Christian Democracy and

Catholic social doctrine that explained why Christian Democratic welfare states were as

generous in terms of social spending as the Scandinavian ones. At the same time, it was also

posited that they were not designed to counter market pressures (to de-commodify labour) to

the same extent as the Social Democratic welfare states. Christian Democracy-cum-Social

Catholicism rather produced and preserved a traditional, patriarchic, status-oriented model of

society.

It is this reading of the history of the western welfare state, that owes much to the

power resources and regime approach, which is challenged in this paper. It seems at best

incomplete. First, an exclusive focus on the labour question and on worker mobilization

ignores other highly contentious issues, particularly whether state or society should be

responsible for protecting workers, but also mothers and families, against the vagaries of life.

And here ‘society’ often had to be read: the church. Church and modern nation state also

waged bitter conflicts over who should be the central agent of socialization, as exemplified by

the Dutch ‘schoolstrijd’ or similar conflicts over education in France. These conflicts over

education exerted a profound impact on early welfare state building as well.

Second, taking into account not only the capital–labour conflict due to the industrial

revolution but also the state–church conflict over education and social policy due to the

‘national revolution’ (Stein Rokkan) is key to our understanding of modern welfare state

development. Only in those countries where in the last quarter of the 19h century bitter state–

church conflicts were waged did parties of religious defence form. These parties later became

so decisive as political actors that mobilized workers and the middle class not just along class

lines, but along cross-cutting lines of denominational belonging as well. To explain why

parties of religious defence formed in continental Europe as opposed to Scandinavia or

England is a precondition for understanding why the continental welfare state developed into

such a different direction compared to the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon regimes.

Third, it is not easy to reconcile the historical facts with the power resources and

regime narrative about European welfare state development. For instance, it was Liberalism

and anti-clericalism, as opposed to Catholicism or Christian Democracy, which prevailed in

the formative period of the Italian and French welfare states. In fact, in these countries much

of the early social legislation had an obvious anti-clerical momentum, since the aim was to

establish central national state responsibilities in a domain for which the church had always

claimed exclusive competency. Yet, in spite of their obvious Liberal and anti-clerical pedigree

several countries such as Italy, Belgium or France are regularly classified as belonging to the

Conservative–Catholic welfare state regime type. Therefore, the dominant reading in the

literature, which explains the specific features of the continental welfare state as a

manifestation of Catholic social doctrine, is historically inadequate and blurs the decisive

causes for the institutional variance among West-European welfare states.

Fourth, an exclusive focus on Catholic social teaching and Christian Democracy also

neglects the influence of Protestantism. For instance, a review of historically oriented studies

of the social and political role of Protestantism and Protestant political parties led one of us

(Van Kersbergen 1995: 254, footnote 1) to reject the idea that Protestantism has had any

positive contribution to either Christian Democracy or the welfare state. But this conclusion is

only warranted in a limited context. That is, when one indeed focuses on the direct impact of

political parties on the emergence and development of social policies, and, at the same time,

disregards the differentiation between Lutheran and reformed Protestantism, we have to

conclude that this universal statement is unjustified on the irrelevance of Protestantism for

welfare state development. Historical evidence suggests two things: First, reformed

Protestantism substantially delayed and restricted the introduction of modern social policy and

therefore had a negative impact on welfare state development. Second, the Lutheran state

church in Germany or in the Scandinavian countries held no major reservations against the

state playing a dominant role in social protection, namely, they did not mount a substantial

resistance against the nation state taking over these new responsibilities. Indeed they even

often supported and welcomed this development. Lutheran state churches, therefore,

positively contributed to welfare state development.

In our view, the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism and between the

major variants of Protestantism are very important for an accurate understanding of the

different directions nations went in their social policy development. On the one hand, the

Protestant free churches and other reformed currents (Dissenters, Calvinists, Baptists, et

cetera) held a strongly anti-étatist position, whereas, on the other hand, Lutheran state

churches never questioned the prerogative of the central state in social policy and education.

In contrast, when workers in Southern Europe fought for their political and social rights and

when Liberals in these countries tried to establish modern nation states, they consistently had

to fight against the Catholic clergy as well which were closely attached to the ruling elite of

the ancien régime. Bitter conflicts between the church and the Liberal elite in the new

republican nation states of Southern Europe were the consequence. It is for this reason that

Liberal parties in these countries often introduced new social legislation with explicitly anti-

clerical motives. This clearly speaks against any unqualified statement that Catholic social

doctrine was dominant in the development of the Southern or Continental welfare state.

Christian Democratic parties, which to a large extent were the unintended offspring of the

church’s political fight against Liberalism, did play an important role, but only much later.

Moreover, these parties did not always exactly play the pro-welfare state role that the

literature imagines, as in the case of the Italian Democrazia Cristiana that used the welfare

state primarily as a clientelist resource in its effort to mobilize voters and as a means of

becoming more independent from the official church hierarchy.

In sum, according to the power resources and regime analysis Protestantism has

played no significant role in the modern welfare state development, and Catholicism did so

but only insofar as Christian Democracy possessed a Catholic social doctrine and was

successful at organizing and mobilizing Catholic workers. We argue that the impact of

political Catholicism and of reformed Protestantism on welfare state development in the

western world was quite different from what the literature so far has suggested. The role of

religion in the development of the western welfare state is far more than just a variation of the

dominant ‘strength of the worker movement’ theme or a question of doctrine influencing

policies.

In this paper we start by reviewing how the impact of religion on modern welfare state

development had been conceived first in modernization theory – both in its ‘bourgeois’ and its

Marxist variants (Section 2). We then continue by positing our own argument of the role of

religion in modern welfare state development within the broader political economy literature,

which explains the welfare state as the outcome of different political class coalitions (Section

3). We end by pointing to further implications of our argument for the comparative welfare

state literature and for the renewed interest in the role of religion in modern welfare state

development (Section 4).

2. Protestantism, Secularization and the Welfare State

The issue of the relationship between religion and the development of social policy came up

in the context of the theory that pointed to modernization as the root cause of the welfare

state. Generally speaking, the origin of the welfare state and its development were largely

interpreted as effects of modernization, which encompasses industrialization and

democratization. The ‘question’ to which the welfare state was an answer concerned the

increasing demands for social and economic equality, that is the demands that completed the

Marshallian trias of civil, political and social rights. In catering for such demands, the scope

of state intervention was increased tremendously and the nature of the state was transformed:

With the structural transformation of the state, the basis of its legitimacy and its

functions also change. The objectives of external strength or security, internal economic

freedom, and equality before the law are increasingly replaced by a new raison d’être:

the provision of secure social services and transfer payments in a standard and

routinized way that is not restricted to emergency assistance (Flora and Heidenheimer

1981: 23).

The increased demand for socioeconomic security came from a system of industrial

capitalism that dislodged masses of people and made them dependent on the whims of the

labour market, thus rapidly destroying traditional forms of social protection. Welfare state

development was related to the problem of social disorder and disintegration that was created

by the increasing structural-functional differentiation of modern societies. Such differentiation

‘involves a loosening of ascriptive bonds and a growing mobility of men, goods, and ideas. It

leads to the development of extensive networks of exchange and greater disposable resources.

As differentiation advances and breaks down traditional forms of social organization, it

changes and exacerbates the problem of integration (…)’ (Flora and Alber 1981: 38).

Modernization caused social disintegration and reinforced the functional requirement

of intervention by social organizations and the state. Modernization involved rapidly changing

working conditions, the emergence of the free labour contract, and the loss of income security

among weak groups in the market and through unemployment. The market did not provide the

collective goods needed to cope with these problems. At the same time, large parts of the

population were mobilized and organized as a consequence of the increasing concentration of

people in factories and cities and the extended means of communication. Mobilization was

expressed in public protest and violence or in social and political organizations, thus making

the spectre of disorder and disintegration directly visible and perceptible for the state elites. In

addition, there emerged a pressure generated by the power of organization itself, especially

the organization of workers.

The causal link between industrialization (or modernization more generally) and

welfare state development was not always elaborated well theoretically. The theory that

modernization (especially industrialization and its correlates) is the root cause of the welfare

state is a functionalist theory that understands the growth of the welfare state in developed

nations by and large as the response of the state to the growing needs of its citizens. This

theory stresses that industrialization generates demands for social security that can only be

met by rational means of state intervention. Similar problems demand similar rational

solutions. Consequently, social welfare was seen as a function of industrialization, which

created the preconditions for welfare state development in the sense of generating both the

need and resources for intervention. It was technical rationality rather than political conflict

that governed this response to the transformation of societies.

We think that modernization theory is right in constructing a causal link between

industrialization and the growing need for social policy, with two crucial modifications: 1) the

association must be understood in a somewhat different manner and 2) it is not the only link

of causal importance. First, it is not industrialism per se, but the establishment of a full-

fledged labour market which links the modern market economy to the welfare state. Second,

not only the industrial revolution, but also the national revolution has been of extreme

importance for the advent of modern systems of social protection. Here we focus on the first

aspect, the labour market–welfare state nexus and inquire into the national revolution as a root

cause of modern welfare state formation in section 3.

According to the original theory a ‘normal’ development would be that modern social policy,

usually conceptualized as social insurance, originated as an effect of the dislocation that

industrial capitalism caused. The theory pointed to societal problems that emerge from the

wide disruption created by the industrial revolution and the advent of capitalism. However,

theoretically the reference to ‘industrialism’ was not always well thought-out. In our view, the

root cause of the demand for modern social policy does not lie in industry but in the advance

of a full-fledged and self-regulating market on which labour could be bought and sold as a

commodity. This, of course, is the single most important characteristic of industrial capitalism

as Karl Polanyi (1944 [1957]: 40–41) understood it:

(…) once elaborate machines and plant were used for production in a commercial

society, the idea of a self-regulating market was bound to take shape (…). Since

elaborate machines are expensive, they do not pay unless large amounts of goods are

produced. They can be worked without a loss only if the vent of the goods is reasonably

assured and if production need not be interrupted for want of the primary goods

necessary to feed the machines. For the merchant, this means that all factors involved

must be on sale, that is, they must be available in the needed quantities to anybody who

is prepared to pay for them. Unless this condition is fulfilled production with the help of

specialized machines is too risky to be undertaken both from the point of view of the

merchant who stakes his money and of the community as a whole which comes to

depend upon continuous production for incomes, employment, and provisions.

Polanyi’s point was that such conditions did not exist in agricultural society, but had to be

brought about. The transformation needed was fundamental and required that the economic

market logic took over all other social motives – gain rather than subsistence – and all other

social institutions. A market economy could only function in a market society. Highly

regulated markets as places for trade and barter, of course, existed everywhere and since long,

but a self-regulating market system was a new and unique phenomenon. ‘Self-regulating

implies that all production is for sale on the market and that all incomes derive from such

sales. Accordingly, there are markets for all elements of industry, not only for goods (always

including services), but also for labor, land, and money (…) (Polanyi 1944 [1957]: 69). This

implied that land, money and labour were assumed to be produced for sale. Thus they could

be bought and sold, functioning as commodities.

Polanyi stressed that labour was obviously not produced for the sole purpose of

selling. It was a fictitious commodity; it was forced to function as if it were a commodity. It

was therefore also subject to the forces of supply and demand, embodied in the price

mechanism, and nothing (and especially not state intervention) ought to prohibit its

functioning as a commodity. But labour could simply not function as a commodity, because if

it really did so on an unrestrained market, it would destroy society.

For the alleged commodity ‘labor power’ cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately,

or even left unused, without also affecting the human individual who happens to be the

bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s labor power the system

would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’

attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human

beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of

acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation’ (Polanyi 1944

[1957]: 73).

Labour had to be adapted to the demands of the market system. And this implied a complete

reorganization of society itself, as a result of which human society became an ‘accessory of

the economic system’ (Polanyi 1944 [1957]: 75). The result were disastrous and ‘human

society would have been annihilated but for protective countermoves which blunted the action

of this self-destructive mechanism’ (idem). Although Polanyi nowhere used the words, his

thesis is, of course, that the commodification of labour was necessarily followed by its

decommodification. This, then, is the ‘double movement’ that Polanyi identified as being so

characteristic for the social history of the nineteenth century: ‘society protected itself against

the perils inherent in a self-regulating market system (…)’ Polanyi 1944 [1957]: 76).

Following Polanyi, it is the timing of the industrial transformation and the development of a

self-regulating market for industrial labour (the first movement) which determines whether

the countermovement in the form of social protection arises in a country.

We can understand nineteenth century developments in social legislation in terms of

the creation of a self-regulating market, the social dislocation this caused and the

counteraction in the form of social protection this provoked. This is the common experience of

all countries in which the self-regulating market did its destructive work. This is Polanyi’s

brilliant analysis of the double movement of commodification, also of labour power, under

capitalist markets and of decommodification as the inevitable response to this. In fact, Polanyi

(1957 [1944]: 147) made a historical-comparative statement to this effect:

Victorian England and the Prussia of Bismarck were poles apart and both were very

much unlike the France of the Third Republic or the Empire of the Habsburgs. Yet each

of them passed through a period of free trade and laissez-faire, followed by a period of

antiliberal legislation in regard to public health, factory conditions, municipal trading,

social insurance, shipping subsidies, public utilities, trade associations, and so on. It

would be easy to produce a regular calendar setting out the years in which analogous

changes occurred in the various years (…).

The supporting forces were in some cases violently reactionary and

antisocialist as in Vienna, at other times ‘radical imperialist’ as in Birmingham, or of the

purest liberal hue as with the Frenchman, Edouard Herriot, Mayor of Lyons. In

Protestant England, Conservative and Liberal cabinets labored intermittently at the

completion of factory legislation. In Germany, Roman Catholics and Social Democrats

took part in its achievement; in Austria, the Church and its most militant supporters; in

France, enemies of the Church and ardent anticlericals were responsible for the

enactment of almost identical laws. Thus under the most varied slogans, with very

different motivations a multitude of parties and social strata put into effect almost

exactly the same measures in a series of countries in respect to a large number of

complicated subjects.

Polanyi’s theory of the double movement explains why all nations, irrespective of regime-

type or the political-ideological leanings of the ruling elites, developed social protection

against the social disruption caused by the creation of the capitalist labour market.

However, neither the theory of industrialism nor Polanyi’s theory of the double

movement appear satisfactory when it comes to explaining the varying forms the welfare state

countermovement took. Their incapability to explain why the state responses to the challenges

posed by the full ‘marketization’ of moderns societies varied so much is due to their lack of a

micro-foundation, since they never detail how exactly pressures of social misery and

dislocation were actually translated into some social policy response or ‘the’ welfare state. In

both the modernization approach and the Polanyian explanation it remains obscure how needs

and demands can create their own fulfilment. There is little or no account of the causal

mechanisms or the societal actors producing the political responses. This is why – implicitly

or explicitly – they are also theories of convergence, arguing that societies were increasingly

becoming alike as they approached a certain level of industrial development and as they

developed a self-regulating labour market. Therefore both theories have little to say

empirically about cross-national variation among developed nations, or why the responses to

the social disruptions caused by modern capitalism were so different from each other with

such long lasting socio-economic effects for these societies.

In our view, it mattered a great deal who exactly executed the countermovement. It is

here that political actors (such as political parties) gain relevance as organized expressions of

social cleavage structures. Among those cleavages that have structured the party systems of

Western Europe, the religious one has been of particular importance. This cleavage resulted

from state–church conflicts that occurred in the wake of the national revolution when state

building elites challenged the position of the church in domains perceived crucial for the

creation of modern nation states (particularly in education, but in social protection as well).

Of course, the 1970s generation of welfare state researchers, inspired by the (functionalist)

theory of modernization and masterly represented by Peter Flora, already claimed that religion

influenced modern welfare state development, but again they rather emphasized the role of

religion as a structural factor and in the longue durée. Modernization theory cherished the

claim that secularization (as a correlate of industrialization and urbanization or as a

phenomenon of modernization in general) and Protestantism were a source of welfare state

development. It was the decline of religion, the impact of Protestantism and the rise of the

secular nation state – as a consequence of the ‘surrender’ of the church to the state or as a

result of the retreat of the church into the ‘private’ realm – that governed the development of

the welfare state.

Secularization was taken to refer to the decline of the categorical impact of religion on

human conduct (Chadwick 1975) and pointed to the increasing powerlessness of organized

religion in temporal affairs, coupled with the decreasing plausibility of the religious

interpretation of the world (Martin 1978). Or in Bruce’s (2002: 3) summary of the

secularization paradigm:

a) the declining importance of religion for the operation of non-religious roles and

institutions such as those of the state and the economy; b) a decline in the social

standing of religious roles and institutions; and c) a decline in the extent to which people

engage in religious practices, display beliefs of a religious kind, and conduct other

aspects of their lives in a manner informed by such beliefs.

Religious institutions lost their dominance over society and culture and Protestantism ‘served

as the historically decisive prelude to secularization’ (Berger 1990: 113).

Christianity was thought to be related to welfare capitalism only so far as

Protestantism involved a first step in the process of secularization and individualization,

because this belief caused ‘an immense shrinkage in the scope of the sacred in reality’ (Berger

1990: 111). Protestantism qualitatively changed church–state relationships which, in turn,

facilitated the construction of the welfare state. Protestantism and secularization influenced

the transformation of traditional societies into mass democracies and this process affected the

institutional arrangements of modern welfare states. Thus Flora’s generalization of the

Rokkan macro-model of European history asserted that

the protestant nationalization of the territorial culture in the North favored the

mobilization of voice ‘from below’: the early development of literacy encouraged the

mobilization of lower strata into mass politics, and the incorporation of the church into

the state apparatus reduced one potential source of conflict and produced a clear-cut

focus for the opposition of the dominated population. By contrast, the supra-territorial

influence of the catholic church favored a mobilization ‘from above’: the late

development of literacy retarded spontaneous mass mobilization and the conflicts over

the control over the educational system led to efforts by the church to mobilize against

the state (Flora 1983: 22).

In nations in which the reformation had a lasting impact and in which state–church relations

gradually developed, the conditions for collective welfare services were argued to be most

favourable, especially as the decline of religion was believed to facilitate the growing political

salience of class. In contrast to the argument that the power of (Calvinist) Protestantism

delayed welfare state development (cf. Manow 2004), the modernization scholars were

convinced that in those nations where Catholicism continued to shape culture and politics, the

conflict between state and church inhibited or at least retarded the emergence of a welfare

state. This contrast between the Protestant and the Catholic nations was then taken to explain

the difference in timing and variation in the quality of the welfare states. These latter

differences concerned the degree of ‘stateness’ (the level of centralization; the level of state–

church integration; the degree of state intervention in the economy) and the degree of

institutional coherence (universalism versus fragmentation).

The ideal type of the welfare state that Flora and others at the time had in mind

referred to a historical combination of universalism and stateness and was taken to comprise

characteristics such as political centralization, nationalization of the church, cultural

homogeneity, advanced agriculture, the lack of (or limited) absolutism, smooth

democratization and a limited division of state and society. This ideal type of welfare state

development was found in Europe’s periphery, specifically, in Scandinavia where the physical

distance from Rome was greatest. In other words, what Peter Flora discovered as the

differentia specifica of the ‘Protestant welfare state’, was later rediscovered by Walter Korpi

and his followers (notably Gøsta Esping-Andersen) as the ‘Social Democratic welfare state’.

In an important article, Heidenheimer (1983) focused on the relationship between

religion and secularization patterns on the one hand and what he called the ‘westward spread’

of the welfare state on the other. His article was in the form of two imaginary dialogues, the

first between Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, taking place in 1904, and the second between

Ernst Reweb and Max Schroeltt, the modern impersonations of the two great sociologists. The

birth of the welfare state was dated 1883, the year of the introduction of the first workers’

insurance in Bismarckian Germany. The question to Weber and Troeltsch was ‘whether the

spread of social insurance is at all related to the religious ethos prevalent in different countries

and if so, how do the different branches of Christianity compare in the degree to which they

have welcomed or opposed this trend?’ (Heidenheimer 1983: 6).

In the Weberian perspective it was expected that the adoption of social insurance

occurred in an early stage in Protestant countries because both doctrine and the intimate

relationship between state and church were favourable to paternalist types of social policies.

Catholic countries were expected to be laggards because Catholicism inhibited economic

development. In the account of Troeltsch, on the other hand, there was a crucial difference

between Calvinist and Lutheran countries, the latter probably more willing to accept social

insurance as a tolerable intervention, the former, because of the association with liberal

capitalism, probably even slower in their embracing of the welfare state than the Catholic

nations.

Secularization patterns were assumed to affect national experiences by altering the

velocity with which social insurance schemes were introduced (cf. Manow 2004). In the

Weberian perspective secularization was assumed to accelerate the development of the

welfare state because it was viewed as a concluding phase of western rationalization.

According to the Troeltschian interpretation, however, secularization was a multi-dimensional

process by which religion lost its influence entirely in some domains, whereas in other

domains traditional values were transplanted into secular structures and processes

(Heidenheimer 1983: 9).

The link between religion and the welfare state that Van Kersbergen (1995) advanced

consisted of four theses: 1) Christian Democracy is the heir of the (social) Catholic parties

that mobilized roughly between 1870 and 1914; 2) Christian Democracy fostered a distinctive

welfare state regime labelled ‘social capitalism’; 3) this regime was both the medium and

outcome of Christian Democratic power mobilization through the ‘politics of mediation’; and

4) the specific configuration of interests (including denominational interests) representation

and accommodation within Christian Democratic parties explained different outcomes in

terms of social policy performance, that is within regime variations. The explanatory problem

did not concern the possible association between religion(s) and welfare state emergence,

timing or development. Rather the question was to what extent an institutionally distinct

welfare state regime could be explained in terms of the impact of Christian Democratic power

mobilization, and to what extent the successful founding of ‘social capitalism’ implied

increasing returns for Christian Democratic power mobilization. In the wake of this argument,

the thesis of the irrelevance of Protestantism came to refer to the issue of the distinctive

regime and to the minimal contribution of Protestants to Christian Democracy.

The main argument was based on the conviction that it was in the social motivation or

concern that we find not only the origins of the distinctiveness of Christian Democracy

(especially vis-à-vis conservatism), but also the root cause of the movements’ success in terms

of electoral competition and policy performance. The religious inspiration of Christian

Democratic parties distinguished them from conservative or secular centre parties, but also

from Liberal and Social Democratic parties (Van Kersbergen 1994; 1995; 1999). The social

concern of Christian Democratic parties was related directly to its main historical ancestor,

Social Catholicism. Even where the Protestant influence was discernible (Germany, the

Netherlands), Catholic social teaching was core to the political ideology of Christian

Democratic parties and through the social policies of these parties impinged on the welfare

state.

To sum up: in contrast to Polanyi we argue that it did matter who politically executed

‘the countermovement’. And following Flora, Heidenheimer and others we emphasize the

importance of religious cleavages when it comes to the question which kind of class or party

coalitions were able to formulate the welfare state response to the Great Transformation. In

the following paragraph we outline two possible narratives of how political class coalitions

have shaped the welfare state response to the challenges posed by the industrial revolution.

We then continue by developing the outlines of our own cleavage theory of political class

coalitions, emphasizing the importance of the religious cleavage in continental Europe as well

as the importance of the absence of a religious cleavage in Scandinavia for the diverging

paths of welfare state formation and development in these two regions.

3. The Party Political Correlates of the Countermovement

It is important to account for the kind of political coalitions that were behind the national

formulations of the Polanyian countermovement. For this reason we look at national party

systems and how they have led to different strengths of the left and the right. The power

resources approach in the comparative welfare state literature argues that the welfare state was

a project of the left, of Social Democratic parties and unions. Where the left was strong, the

welfare state became generous and encompassing. Where the left was weak, the welfare state

remained residual. Yet, Social Democracy nowhere was able to achieve an electoral majority

on its own (Przeworski and Sprague 1986). The left always remained dependent on coalition

partners who would join them in their struggle for more social justice and equality, for

workers’ better living conditions, and for the decommodification of labour. Therefore, ‘the

history of political class coalitions [is] the most decisive cause of welfare state variations’

(Esping-Andersen 1990: 1). In the first chapter of his seminal The Three Worlds of Welfare

Capitalism Esping-Andersen (1990) himself sets out to provide us with such a stylized history

of political class coalitions. He highlights three elements of such an account: the ‘nature of

class mobilization (especially of the working class); class political coalition structures; and

the historical legacy of regime institutionalization’ (Esping-Andersen 1990: 29). With respect

to the mobilization of the working class, he is quick to add that working class strength itself

does not help explaining much of the history of welfare state development: ‘It is a historical

fact that welfare state construction has depended on political coalition-building. The structure

of class-coalitions is much more decisive than are the power resources of any single class’ (p.

30). He then goes on to stress the importance of the pro-welfare state support coalition

between Social Democracy and agrarian parties in the Nordic countries, a coalition which

could be expanded after World War II to include the middle class. Esping-Andersen explains

the specific success of Swedish Social Democracy in building a generous welfare state with

the fact that it succeeded to broaden the political support for a new kind of welfare state that

‘provided benefits tailored to the tastes and expectations of the middle classes’ (31). Without

pointing out possible causes, Esping-Andersen goes on to state that in Anglo-Saxon countries

‘the new middle classes were not wooed from the market to the state’ and therefore these

countries ‘retained the residual welfare state model’ (31). ‘In class terms, the consequence is

dualism. The welfare state caters essentially to the working class and the poor. Private

insurance and occupational fringe benefits cater to the middle classes’ (31). The continental

welfare states, finally, also depended on the support of the middle classes, but out of

‘historical’ (ibid.) – again not particularly well explained – reasons the outcome was different.

‘Developed by conservative political forces, these regimes institutionalized a middle-class

loyalty to the preservation of both occupationally segregated social-insurance programs and,

ultimately, to the political forces that brought them into being’ (Esping-Andersen 1990: 31–

32).

As valuable as the distinction of the three regimes has proven for the comparative

analysis of welfare states and as critical as the emphasis on the importance of ‘political class

coalitions’ is, Esping-Andersen does not provide us with an explanation why these groups of

countries followed such different institutional trajectories of development. His account rather

‘comes across as a post-hoc description’ (Iversen 2006: 609), in particular since Esping-

Andersen gives no systematic reasons why some welfare states were able to include the

middle class while others were not.

In a recent paper Torben Iversen and David Soskice (2005) have proposed a different

version of a political class coalition theory of welfare state formation and growth. They start

from the basic observation that in multi-party systems the left is in government more often

whereas the right more often governs in two-party systems. Why is this so? At the risk of

oversimplification their argument may be summarized as follows: In a simple model with

three classes – the lower, middle and upper classes – and a system of (nonregressive) taxation

and redistribution the middle class votes together with the lower class in a multi-party system

more often than in a two-party system. In a multi-party system the lower and the middle

classes together can tax the rich and share the revenue. In a two-party system the middle class

can either vote for a centre-left party or a centre-right party. If the left governs, the middle

class has to fear that the left government will tax both the upper and the middle class for the

exclusive benefit of the lower class. If a right party governs, the middle and upper class will

not be taxed and redistribution will be marginal. Therefore, in a two-party system the middle

class has the choice either to be taxed and to receive no benefits, or not to be taxed and to

receive no benefits. Obviously, it would then prefer not to be taxed. In a multi-party system,

however, the middle class’s choice is different. If the middle class party enters into a coalition

with the left party, the lower and middle class can tax the rich and divide the revenue. If the

middle class party goes together with a right party, taxation as well as redistribution will be

marginal. From this simple and highly stylized account it is clear that the middle class will

more often vote together with the lower class in multi-party systems – or to be more precise:

middle class parties will more often enter into coalitions with lower class parties in multi-

party systems than in two-party systems.

The crucial assumption in the Iversen/ Soskice model is that centre-left parties in a two party system

cannot credibly commit themselves to a political agenda tailored to median voter interests. Problems

of credible commitment are more easily solved in coalition governments. There is ample evidence that

indeed a ‘coalition of parties’ functions differently than ‘coalition parties’ (Bawn and Rosenbluth

2003).

As in Esping-Andersen’s sketch of different welfare state coalitions, Iversen and

Soskice also develop a class-coalitional approach, but they provide us with a clearer

mechanism that explains the formation of different class coalitions. The authors stress

electoral rules as the most important mechanism, as these either lead to multi-party systems-

cum-generous welfare state or two-party systems-cum-residual welfare state. The critical

analytical distinction therefore is the distinction between plurality and proportional

representation (PR). In essence, Iversen and Soskice provide us with a very elegant

explanation for the fact that the left more often governs in countries with PR systems (and it is

here the welfare state tends to be bigger and more redistributive), whereas the right more

often governs in countries with majoritarian electoral rules – countries in which the welfare

state tends to be less generous and more residual (see Table 1; Iversen and Soskice 2005: 3,

47).

Table 1: Electoral systems and the number of years with left and right governments

(1945–1998)

Government Partisanship Proportion of Right

Governments

Left Right

Proportional 342

(8) 120

(1) 0.26 Electoral

System Majoritarian 86

(0) 256

(8) 0.75

Number in parenthesis: number of countries that have an overweight (more than 50

%) of centre-left or centre-right governments during the 1945–1998 period

But ever since the seminal contribution of Esping-Andersen we know that the level of

spending per se is not what should interest us most, but rather the profound differences in the

Whether ‘years in government’ is a good measurement for the effects of electoral rules remains an

open question. Since one of the effects of PR in Scandinavia is the frequent occurrence of minority

governments, where parties supporting the government nonetheless can have substantial policy

influence, the measure might underestimate the importance of informal party coalitions between left

and centre parties. Therefore, also vote shares can be considered when assessing the potential for

policy influence of different parties, which, however, does not alter the picture substantially (see

Manow 2006). The reason for the unequal success of left and right parties in PR and majoritarian

systems respectively may have a cause different from the one to which Iversen and Soskice point (vote

choice of the middle-class). In a recent paper Jonathan Rodden has shown that plurality systems

disadvantage the left, since regionally concentrated votes are translated into fewer seats than more

dispersed votes. This works at the disadvantage of workers in the industrial centres (Rodden 2005).

The malapportionment of districts, when the rural population declines and the urban population

increases, adds to this problem. For our context, however, it is more central to stress the difference

between two-party and multi-party systems with respect to the representation of societal cleavage

lines.

institutional setup of European welfare states with their substantially differing socio-economic

effects. However, is there a way to combine the class-coalition model of Iversen and Soskice

with the three regimes approach of Esping-Andersen? Yes, there is such a link or nexus, but it

is one which becomes apparent only once we give due credits to the importance of societal

cleavage structures and especially the religious cleavage.

Our argument runs as follows. We agree with Duverger and Iversen and Soskice that

majoritarian electoral rules lead to a two-party system and that here the middle class more

often votes for conservative parties. In such a two-party system mainly one societal cleavage

is present, namely the one dominant in all advanced industrial countries, the left–right or

labour–capital cleavage. All other cleavages are absorbed, latent or ‘incorporated’ in this

basic cleavage.

A good example would be the fierce conflict between the Anglican high

church and the Protestant dissent in Britain in the last quarter of the 19th century. This was a

virulent conflict line between the Tories and the Liberal Party (Parry 1986), but quickly

receded into the background once the Labour Party crowded out the Liberal Party in the last

decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century. The religious dissent

then lost its own strong political representation in the party system and subsequently

Nonconformism became influential within the Labour party, exhibited by corresponding

changes to Labour’s social policy program (see Pelling 1965; Caterall 1993). It is here where

the basic mechanism described by Iversen and Soskice seems to apply: where the middle class

more often votes for Conservative parties, the welfare state remains residual.

In PR systems, by contrast, there exists a larger (effective) number of parties that

represent more than the one dominant cleavage dimension (the labour–capital cleavage) (Neto

and Cox 1997; Clark and Golder 2006). Which kind of additional cleavages are represented in

the party system depends on the cleavage structure of the country in question. Here the

distinction between the Nordic and the Continental countries and their welfare states achieves

particular relevance. In the north of Europe a religious cleavage did not become politicized

and ‘particized’ (see Stoll 2005) because these societies were neither religiously

heterogeneous, nor did the ‘national revolution’ (Rokkan) lead to strong state–church

conflicts within them. ‘All the Nordic countries belong to (and, indeed, collectively

constitute) Europe’s sole mono-confessional Protestant region’ (Madeley 2000: 29). The

northern Protestant churches as Lutheran state churches, in contrast to the Catholic church in

The analysis of the impact of religion does not become irrelevant in this context, however, since it is

of interest how the religious cleavage has played out itself within the dominant left–right divide. The

role of Christian Socialism and Nonconformism within the British Labour party and the substantial

influence of these currents on the social policy program of Labour is an example.

southern Europe, did not feel fundamentally challenged when the new nation state started to

take over responsibilities which previously had fallen under the responsibility of the church.

Anti-clericalism never became a strong political current in the Scandinavian countries.

A cleavage that did become politicized and particized was the cleavage between

agrarian and industrial interests. It is in Europe’s north where strong parties of agrarian

defence emerged and where they received a substantial share of the votes over the entire post-

war period. The Finnish Agrarian Union (Malaisliitto), renamed Centre Party in 1965, won

between 21 and 24 percent of the vote in all elections between 1945 and 1970. Even in the

1970s and 1980s the Centre Party never received less than 17 percent of the vote. In the

general elections of 1991 the agrarians even became the biggest party with a vote share of

almost 25 percent, three percent more than the Social Democrats (see Caramani 2000: 275–

289).

Electorally less successful, but still with an impressive electoral record, was the

Swedish agrarian party, the Bondeförbunet, renamed Centerpartiet in 1957. It gained between

12 and 16 percent of all votes in the 1950s and 1960s, and then even increased its vote share

substantially in the 1970s, gaining up to 25 percent thereby becoming the second largest party

behind the Social Democrats. In the 1980s and 1990s, the agrarian party then again lost much

of its former strength and had a vote share of 15 percent in the early 1980s and went down to

5 percent in the late 1990s. The Norwegian Bondepartiet (since 1961 Senterpartiet), smaller

than its Finnish or Swedish counterparts, received around 9 percent on average throughout the

1950s and 1960s, had slightly more than 10 percent of the vote in the 1970s, and then fell

back a bit and remained between 6 and 8 percent in subsequent elections (with the exception

of the 1993 election where the agrarian party got 16.7 percent and was the third largest party

in the Storting) (see Caramani 2000: 762–775).

In Denmark the agrarian vote was very much concentrated in the Liberal party, the

Venstre or ‘Agrarian Liberals’ (Johansen 1986: 351), established in 1870 as ‘a derivation of

the Bondevennerne, the peasants’ friends’ (Caramani 2000: 204). The Venstre always won

more than 20 percent of the vote in the elections between 1945 and 1966, and became the

second largest party behind the Social Democrats. It was only in 1968 that the Liberals fell

back on third place behind the Conservatives. After a spectacular comeback in the 1975

elections (23 percent vote share) the party gained around 11 and 12 percent in subsequent

elections of the 1980s, only again to experience a strong increase in strength in the 1990s

(with 23 and 24 percent in the 1994 an 1998 elections respectively). As a split from the

Venstre/Liberals, Det Radicale Venstre was established in 1905. Whereas the Liberals

represented the interest of large farms, the Radicals defended small farm interests (Huber and

Stephens 2001: 141).

In sum, the distinguishing feature of the Scandinavian party systems is the strong role

that agrarian parties play in them. Over the entire post-war period from 1945 to 1999 agrarian

parties in Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark gained on average 20.6, 13.9, 8.9 and 18.5

percent of the vote. No comparable figures can be found in any other European party system

except in Switzerland, where the Schweizerische Bauern-, Gewerbe- und Bürgerpartei (since

1971 Schweizerische Volkspartei) gained more than 10 percent of the votes in each election

in the post-war period (cf. Caramani 2004: 181).

In all other European countries ‘the urban–

rural cleavage was incorporated into other party alignments – state–church and left–right in

particular – and did not give rise to specific political parties’ (Caramani 2004: 184). Given the

strong position of the agrarian parties, it comes as no surprise that almost all accounts of the

historical development of the Nordic welfare state stress the importance of red–green

coalitions for the formation and the subsequent expansion of the welfare state (see Olson

1986: 5, 75; Esping-Andersen 1990: 30) or see agrarian parties even as the driving force of

early welfare state development (Baldwin 1990: 55–94). The influence of the agrarian or

centre parties was due to their pivotal position within the Scandinavian party systems. When

not itself a part of the government coalition, centre parties tolerated the minority governments

often led by Social Democrats, especially in Norway and Sweden (see Narud and Strom 2000;

Bergman 2000). Social legislation depended on their consent and therefore was tailored to the

agrarian needs and interests.

Thus the political space occupied by agrarian parties in the north could be said to be

occupied by the Christian Democratic parties on the continent. The German CDU, the Dutch

CDA, the Austrian ÖVP, the Belgian CVP/PSC (Parti Social-Chrétien or Christelijke

Volkspartij), the Italian Democrazia Cristiana or the Swiss Christlich-Demokratische

Volkspartei are parties with their roots in political Catholicism. They are the offspring of the

fierce state–church conflicts in the last quarter of the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th

century (in the Belgian case, the CVP/PSC is the offspring of the national independence

movement of the Catholic southern provinces against the Protestant northern provinces of the

Low Countries).

The continental-European countries, each of which introduced PR no later than 1919,

have party systems with a relatively high (effective) number of parties in which the religious

The Bauern-, Gewerbe- und Bürgerpartei, however, is much more regionally concentrated and much

less nationally dispersed than the Nordic agrarian parties.

cleavage is represented in the form of Christian-democratic parties. The religiously mixed or

homogenously Catholic countries (like Belgium or Austria) all witnessed fierce state–church

conflicts in the last quarter of the 19

century. These conflicts led to the formation of parties

of religious defence, a type of party that is absent in the religiously homogenous (Protestant)

north.

Both with respect to vote shares and with respect to time in government, the Christian

Democratic parties have been dominant (if not hegemonic like the Italian Democrazia

Cristiana) in the continental countries. Since Christian Democratic parties combined the

religious and large parts of the bourgeois vote, their electoral fate was better than that of the

Nordic agrarian parties. Only counting the vote shares of the Catholic parties like the

Österreichische Volkspartei, the Christlich-Demokratische Union, the Democrazia Cristiana,

the Christen Demokratisch Appèl (and its former member parties like the Katholieke

Volkspartij)

and the Parti Social-Chrétien or Christelijke Volkspartij of Belgium (and

ignoring the Protestant parties in these countries for a moment), it becomes evident that

Christian Democracy was much more successful than the agrarian parties in Scandinavia. On

average, the Belgian PSC or CVP received 34.9 percent of the vote in all elections that took

place between 1945 and 1999, the German Christlich-Demokratische Union gained on

average of 44.2 percent of the vote during this period, the Katholieke Volkspartij (and later

the Appèl) gained on average 28.6 percent of the vote in the same period, the Austrian

Volkspartei received 41.5 percent, and the Italian DC received 33.8 percent of the vote. And if

we do not count the elections after the breakdown of the first Italian republic – that is if we

discard the elections after 1992 – than this share rises even to 37.9 percent. The Swiss

Christlich-Demokratische Volkspartei won around 20.9 percent of the vote. At the same time,

parties of agrarian defence remained largely absent in continental Europe. The urban–rural

cleavage dimension remained latent and was not politicized and particized in the continental

welfare states.

Put pointedly, according to our history of political class coalitions we find liberal

welfare states in countries with a majoritarian electoral system in which only one political

cleavage dimension is present (exemplary case: the UK). The Social Democratic generous

welfare states, which we find in the Nordic countries, however, have been the result of a

coalition between Social Democratic parties and parties of agrarian defence (red-green

Since part of the joined Christen-Democratisch Appèl were the Anti-Revolutionary Party and the

Christlijk-Historische Unie, since 1975 we cannot speak of a purely Catholic party. Numbers from

before 1975 however refer to ‘purely’ Catholic parties, mainly the Katholieke Volkspartij.

coalition). One important precondition for this coalition has been the absence of a strong

religious cleavage in the Scandinavian countries. On Europe’s continent, in turn, we find

welfare states that are the product of a coalition between Social and Christian Democracy

(red-black coalition). This is due to the fact that the second cleavage represented in the party

systems of continental Europe, besides the dominant left–right or labour–capital cleavage, has

been the religious cleavage, a cleavage inherited from the state–church conflicts in the wake

of the national revolution, in which Liberal state elites challenged the church in its former

domains like education or poor relief. What we propose here, in other words, is a Rokkanian

complement to the Iversen and Soskice model of welfare state class coalitions. In our view

Iversen and Soskice are perfectly right in stressing the importance of a class coalition between

lower and middle class, but once we look at the party political coalitions behind the Nordic

and the continental welfare states, we are also able to identify which type of middle class has

entered into a coalition with Social Democracy. This insight will also allow us to explain the

type of welfare state to which these party political class coalitions have led. Similarly, the

variation in Christian Democracy on the European continent – sometimes being hegemonic

like in the case of the Italian DC, sometimes having vanished over the course of the post-war

years like the French MRP – allows us to address systematically the question of the within-

type variation in the case of the Conservative, Christian Democratic welfare state predominant

on the continent.

To be clear, there have been and still are religious parties in the Nordic countries –

such as the most important and electorally successful Norwegian Kristelig Folkeparti founded

in 1933

– and there have been agrarian parties in continental Europe. But both remained

marginal, without political influence and impact, especially when it comes to welfare state

formation and growth. We also would like to emphasize that we do not claim that the PR

electoral systems can explain the formation of either agrarian parties or parties of religious

defence. In numerous cases these parties were founded before the introduction of PR, which

in most countries occurred only after World War I. However, in contrast to the simple

majority system in force in Britain, the two-ballot or two-round majority system in place

before the Great War in almost all other European countries has the non-Duvergian tendency

to sustain a higher effective number of parties, despite its ‘Duvergian drive’ towards the

formation of two blocks or party camps. This was a crucial difference between Britain and the

rest of Western Europe in the period of suffrage extension.

The Finnish Christian League, Suomen Kristillinen Liitto, was founded in 1958; the Swedish Kristen

Demokratisk Samling was founded 1964; the Danish Kristeligt Folkeparti was founded in 1970.

Within this broader picture France is an outlier case and we would like to address this

particular case shortly here.

France is a peculiar case since its welfare state is Bismarckian

(cf. Palier 2004). It shares many features with the social insurance states of other continental

European nations. However, in France a Christian Democratic party did not emerge in the

critical period of mass democratization (Kalyvas 1996), and then, after its late foundation

(MRP in the year 1939), proved to be only very short-lived. The party dissolved in the 1960s,

but already in the 1950s had only a marginal vote share (cf. Caramani 2004: 182; Elgie 2005;

Alexander 2004). Today the secular–confessional cleavage seems largely absent from the

French party system (notwithstanding the conflicts between laïcists and Islamic immigrants in

contemporary France). If one considers the continental or conservative welfare states to be a

product of a coalition between left Social Democrats and centre-right Christian Democrats,

then the French case obviously does not fit particularly well into this broader picture.

Closer inspection, however, helps to explain the peculiarities of the French

development. During the Third Republic, a secular–confessional divide was clearly present

and extremely important in the French political system. Therefore, the state–church cleavage,

which gave birth to Christian Democratic parties on Europe’s continent, was enormously

virulent in the early period of welfare state formation despite the nonformation of a Christian

Democratic party. Kimberly Morgan (2002, 2003, 2004) has convincingly argued that this

conflict was of importance in the field of family policy, early education and schooling. There

is also ample evidence that the strong position of the French state in social assistance has to be

interpreted against the background of the intense state–church conflicts in the last quarter of

the 19th and the first quarter of the 20th century. While all the political heat in the period from

1890 to 1910 was where state and church struggled over the responsibility for education and

poor relief, the so-called ‘worker question’ figured less prominently in the political

controversies around the turn of the century, also because this problem still loomed less large

for late industrializing France. This allowed voluntary arrangements to dominate the field,

whereas the state claimed predominance over the church in education, social assistance and,

increasingly, also for the hospital sector, leading to the side by side development of étatist

regulation in some sectors and corporatist solutions in others which is so typical for the

French état providence. But whereas the state–church conflict had been virulent in the

formative period of welfare state formation in France, ‘by 1958 the confessional–secular

cleavage has disappeared’ (Elgie 2005: 127).

The other obvious outlier – Switzerland – is explained by its strong federalism, which itself was a

way to pacify a fierce religious conflict.

Electoral rules, we contend, are again part of the explanation. When France went back

to the two-ballot system in 1958 (substituting for the PR electoral rules of the Fourth

Republic) the formation of two camps or ‘Lager’ – a left and a right block – was the effect

(Elgie 2005: 126–127). But with only two Lager, societal cleavages other than the socio-

economic left–right or labour–capital cleavage line tended to disappear from politics.

In an

electoral system like the French, there is one type of societal interest, however, which does

get represented, namely local, territorially based, that is especially agrarian interests

(Rogowski 1987). The poor electoral performance of the MRP before 1958 probably has

much to do with the ‘regime cleavage’ (Kalyvas 1996: 137–141), which already in the late

century had hindered the foundation of a Christian Democratic party in France and which

had fundamentally delegitimized such a project for many years to come.

In this paper we do not deal with the many institutional consequences which the

different welfare state coalitions in Europe’s north and on its continent had. We restrict

ourselves to simply mentioning some of the more important ones. One important difference is

evident from the outset: agrarian parties in the North voiced resistance against the income

differentiated social benefits that Social Democrats favoured (cf. Olson 1986; Johansen 1986).

Instead they preferred universalist, flat rate benefits since many small landholders had no long

histories of steady income and therefore feared that they would be actually unable to benefit

from welfare entitlements which were contribution financed with contribution related benefit

levels (cf. Baldwin 1990: 55–94). Christian Democratic parties, on the other hand, which

mobilized workers as did their Social Democratic counterparts, had far less reasons to object

to differentiated, wage-based contributions and entitlements. Social insurance contributions

promised to ease the party-internal conflict over social policy between Catholic workers and

the middle-class, since contributions ‘naturally’ seemed to limit the extent of welfare state

redistribution. Moreover, during the severe economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s,

which had particularly affected Scandinavian agriculture, many farmers became less

interested in unemployment payments, which would bridge the spells without work. Rather,

they demanded active labour market policies to ease the transition to the second and third

sector. The problem was perceived as one of structural change, in which the loss of

employment in the first sector had to be compensated through employment growth in the

We think it is revealing that in the reform debates of 1956–1958, which led to the substitution of PR

with the majoritarian two-ballot system, the ‘Christian Democratic’ MRP strongly favoured

proportional representation, whereas the Parti Radicale, which had collected the local, especially

agrarian vote was ‘sympathetic to a restoration of majority rule which had benefited them historically

so greatly’ (Alexander 2004: 210).

industry and services. Other important differences were the integration of the churches in the

continental welfare states in the provision of social services (hospitals, old-age homes,

kindergartens et cetera) as compared to state provision of these services in the Nordic

countries. Agrarian parties were also strongly in favour of financing the welfare state through

indirect taxes because this promised to shift ‘the expense of meeting risk from the most

progressively assessed levies of the day – the direct land taxes they (the agrarians) paid to

underwrite the poor-relief system – to the consumption habits of their urban political

opponents’ (Baldwin 1990: 64). It is therefore in the most crucial dimensions of the welfare

state – the mode of financing, the benefit structure, the structure of the provision of social

services – that we see the varying impact of the different party political coalitions in the North

and on the continent.

4. Outlook

As of yet, the comparative welfare state literature has tended to neglect the role of religion

and religious cleavages, the impact of parties of religious defence and the legacies of fierce

state–church conflicts. Where addressed at all, the influence of religion was perceived as

largely restricted to political Catholicism, and here most of the emphasis was put on the

influence of Catholic social doctrine. We acknowledge the importance of social doctrines, but

stress that parties of religious defence were the central political actors that translated religious

concerns into the realm of modern democratic politics. In those party systems in which parties

of religious defence are present, namely on Europe’s continent (without France, Spain and

Portugal), they backed a specific type of cross-class compromise which became manifest in a

specific type of redistributive regime.

With this we do not mean to say that we see the impact of religion on modern welfare

state development restricted to work through this party-political cum electoral channel. As

one important ‘transmitting’ channel however, parties were never simple porte-paroles of

religious doctrines (or other ideologies), but above all interested in maximizing votes, seats or

office. Parties need to attract an electorate and have to satisfy specific societal interests if they

want to be elected. A welfare state regime then represents a political compromise between

different electoral and societal groups, and this is particularly true for PR electoral systems in

which coalition government (or minority government) is the rule and one-party rule the

exception. Specifically, we have argued in this paper that a compromise between farmers’ and

workers’ interests was behind the formation and development of the welfare state in

Scandinavia, whereas the continental welfare state is the institutional expression of an (inter-

and intra-party) compromises between workers and the Catholic middle-class. We contend

that in order to understand which kind of political class-compromises were struck in the

different European countries, we need to analyze systematically the presence or absence of

different societal cleavage lines. This perspective directs attention to the different logics of

redistributive politics in different party-system settings – something we hope to analyse in

some more detail in future work.

Our re-assessment of the impact of religion on western welfare state development is an

invitation for a renewed debate on the causal sequences behind the different institutional

setups of contemporary welfare states. It implies that the threefold categorization between

Social Democratic, Conservative and Liberal welfare states rather hides than elucidates the

causal factors in the development of the various welfare state regimes as we know them

today. This paper has introduced an adapted model of political class coalitions that takes into

account societal cleavage structures. Moreover, it has shown how contrasting church–state

constellations and conflicts in the north, centre and south of Europe, variation in the party-

political representation of those cleavages, and differences in the social and political teachings

of Catholicism, Lutheranism and reformed Protestantism, have led to different coalitions

between lower and middle classes. These in turn manifested themselves as distinct

institutional paths of welfare state development in the West.

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Working Papers Political Science Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

2002/01 Paul Pennings and Hans Keman The Dutch parliamentary elections of 2002:

Fortuyn versus the establishment.

2002/02 Tanja A. Börzel and Madeleine O. Hosli Brussels between Berlin and Bern:

comparative federalism meets the European Union.

2002/03 Andreas Nölke Networks versus networks: a critical appraisal of post-national

governance Approaches with a focus on international organisations.

2002/04 Tanja Aalberts Multilevel governance and the future of sovereignty: a

constructivist perspective.

2003/01 Henk Overbeek Globalisation, neo-liberalism and the employment question.

2003/02 André Krouwel Measuring presidentialism of Central and East European

countries.

2003/03 Harmen Binnema How Europe hits parties... or not? Europeanisation of party

programmes in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

2003/04 Andreas Nölke Alternativen bei der Einführung von “Bologna” Die Umstellung auf

das BA/MA-System in der niederländischen Politikwissenschaft.

2003/05 Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Andreas Nölke and Henk Overbeek The transnational

political economy of corporate governance regulation: a research outline.

2003/06 Andreas Nölke Private international norms in global economic governance:

coordination service firms and corporate governance.

2004/01 Henk Overbeek Global governance, class, hegemony: a historical materialist

perspective.

2004/02 Noël Vergunst The impact of consensus democracy and corporatism on

socioeconomic performance in twenty developed countries.

2004/03 Adrianus Koster Het achterhalen van de eenzame fietser: Beschrijving en

analyse van de politieke loopbaan van Dries van Agt.

2004/04 Jasper de Raadt, David Hollanders, André Krouwel Varieties of populism: an

analysis of the programmatic character of six European parties.

2004/05 Arjan Vliegenthart Corporate governance in Eastern Central Europe: the state of the

art.

2004/06 Laura Horn The Transformation of Corporate Governance Regulation in

Europe - Towards a Marketisation of Corporate Control?

2004/07 Angela Wigger Revisiting the European Competition Reform:The Toll of Private

Self-Enforcement

2005/01 Barbara Vis Trade Openness, Welfare Effort and Varieties of Welfare Capitalism

2005/02 Catherine Netjes Institutional Trust in Central and Eastern Europe: Barometer of

Democracy or Performance Thermostat?

2005/03 Lawrence Ezrow Why Pander to the Party?: A Spatial Analysis of Senate Primary

and General Elections

2006/01 Hans Keman Comparing political systems: Towards positive theory development

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2006/02 Hans Keman en André Krouwel The Rise of a New Political Class? Emerging New

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Papers are available for downloading at http://www.politicalscience.nl

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Education state, welfare capitalism regimes, and politics

Article

Feb 2015

James S. Mosher

Esping-Andersen’s welfare state capitalism typology can be extended by including education as one component of the welfare regime. An analysis shows that Liberal welfare regimes put more relative effort into the education state compared with their lower levels of welfare state spending and this acts as a kind of functional substitute for welfare state spending. This pattern is consistent with Liberalism’s emphasis on equality of opportunity over equality of outcomes. In contrast, Social Democratic and Conservative welfare regime countries put less effort into accumulated education investment compared with their welfare state spending. A number of political factors shape this outcome. Greater Left party support tends to expand both welfare state spending and accumulated education investment. Stronger unions tend to expand overall welfare state spending and reduce accumulated education investment. Greater Center party support leaves accumulated education investment unaffected but raises overall welfare state spending. More Catholicism in a country leaves overall welfare state spending unaffected but tends to lower accumulated education investment.

Exploring the Extended Family of Mediterranean Welfare States, or: Did Beveridge and Bismarck Take a Mediterranean Cruise Together?

Chapter

Full-text available

Apr 2010

John Gal

The study of welfare states and social policy has enjoyed growing popularity in the last four decades. Emerging from primarily descriptive studies of state-provided welfare, social security, and health institutions and from relatively crude quantitative and qualitative comparative studies, this field has been characterized by a growing level of theorization, richer case study analyses, inclusion of additional sources of welfare provision (nonprofit, market-based, informal, family), and increasingly complex, accurate and up-to-date cross-national comparative analyses (Castles, 2004; Clasen & Siegel, 2007; Ferrera, 2008; Huber & Stephens, 2001; Mabbet & Bolderson, 1999).

The Emergence of the Western Welfare State

Chapter

Dec 2021

This is the comprehensively revised second edition of a volume that was welcomed at its first appearance as ‘the most authoritative survey and critique of the welfare state yet published’. Of its fifty-one chapters, some chapters are brand new; all have been systematically revised, and they are all right up to date. The first seven sections of the book cover the themes of ethics, history, approaches, inputs and actors, policies, policy outcomes, and worlds of welfare. A final chapter is devoted to the future of welfare and well-being under the imperatives of climate change. Every chapter is written in a way that is both comprehensive and succinct, introducing the novice reader to the essentials of what is going on, while providing new insights for the more experienced researcher. Wherever appropriate, the handbook brings the very latest empirical evidence to bear. It is a book that is thoroughly comparative in every way.

publication list september 2015

Research

Full-text available

Sep 2015

Philip Manow

Philip Manow: Publications (date: September 2015)

Religion, kirke og velfærdsstat - er der en sammenhæng?

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2009

Artiklen præsenterer en oversigt over de hidtidige forskningstilgange i forståelsen af velfærdsstaters forskelligartede opståen og udvikling, herunder religionens rolle i forklaringsmodellerne. Det følges af en præsentation af nyere tilgange, der i højere grad tillægger religionen og de religiøst betingede "sociale doktriner" en selvstændig betydning som forklarende variabel. Den sluttes med en række kritiske spørgsmål til denne nye forskningstilgang.

Health

Chapter

Jan 2010

Long-Term Care

Chapter

Jan 2010

The Transformation of Corporate Governance Regulation in the European Union: From Harmonization to Marketization

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2007

In the last couple of years, a broad range of regulatory initiatives with regard to company law and corporate governance has been taken by the Commission. These efforts, we shall argue, mark both a continuation – with respect to some of the issues involved – and a fundamental break – regarding both form and content – with earlier attempts at company law harmonization within the European Community. This transformation of corporate governance regulation at EU-level may be seen as a reflection and at the same time as an important cause of a broader, transnational transformation of corporate governance regulation in the European political economy. This paper argues that the EU has not only increased its attention to corporate governance regulation, but that, in terms of its content, the European approach to regulating the governance of corporations has shifted from a focus on harmonization, aimed at the prevention of regulatory competition, to a focus on promoting the marketization of corporate control, in part making use of market-based regulatory mechanisms. This shift cannot be simply explained either as a result of exogenous globalization pressures or as response to the recent wave of corporate scandals, but has to be interpreted as bound up with a coherent transnational political project constructed from the late 1980s onwards. This project can be understood both more broadly as a neoliberal project aimed at the marketization of the European socioeconomic order in general – that is, promoting the market mechanism as the organizing principle (Polanyi 1957) of this order – and more narrowly, as a project aimed at the marketization of corporate control. As this papers argues, the latter has been increasingly articulated with, and made an integral part of, Europe's strategy for creating a single financial market.

The Privatization and Micro-Economization of EU Antitrust Law Enforcement

Article

Full-text available

Angela Wigger

Rethinking the Global Production of Uneven Development

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2007

Marcus Taylor

This paper argues that reconceptualising the relationship between production and uneven development is an important step towards overcoming what the editors of this volume term 'anachronistic approaches' in contemporary development theory. Notwithstanding the centrality of production within global capitalism, its status within critical development studies is at a low ebb. This is partly a consequence of the mainstream ascendancy of neoclassical economics, but also because alternative approaches offer too narrow a perspective to fill the void. One common weakness is the way in which labour-both as a social practice and as embodied productive potential-is neglected. This neglect is problematic because it is impossible to conceptualise adequately questions of identity, power, (re)distribution, and socio-economic change without considering both the material and social dimensions of labour and production. To overcome this labour blindness, it is useful to focus upon the interplay between locally embedded production relations and the abstraction of these economic activities in the form of market price and inter-firm competition. The dynamic relationship between these two processes-embedding and abstraction-provides a unifying conceptual basis on which we can examine how workers and their communities both produce and contest social reproduction across different geographic locales and social contexts.

Capitalism and Democracy

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2008

Torben Iversen

The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy surveys the field of political economy. Over its long lifetime, political economy has had many different meanings: the science of managing the resources of a nation so as to provide wealth to its inhabitants for Adam Smith; the study of how the ownership of the means of production influenced historical processes for Marx; the study of the inter-relationship between economics and politics for some twentieth-century commentators; and for others, a methodology emphasizing individual rationality (the economic or public choice approach) or institutional adaptation (the sociological version). This Handbook views political economy as a grand (if imperfect) synthesis of these various strands, treating political economy as the methodology of economics applied to the analysis of political behaviour and institutions. The fifty-eight articles range from micro to macro, national to international, institutional to behavioural, methodological to substantive. Articles on social choice, constitutional theory, and public economics are set alongside ones on voters, parties and pressure groups, macroeconomics and politics, capitalism and democracy, and international political economy and international conflict.

The Politics of Reforms in Bismarckian Welfare Systems

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2006

Bruno Palier

Countries that share a particular social protection system, of Bismarckian inspiration and based on social insurance, seem to encounter similar and particularly awkward difficulties. They also seem to be following parallel trends in reforms, with respect to both their timing and their content and process. This paper is an attempt to compare the development of Bismarckian welfare systems during the last 25 years, showing the common pattern of reform.

Sweden When Minority Cabinets are the Rule and Majority Coalitions the Exception

Chapter

Sep 2000

Torbjörn Bergman

Coalition Governments in Western Europe is the most comprehensive empirical analysis to date of coalition politics. Based on a large cross-national data collection, covering the entire post-war period from 1945 to 1999, it is the first systematic study of the institutions of governance and conflict resolution in coalition governments. The book is also an unparalleled source of information on cabinet formation, membership, termination, and electoral performance of coalition parties. The volume also analyses the institutional frameworks in which coalition politics takes place in the individual countries and discusses which constraints for government formation, coalition governance, and coalition termination result from them. The information has been collected in standardized form by first rate country experts, and is presented in the form of standard tables.

Contemporary Christian Democracy and the Demise of the Politics of Mediation

Chapter

Jan 1999

Kees van Kersbergen

In the early 1980s, many observers, argued that powerful organized economic interests and social democratic parties created successful mixed economies promoting economic growth, full employment, and a modicum of social equality. The present book assembles scholars with formidable expertise in the study of advanced capitalist politics and political economy to reexamine this account from the vantage point of the second half of the 1990s. The authors find that the conventional wisdom no longer adequately reflects the political and economic realities. Advanced democracies have responded in path-dependent fashion to such novel challenges as technological change, intensifying international competition, new social conflict, and the erosion of established patterns of political mobilization. The book rejects, however, the currently widespread expectation that 'internationalization' makes all democracies converge on similar political and economic institutions and power relations. Diversity among capitalist democracies persists, though in a different fashion than in the 'Golden Age' of rapid economic growth after World War II.

Modernization, Democratization, and the Development of Welfare States in Western Europe

Chapter

Jul 2017

State, Economy and Society in Western Europe, 1815–1975

Book

Jan 1983

France: Reform-mongering Between Majority Runoff and Proportionality

Chapter

Jan 2004

Gerard Alexander

For perhaps no other country do we have so much ‘evidence of the politician’s belief in the importance of electoral systems as political weapons… Between 1870 and 1940 the parliamentary electoral system was changed seven times, and between 1945 and 1988 five times’ (Criddle, 1992: 110). As this suggests, France stands out in many analyses for its unusually frequent alteration of electoral rules. Change at the national level has also been shadowed in recent decades by change in the rules governing subnational elections, both municipal and, later, regional. These changes, too, were typically related to partisan strategizing. This chapter argues that a pattern can easily be discerned: most consistently, parties in a position to design the rules governing the next elections were, in the French case, unembarrassed to change the existing ones if others substantially better served their purposes. This is true of the parties of the postwar Fourth Republic (1946-58) who imposed first proportional representation and then undermined it when it suited their purposes. It was true of the Gaullists who sponsored the sweeping institutional changes of 1958, including a greatly strengthened presidency and a return to France’s historic (pre-1945) procedure of majority rule with a second-round runoff. And it was true of both the socialists and centre-right parties who favoured, and successively imposed, opposing electoral rules in the 1980s. The majority runoff rules which have predominated since 1958 have been associated with a dramatic shift from record levels of cabinet instability to substantial cabinet stability.

Social Capitalism. A Study of Christian Democracy and the Welfare State

Article

Sep 2003

Kees van Kersbergen

Christian democracy has been one of the most successful political movements in post-war Western Europe yet its crucial impact on the development of the modern European welfare state has been critically neglected. This book describes the origin and development of the Christian democratic movement and presents comparative accounts of the varying degrees of political entrenchment of national Christian democratic parties. Drawing upon cross-national indicators of welfare state development the existence of a distinctively Christian democratic (as opposed to a liberal or social democratic) welfare state regime, called social capitalism, is identified.

France: Stacking the Deck

Chapter

Sep 2005

Robert Elgie

France has experienced considerable electoral system change, often for partisan motives, but has invariably returned to the two-round system (also known as the double ballot system) in single-member constituencies. This electoral system is one of the factors responsible for France's current party system, which for most of the past fifty years has been characterised by centripetal left-right competition, with a wide range of parties, most of which are part of loose alliances. Far-right and Communist parties are highly under-represented in parliament under the two-round electoral system, and overall disproportionality is high. The Fifth Republic has seen the emergence of majoritarianism.

The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.

Article

Dec 1991

Book review

The impact of class coalitions, cleavage structures and church-state conflicts on welfare state development

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