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Käsiteanalyysi universalismin ulottuvuuksista sosiaalipolitiikassa
Abstract
Universalismi on sosiaalipolitiikassa hyvin yleisesti käytetty, mutta teoreettisesti ja analyyttisesti epäselvä ja kiistanalainen käsite. Sen määritelmään on liitetty jopa keskenään ristiriitaisia ulottuvuuksia, ja käsitteestä on tullut enemmän poliittisesti kuin analyyttisesti hyödyllinen. Universalismin käsitteen epäselvyys on ongelma, johon puutun tässä artikkelissa. Käsiteanalyysin keinoin avaan universalismin ulottuvuuksia oikeudenmukaisuusteorian näkökulmasta. Tarkastelen oikeudenmukaisuutta John Rawlsin, Ronald Dworkinin ja Amartya Senin oikeudenmukaisuusfilosofioiden pohjalta. Universalismin normatiivisuuden käsiteanalyyttinen avaaminen on tärkeää, jotta ymmärtäisimme, millaista oikeudenmukaisuutta universalismilla voidaan rakentaa.
... Around the mid-1990s, welfare state research thus came to change its focus from characterizing welfare state systems to understanding the processes that dismantled the same (starting with Pierson 1995). The most recent developments in welfare state governance are often portrayed as an ideologically steered broad implementation of praxis that severely weakens the state's core obligations to its citizens (Halmetoja 2015). For example, Kosonen (2002Kosonen ( [1993) describes how from the 1960s to the 1980s, welfare systems following a Nordic model were institutionalized in Finland but that "[i]n the 1990s, this development has come to an end, and all proposals point to cuts and reductions in so-cial transfers and public services" (Kosonen 2002(Kosonen [1993, 45). ...
This study is concerned with the Finnish government’s political programmes (N=42) from the 1950s to the present. Its objective is to examine how conceptions of the welfare state have changed over the past 65 years. The analysis concentrates on the social and health care sectors as indicators of the content and nature of the ambitions set for the welfare system by the highest political leadership. The programmes were examined for their aims, character and concepts. The governments’ changing position towards its welfare political mandate emerges in three distinct periods: 1) 1950 through the 1970s, when the welfare state was being constructed; 2) the 1980s and 1990s, as the concept was further developed and internally synchronized; and 3) 2000 to 2015, a time of increasing estrangement from universal notions. The study shows that as late as 2014, the welfare state’s aims of inclusion and universalism were dramatically toned down to an absolute minimum in the government programmes. The article shows that in contemporary times, the coalition government system may have strengthened the welfare state ethos. This is a finding of great significance for a structural-political perspective on the support of welfare state ideas.
The governments of New Zealand, Mauritius, Namibia, Botswana, Bolivia, Nepal, Samoa, Brunei, Kosovo, and Mexico City provide a basic pension to the elderly with no test other than citizenship, residence, and age. These universal non-means-tested pensions automatically protect an entire population, in a way that contributory, earnings-related pensions never can. The author examines the value of this scheme for low-income countries and argues that an income test, if desired, is best done ex post through the tax system rather than ex ante, even though there are few examples of ex post recovery systems operating in the world today.
Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) was established in the wake of World War II amid a broad consensus that health care should be made available to all. Yet the British only barely succeeded in overcoming professional opposition to form the NHS out of the prewar mixture of limited national insurance, various voluntary insurance schemes, charity care, and public health services.
Success stemmed from extraordinary leadership, a parliamentary system of government that gives the winning party great control, and a willingness to make major concessions to key stakeholders. As one of the basic models emulated worldwide, the NHS—in both its original form and its current restructuring—offers a number of relevant lessons for health reform in the United States.
Two of the most important theories in contemporary liberal egalitarianism are Ronald Dworkin’s equality of resources and Amartya Sen’s capability approach. Recently Dworkin has claimed that Sen’s capability approach does not provide a genuine alternative to equality of resources. In this article, we provide both an internal and an external critique of Dworkin’s claim. In the first part of the article we develop an internal critique by providing a detailed analysis of Dworkin’s claim. Andrew Williams has contested Dworkin’s claim, but he has failed to convince Dworkin of his objections.We analyze this debate, and offer an argument that,we hope, settles this dispute. In the second part of the article we argue that an analysis beyond the current parameters of the liberal-egalitarian debate points to three significant differences between Dworkin’s and Sen’s egalitarian theories: the degree to which they rely on an ideal-theoretical approach; their ability to judge social structures that are intertwined with people’s social endowments; and their endorsement of a well-defined criterion to demarcate morally relevant from morally irrelevant inequalities. This broader analysis not only reinforces our conclusion that Dworkin’s equality of resources and Sen’s capability approach are genuinely distinct, but it also suggests some more general insights that may be relevant for a better understanding of contemporary egalitarian thinking.
Nowhere in the broad and heterogeneous work on concept formation has the question of conceptual utility been satisfactorily addressed. Goodness in concept formation, I argue, cannot be reduced to 'clarity,' to empirical or theoretical relevance, to a set of rules, or to the methodology particular to a given study. Rather, I argue that conceptual adequacy should be perceived as an attempt to respond to a standard set of criteria, whose demands are felt in the formation and use of all social science concepts: (1) familiarity, (2) resonance, (3) parsimony, (4) coherence, (5) differentiation, (6) depth, (7) theoretical utility, and (8) field utility. The significance of this study is to be found not simply in answering this important question, but also in providing a complete and reasonably concise framework for explaining the process of concept formation within the social sciences. Rather than conceiving of concept formation as a method (with a fixed set of rules and a definite outcome), I view it as a highly variable process involving trade-offs among these eight demands.
'The book is without doubt a must-read reflection on the notion of full employment and a source of inspiration for the establishing of the knowledge-based economy that is such an aspiration for Europeans.'
Purpose
Local welfare governance is approached from the vantage point of informal carers caring for older people. A bottom‐up perspective is used to construct a critical view on welfare provision and governance practices at the local level. The paper aims to discuss the issues.
Design/methodology/approach
The data consist of 23 in‐depth interviews with informal carers. Universal access to services and equal treatment of citizens is discussed.
Findings
The analysis illustrates how informal carers share care responsibilities with the municipality and gain access to services both as service providers and service users. Informal care comprises a complex mixture of public and private responsibilities that poses a challenge to universalism. There are new inequalities emerging among informal carers, while access to public resources is easier for resource‐rich carers positioned as service providers. Resource‐poor carers identify themselves often as service users in relation to municipality.
Originality/value
The use of original data provides important knowledge on informal carers' dual position in the local welfare governance and contributes to both theoretical and empirical understanding on shifts within Nordic welfare governance. Informal carers' dual position reflects the essence of mixed governance and represents future social policies.
Universalism is a category that is widely used both in mainstream theorizing on welfare states and in feminist scholarship. Yet, scientific analyses of the concept and politics of universalism are rare. The article looks at the idea, principle and politics of universalism in the contexts of income security and welfare services. Universalism turns out to be a complex concept with different dimensions and meanings. It is an important ideology behind social policy, and universal solutions have successfully resolved class- and gender-related conflicts in the Nordic countries. Universalism is also an integral part of woman-friendly social policies.
The impact of postmodernism on theories of social policy has called into question the established basis of welfare provision. Existing compromises between universalism and particularism, equality and diversity, have been unsettled. This paper re-examines the question of the appropriate balance between these values in light of the issues postmodernism raises. Although postmodernists provide good reasons to reject crude forms of universalism, it remains possible to defend a sophisticated universalism that, while committed to equality, is able to be sensitive to diversity by incorporating significant elements of both selectivism and particularism. While the realization of such a social policy would also require an ap propriate form of welfare governance, this form can only be briefly sug gested here. In sum, it is argued that, by learning from an encounter with postmodernism, contemporary social policy can begin to combine uni versalism with particularism, equality with diversity, and consistency of treatment with group empowerment.
A key distinction in models of social policy and typologies of welfare provision has been a differentiation between residual and institutional types. However, despite the gradual elaboration of models based on this distinction, there has been little effort to apply them in empirical comparative analysis or to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the models. This article initially examines two main approaches in identifying types of welfare states and major welfare state variations. It subsequently applies several dimensions of variation posited by the residual and institutional models in a comparison of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden. This comparison forms the point of departure for evaluating the merits and limitations of models based on the residual-institutional distinction.
Examining reforms that have taken place in the 1990s, this article explores the hypothesis that the most distinctive characteristic of the Scandinavian model today is the “stickiness” of its reputation, rather than the institutions and policies that make up the model. Borrowing the concept of path-dependency from institutional analysis, the article argues that because there is a strong commitment to the idea of a Scandinavian model, there is a tendency to expand conceptions of the model so that policy changes appear to be consistent with it.
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This paper adapts the Rawlsian idea of decision making behind the veil of ignorance in the realm of income transfer systems. As rational decision makers, we would plan a society where the incidence of poverty is low, differences in the level of living between life cycles are small, income differences between the rich and poor are modest, income mobility from poverty to non-poverty is high, and where the living standard of the poor is decent. The results show that income mobility is not greater in those countries which have wide income differences, nor is the situation of the poor any better in countries with huge income disparities than in other countries. Cross-national comparisons indicate that high poverty rates are not associated with more rapid income mobility and higher standards for the poor.
This paper is a description of inductive and deductive content analysis.
Content analysis is a method that may be used with either qualitative or quantitative data and in an inductive or deductive way. Qualitative content analysis is commonly used in nursing studies but little has been published on the analysis process and many research books generally only provide a short description of this method.
When using content analysis, the aim was to build a model to describe the phenomenon in a conceptual form. Both inductive and deductive analysis processes are represented as three main phases: preparation, organizing and reporting. The preparation phase is similar in both approaches. The concepts are derived from the data in inductive content analysis. Deductive content analysis is used when the structure of analysis is operationalized on the basis of previous knowledge.
Inductive content analysis is used in cases where there are no previous studies dealing with the phenomenon or when it is fragmented. A deductive approach is useful if the general aim was to test a previous theory in a different situation or to compare categories at different time periods.
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