No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Welfare State Policies and Their Effects
Despite the large volume of literature on childcare provision across countries, individuals’ attitudes and preferences concerning the role of government in the provision of childcare remain largely unexplored. This study examines how current policy provision structures, measured through objective and subjective indicators, both at the individual and national levels, influence the degree to which parents in European countries support public provision of childcare. The relative importance of current provision structures is then compared with other welfare attitude determinants; that is, self-interest and political attitudes. This is done using data from 22 European countries in 2008/2009 and a multilevel modelling technique. Results show that in general parents across Europe are largely supportive of public childcare provision. Furthermore, current provision structures, and people’s assessment of it, are consistently related to parents’ support for public childcare. Current provisions are salient factor explaining variance in childcare support (both at the individual and national levels) over and beyond the most commonly used frameworks, namely self-interest and ideologies. The results of this study provide evidence for a vicious and virtuous cycle in the relationship between policy provision and support, where investment in policies may drive up support while rolling back of policies may further decrease support.
Cross-nationally, scholars conceptualize welfare states as both systems of stratification, reinforcing status distinctions between groups, and systems granting social rights to citizens. With growing inequality in the postindustrial era, it is particularly important to understand the role of the state in reinforcing or ameliorating inequality. The authors focus in this article on households with children, because there has been substantial polarization in income among these households. The authors consider how welfare state interventions affect a broad array of households that differ on crucial characteristics such as family structure and parental education. Focusing on European and North American welfare states between 1985 and 2007, the authors illustrate which households benefit in different policy contexts. Most policies do not have differential associations with income for mothers with different levels of education. However, tax policies are associated with variations that relate to partners’ education. Finally, childcare policies are associated with variations in income for both single-parent and dual-parent households.
This paper attempts to resolve scholarly disagreements concerning how class conflicts are manifested in contemporary welfare states. An analytical distinction is made between social (tensions/antagonism between classes) and political (class-based differences in political preferences) manifestations of class conflict. Using International Social Survey Program data (1999/2009) from 20 countries, the results indicate that social conflict is more common in meager welfare states where material inequality is relatively high compared to encompassing highly redistributive welfare states where levels of material inequality are relatively low. When it comes to distributive struggles in the political sphere – political conflict – the pattern is reversed. The results do not support arguments emphasizing that class as an analytical concept is irrelevant for understanding socio-political phenomena in modern industrial democracies. Instead, the results suggest that the character of class conflict varies across national socio-economic contexts in tandem with between-country variation in the institutional setup of the welfare state. The results support Walter Korpi’s theory outlined in The Democratic Class Struggle, which suggests that in modern welfare states, institutionalized political conflict tends to replace less institutionalized and unorganized social conflict. This is more the case in encompassing welfare states than in residual welfare states.
Inequality has increased in recent years in both developed and developing countries. Tax experts, like others, have focused on how taxes may reduce this growing inequality of income and wealth. In developed countries, the income tax, and especially the personal income tax, has long been viewed as the primary instrument for redistributing income. This Article examines whether it makes sense for developing countries to rely on personal income taxes to redistribute income. We think not, for three reasons. First, the personal income tax has done little, if anything, to reduce inequality in many developing countries. Second, it is not costless to pretend to have a progressive personal income tax system. Third, opportunity costs also exist from relying on taxes for redistributive purposes. If countries want to use the fiscal system to reduce poverty or inequality, therefore, they need to look elsewhere. This Article begins with some initial reflections on the redistributive role of the tax system. It then considers the relative success of developed and developing countries in using tax systems to redistribute income. Finally, the Article examines some alternatives in reforming the personal income tax, as well as options available to developing countries in designing and implementing more progressive fiscal systems.
Is international migration a threat to the redistributive programmes of destination countries? Existing work is divided. This paper examines the manner and extent to which increases in immigration are related to welfare state retrenchment, drawing on data from 1970 to 2007. The paper makes three contributions: (1) it explores the impact of changes in immigration on social welfare policy over both the short and medium term; (2) it examines the possibility that immigration matters for spending not just directly, but indirectly, through changes in demographics and/or the labour force; and (3) by disaggregating data on social expenditure into subdomains (including unemployment, pensions, and the like), it tests the impact of immigration on different elements of the welfare state. Results suggest that increased immigration is indeed associated with smaller increases in spending. The major pathway is through impact on female labour force participation. The policy domains most affected are ones subject to moral hazard, or at least to rhetoric about moral hazard.
Using data from the European Social Survey, we analyse the link between basic human values and attitudes towards redistribution,
and how that link differs among classes and across countries. We assess whether and why the class-specific impact of self-transcendence
and self-enhancement values on attitudes towards redistribution differs across a selection of European countries. The results
show that the links between values and attitudes are generally stronger in more materially secure and privileged classes.
However, the relative strength of the associations varies substantially across countries. Where inequality is smaller and
poverty less prevalent, the link between values and attitudes becomes less class-specific. These findings provide support
for our two main interpretations: (a) that welfare policies mitigate the class-specific risks that people are exposed to,
which make values more salient and effective among workers; and (b) that the existence of visible and salient redistributive
policies works to make clearer the cognitive link between abstract values and support for concrete policies.
Recent research has established that employment risk shapes social policy preferences. However, risk is often conceptualized
as an alternative measure of the socio-economic status. We show that employment risk and socio-economic status are distinct,
crosscutting determinants of social policy preferences. More specifically, we analyze the policy preferences of high-skilled
labor market outsiders as a cross-pressured group. We first establish that labor market vulnerability has spread well into
the more highly educated segments of the population. We then show that the effect of labor market vulnerability on social
policy preferences even increases with higher educational attainment. We conclude that that labor market risk and educational
status are not interchangeable and that the high skilled are particularly sensitive to the experience of labor market risk.
Thereby, our findings point to a potential cross-class alliance between more highly and lower skilled vulnerable individuals
in support of a redistributive and activating welfare state. Thus, they have far-reaching implications for our understanding
of both the politicization of insider/outsider divides and the politics of welfare support.
State social provision affects women's material situations, shapes gender relationships, structures political conflict and participation, and contributes to the formation and mobilization of identities and interests. Mainstream comparative research has neglected gender, while most feminist research on the welfare state has not been systematically comparative. I develop a conceptual framework for analyzing the gender content of social provision that draws on feminist and mainstream work. Three dimensions of qualitative variation suggested by power resources analysts are reconstructed to incorporate gender: (1) the state-market relations dimension is extended to consider the ways countries organize the provision of welfare through families as well as through states and markets; it is then termed the state-market-family relations dimension; (2) the stratification dimension is expanded to consider the effects of social provision by the state on gender relations, especially the treatment of paid and unpaid labor; (3) the social citizenship rights/decommodification dimension is criticized for implicit assumptions about the sexual division of caring and domestic labor and for ignoring the differential effects on men and women of benefits that decommodify labor. Two additional dimensions are proposed to capture the effects of state social provision on gender relations: access to paid work and capacity to form and maintain an autonomous household.
Unemployment has persistently been found to severely decrease the life satisfaction of individuals. Even after income and other socioeconomic characteristics are controlled for, the employment status remains an important determinant of happiness, pointing to non-pecuniary functions of work. But what effect does labour market policy have? Can the psychosocial functions of work be fulfilled by activation measures, offsetting the detrimental life satisfaction effect of unemployment? Analysing panel data, this paper shows that the biggest German activation programme 'One-Euro-Job' is connected to a level of life satisfaction that is significantly higher than the one of respective unemployed welfare benefit recipients. This effect is especially strong if participants perceive the measure to match their personal skills and to increase their future employment chances, but vanishes if participants perceive it as degrading. In total, satisfaction scores of participants do not match the level of the regularly employed. In contrast to these pronounced differences in cross-sectional analyses, longitudinal models show similar effects but are less statistically robust, pointing to certain selection biases. © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. All rights reserved.
We examine gender differences in the relative poverty of men and women in eight industrialized countries. The analyses are based on data from the Luxembourg Income Study, which includes data from the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, West Germany, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands. We examine the importance of the gender-specific demographic compositions of marriage, parenthood, and employment in accounting for differences in men's and women's poverty rates, both within and across countries. The cross-national comparisons suggest that the relative importance of demographic characteristics differs by country and that factors such as religion, culture, and government policies also help determine the gap between women's and men's poverty rates.
Social capital has become a much researched concept and there has been much theoretical speculation about unequal access to it. However, the cross-national empirical analysis of social capital in relation to social stratification and social inequality is lacking. In this article, we explore the relationship between social stratification and social capital across 27 European countries using the Eurobarometer (EB) 62.2 ( N = 27,000) carried out in autumn 2004. Through the use of statistical modelling we are able to determine the extent to which individual characteristics, including occupational position and education, are associated with different measures of social capital and to set this within a cross-national context. We find that social stratification is an important element in understanding social capital both at a country and at an individual level. Upper layers of society have higher levels of social capital, especially through associational networks (formal social capital), although informal contacts were not so clearly stratified by class. Countries with high levels of inequality magnified these differences between classes, giving the upper classes further advantages. Patterns of social capital, therefore, tend to reflect or even perpetuate the stratification patterns of the society.
Through a pooled cross-section time-series analysis of the determinants of wage inequality in sixteen OECD countries from 1973 to 1995, we explore how political-institutional variables affect the upper and lower halves of the wage distribution. Our regression results indicate that unionization, centralization of wage bargaining and public-sector employment primarily affect the distribution of wages by boosting the relative position of unskilled workers, while the egalitarian effects of Left government operate at the upper end of the wage hierarchy, holding back the wage growth of well-paid workers. Further analysis shows that the differential effects of government partisanship are contingent on wage-bargaining centralization: in decentralized bargaining systems, Left government is associated with compression of both halves of the wage distribution.
This paper surveys the debate regarding Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare states and reviews the modified or alternative typologies ensuing from this debate. We confine ourselves to the classifications which have been developed by Esping-Andersen's critics in order to cope with the following alleged shortcomings of his typology: (1) the misspecification of the Mediterranean welfare states as immature Continental ones; (2) the labelling of the Antipodean welfare states as belonging to the `liberal' regime type; (3) a neglect of the gender-dimension in social policy. We reconstruct several typologies of welfare states in order to establish, first, whether real welfare states are quite similar to others or whether they are rather unique specimens, and, second, whether there are three ideal-typical worlds of welfare capitalism or more. We conclude that real welfare states are hardly ever pure types and are usually hybrid cases; and that the issue of ideal-typical welfare states cannot be satisfactorily answered given the lack of formal theorizing and the still inconclusive outcomes of comparative research. In spite of this conclusion there is plenty of reason to continue to work on and with the original or modified typologies.
Social contacts of older people have consistently been associated with good health and longevity. The extent of individual
social contacts, however, varies considerably between countries. We study why countries differ in amounts of social contacts
of older adults. Using theory on income inequality and neo-materialism, we expect the amount of social contacts of older people
to be highest in countries with low income inequality and comprehensive welfare spending. Furthermore, we hypothesize that
the impact of country characteristics on social contacts differs with individual income and age. We combine individual-level
data from the European Social Survey with country-level data from Eurostat, and test two dimensions of social contacts of
people aged ≥60 years: having a close contact and meeting socially. Cross-national comparison of 27 European countries is
realized through linear and logistic multilevel modelling. The results reveal partial support for our expectations. Income
inequality and old-age poverty reduce the likelihood of having a close contact. Welfare spending, specifically expenditure
on care for older adults and health services, has the potential to cancel out some of these negative effects. However, there
were only small differences between age groups. The implications of these findings are being discussed.
The aim of this article is to offer detailed information of the redistributive impact of social transfer programmes and taxes in 28 Member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development, employing data that have been computed from the Luxembourg Income Study's micro‐level database. We find that welfare states on average reduce inequality by 35 per cent. Social benefits have a much stronger redistributive impact than taxes. As far as social programmes are concerned, public pensions account for the largest reduction in income inequality, although the pattern is diverse across countries. To a lesser extent, social assistance, disability and family benefits also contribute to smaller income disparities.
Europe and the United States confront common challenges in responding to the transformations of work and welfare in the ‘new economy’, and there are signs of far-reaching changes in the role of government as a direct result. This volume presents the latest research by a team of outstanding international contributors. Parts One and Two examine new approaches to the governance of work and welfare in the EU and the US respectively; and Part Three surveys emergent trends and reflects on future possibilities.
This book explores the difference in the distributive policies of the United States and Europe. It seeks answers to why Americans are less willing than Europeans to redistribute from the rich to the poor. It finds that redistribution is influenced by political institutions, ethnic heterogeneity, and beliefs about the nature of poverty.
This contribution delineates the sui generis paradigmatic portent of the social investment perspective. After theoretically defining the notion of a policy paradigm in welfare state analysis, the substantive core of the social investment paradigm is presented in two consecutive steps. First, the substantive core of the social investment policy paradigm is exemplified in terms of three core policy functions, relating to: raising and maintaining human capital ‘stock’ throughout the life course; easing the ‘flow’ of contemporary labour market transitions; and upkeeping strong minimum-income universal safety nets as social protection and economic stabilization ‘buffers’. To drive home the conjecture of social investment as a policy paradigm in its own right, this will, in the final section, be compared with two preceding hegemonic ideal-typical policy paradigms: the demand-oriented Keynesian-Beveridgean welfare compromise of the post-war era; and its anti-thesis, the neoliberal supply-side critique of the welfare state of the 1980s, along a number of institutionally relevant dimensions.
East Asia ’s economic and social structures came under pressure in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the productivist welfare capitalism (PWC) thesis faced a fundamental challenge. This paper explores the veracity of the PWC thesis by exploring six social policy fields, including education, health care services, family, old-age pensions, housing and protective labour market policy, in China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan using fuzzy-set ideal type analysis (FsITA). The findings suggest that it is inaccurate to talk about one single, homogeneous welfare model in East Asia. Despite persistent similarities in regard to their cultural foundations, cases in Greater China and East Asia have distinctive social policy development trajectories often combining ‘productive’ and ‘protective’ policies in unique ways.
In recent years, several international-comparative studies have analyzed the relationship between migration and native populations’ decreasing support for redistributive policies. However, these studies use cross-sectional designs and aggregate the number of foreign-born residents at the national level. Both aspects are theoretically and methodologically problematic. We address these shortcomings by investigating cross-sectional as well as longitudinal effects in the case of Germany, using a combination of individual- and regional-level data for several time points from 1994 to 2010. Our results suggest that native-born populations become more reluctant to support welfare programs when the proportion of foreigners at the regional level increases. This effect is particularly strong in the initial phase of immigration, and it is further moderated by the economic context: the higher the unemployment rate, the more negative is the effect of foreigners on natives’ attitude toward providing welfare.
Recent research has suggested that there is a trade-off between the ‘family-friendliness’ of jobs, occupations and welfare states on the one hand and women's relative wages on the other. In particular, the extensive family policies found in Scandinavia are thought to harm highly educated women by affecting occupational segregation and workplace skill development. In this article, we use pooled wage data from the European Social Survey of 2004 and 2010 to examine the mechanisms behind the gender wage gap in Germany, Sweden and the UK and compare the situation of high- and low-skilled employees. Our findings show that the gender wage gap among high-skilled employees in Sweden is larger than in the UK, but not larger than in Germany. Also, segregation and work-related training are no more important in Sweden than in the other countries. Another important finding is that the mechanisms behind the gender wage gap differ between high- and low-skilled employees in ways not predicted by the trade-off argument. In particular, the large unexplained wage gap among high-skilled employees provides new theoretical challenges.
This article investigates how income inequality affects class differences in attitudes to redistribution. Drawing on the fourth wave (2008–09) of the European Values Study, it provides a multilevel analysis covering 44 nations. The main finding is that class differences in attitudes to redistribution tend to fade out in more unequal countries, not because higher classes converge toward more pro-redistributive positions, but because working class people become less egalitarian. This result proved to be robust with respect to several checks and to the inclusion of different control variables, both economic and non-economic. The interpretation of these puzzling findings points to the role of various societal and cultural factors, such as social mobility, political discourse and individualistic values.
Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book explores the conditions under which social policy--defined as the public pursuit of secure welfare--operates in the poorer regions of the world. Making an important contribution by breaking away from the traditional focus on Europe and North America, it develops a new conceptual framework for understanding different types of welfare regimes in a range of countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa. © Ian Gough, Geof Wood, Armando Barrientos, Philippa Bevan, Peter Davis and Graham Room 2004.
This article investigates whether self-interest as compared with values or ideological dispositions shapes individual attitudes
towards the welfare state. Causal interpretations of how self-interest, values, and welfare state attitudes are linked have
been difficult to sustain so far, as the research mainly relies on static, cross-sectional analyses. We address this empirical
challenge using data from the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences panel (2008–2013) that covers the
period of the international economic crisis. We investigate how individuals change their attitudes in times of economic hardship. Our findings confirm theoretical expectations that people change their support
for unemployment benefits in reaction to changes in their individual material circumstances. Job loss leads to an increased
support for public provision of unemployment benefits. The analysis also suggests that this attitude change is persistent.
After the temporarily unemployed have found a new job, they do not return to their pre-unemployment attitude. In contrast,
individual support for life course-related domains of the welfare state such as health care or pensions is not affected by
changes in individual material circumstances. Our results show that individual material circumstances and thus self-interest
have a sizable effect on how individuals change their welfare state attitudes.
This research sheds light onto the effects of welfare policies on anti-immigration attitudes by focusing on qualitative differences in these policies over time. Previous studies provide little evidence that welfare policies affect levels of anti-immigration attitudes because they view the welfare state in an overly abstract manner in relation to attitudes toward immigration. From this viewpoint, this research focuses on differences in a specific aspect of welfare policies, i.e. labor market policies, according to level and type of activation. By analyzing cross-national data over time, we determine that labor market policies in the form of activation policies indeed affect attitudes toward immigration. We also show that the effects vary across different types of labor market policies and depend on individual levels of socioeconomic vulnerability. Thus, this article provides a first step to rethinking how we conceptualize the welfare state in relation to anti-immigrant attitudes.
The social investment approach explicitly and implicitly addresses gender issues in its proposals for reforming welfare states.
It promotes women's labour force participation and suggests a re-drawing of family-state boundaries in the responsibility
towards children as human capital. While appreciating the support for work-family policies and for a public responsibility
in investing on children from an early age, I argue that the ideal adult worker model that underlies this approach hides,
and to some degree even takes for granted, gender inequalities in both the household and the labour market. The social investment
approach also undervalues the subjective and relational meaning of caring within households, while attributing to families
a mainly functional role regarding societies and labour markets. In so doing, the approach causes new tensions for men and
women and possibly new inequalities among women, as well as among men.
There has been great interest in the relationship between immigration and the welfare state in recent years, and particularly since Alesina and Glaeser's (2004) influential work. Following literatures on solidarity and fractionalization, race in the U. S. welfare state, and anti-immigrant sentiments, many contend that immigration undermines public support for social policy. This study analyzes three measures of immigration and six welfare attitudes using 1996 and 2006 International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data for 17 affluent democracies. Based on multi-level and two-way fixed-effects models, our results mostly fail to support the generic hypothesis that immigration undermines public support for social policy. The percent foreign born, net migration, and the 10-year change in the percent foreign born all fail to have robust significant negative effects on welfare attitudes. There is evidence that the percent foreign born significantly undermines the welfare attitude that government "should provide a job for everyone who wants one." However, there is more robust evidence that net migration and change in percent foreign born have positive effects on welfare attitudes. We conclude that the compensation and chauvinism hypotheses provide greater potential for future research, and we critically consider other ways immigration could undermine the welfare state. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that factors other than immigration are far more important for public support of social policy.
Single motherhood is often discussed as a reason for women’s non-employment. This article investigates women’s employment
trajectories during and after single motherhood in the welfare state contexts of Britain and West Germany. Sequence analysis
is applied to longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey (N = 329) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (N = 378), comparing patterns in employment trajectories within and across country contexts. The article finds that trajectories
vary strongly across individuals, but can be grouped into eight distinctive clusters. Typical trajectories during and after
single motherhood are spread unevenly among women in Britain and West Germany. It was found that overall there was higher
labour market attachment in West Germany and a higher prevalence of volatile employment trajectories in Britain. The findings
also suggest that policy approaches focusing on single motherhood may be well advised to further disaggregate the claimant
category by accounting for the life-course positioning of this family situation.
The seminal work by Esping-Andersen (1990) has transformed and inspired social policy research over the past two decades. Various contributions have confirmed his typology, while others have challenged, and expanded, it from substantive and methodological perspectives. This article contributes to this debate in two ways. First, it provides a comprehensive analysis of the different typologies proposed in the literature, employing the concept of 'ideal types'. Second, it elaborates new directions for research along three dimensions: (1) improving measurement validity by linking macro and micro data to overcome assumptions, largely based on the average (production) worker; (2) assessing the reliability of typologies over time; (3) systematically integrating both the work–welfare as well as the care–welfare dimensions.
This article examines immigrant poverty across three institutionally distinct European states: Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Focusing on 33 immigrant groups and controlling for sending country in addition to human capital and family characteristics, the analysis explores host country variation in (1) immigrant/native-born poverty gaps and (2) the underlying poverty levels at which these gaps occur. Findings reveal the largest poverty gaps in Sweden and demonstrate that this is due to immigrants’ comparatively severe labor market disadvantages. However, underlying poverty levels are also lowest in Sweden because of a two-pronged policy strategy of enabling work (particularly among women, immigrant and native-born alike) and reducing poverty through income support. Thus, immigrants in Sweden live at lower levels of poverty than their immigrant counterparts elsewhere, despite facing higher levels of inequality vis-à-vis native-born Swedes. The conclusion considers implications of poverty gaps and poverty levels, especially for the children of immigrants.
Existing research shows that women’s employment patterns are not driven so much by gender as by motherhood, with childless people and fathers employed at substantially higher levels than mothers in most countries. We focus on the cross-national variation in the gap in employment participation and working hours
between mothers and childless women. Controlling for individual- and household-level factors, we provide evidence that institutional and cultural contexts shape maternal employment. Well-paid leaves, publicly supported childcare services for very young children, and cultural support for maternal employment predict smaller differences in employment participation and working hours between mothers and childless women. Yet, extended leave, notably when unpaid, is associated with larger motherhood employment gaps.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of recent transformations in East Asian welfare regimes, applying a 'real-typical' perspective, based on the 'productivist welfare capitalism' thesis of Ian Holliday (2000). Unlike Western welfare-state regimes in which the politics of austerity has dominated, the politics of welfare expansion has been noticeable in East Asian welfare regimes. This paper will analyse whether these changes have fundamentally dismantled the productivist feature where social policy is subordinate to economic objectives. While the trajectories are different depending on different political institutional contexts, this study shows that there are two strong signs that these states are moving out of their productivist nature and also that they are in the process of establishing their own welfare states. Japan seems to still be a productivist welfare-state regime struggling to accommodate rapid socio-economic changes, whereas Korea is a welfare state regime with strong liberal characteristics via modern welfare politics. Since the needs for social policy expansion in China correspond to economic and political needs, the productivist feature has been significantly weakened. However, this study argues that these transitory welfare regimes are in critical stages of formulating their new welfare regimes and that welfare politics based on contingent events could affect the future trajectories of these regimes.
Focusing on an array of European and North American welfare states between 1985 and 2005, we consider how welfare state policies are related to households’ relative incomes, taking into account cross-national and temporal differences in income distributions. We consider work-family policies including public childcare and family leave generosity, tax progressivity, family allowance generosity, and levels of wage coordination. We also consider how two of the central factors that may be driving income inequality at the individual or household level – parental educational level and family structure – may be related to a household’s relative income. This research fills a gap in the literature because there are surprisingly few studies that examine inequality by both family structure and education, and even fewer that examine relative income cross-nationally and longitudinally. Theoretically, our contributions are to structural vulnerability theory. Structural vulnerability theory aims to consider how the individual, or the household, is structurally located within a context. Our analysis provides a better test of structural vulnerability theory than previous studies because structural vulnerability is operationalized in both the independent (through cross-level interactions) and dependent variables. By creating a dependent variable that standardizes household income relative to societal-level income inequality, we are able to get at the very center of structural vulnerability.
We examine how public policies affect life satisfaction across the industrial democracies. We consider as indicators of policy
overall levels of government spending, the size and generosity of the welfare state, and the degree of labor market regulation.
Using individual- and aggregate-level data for OECD countries from 1981 to 2007, we find robust evidence that citizens find
life more satisfying as the degree of government intervention in the economy increases. We find, further, that this result
is inelastic to changes in income; that is, high- and low-income citizens appear to find more “leftist” social policies equally
conducive to their subjective well-being. We conclude with a discussion of the practical and theoretical implications of the
results.
We use data from the 2002 International Social Survey Programme, with roughly 42,000 individuals nested within twenty-nine countries, to examine the determinants of happiness in a comparative perspective. We hypothesize that social democratic welfare states redistribute happiness among policy-targeted demographic groups in these countries. The redistributive properties of the social democratic welfare states generate an alternate form of “happiness inequality” in which winners and losers are defined by marital status, presence of children, and income. We apply multilevel modeling and focus on public social expenditures (as percentage of GDP) as proxy measures of state intervention at the macro level, and happiness as the specific measure of welfare outcome at the micro level. We find that aggregate happiness is not greater in the social democratic welfare states, but happiness closely reflects the redistribution of resources in these countries. Happiness is redistributed from low-risk to high-risk individuals. For example, women with small children are significantly happier, but single persons are significantly less happy in the welfare states. This suggests that the pro-family ideology of the social democratic welfare states protects families from social risk and improves their well-being at the cost of single persons. Further, we find that the happiness gap between high- versus low-income earners is considerably smaller in the social democratic welfare states, suggesting that happiness is redistributed from the privileged to the less privileged.
The relationship between political preferences and material circumstances has stimulated one of the most vibrant discussions
in the social sciences. However, the verdict is still out on the extent to which political preferences are a function of material
circumstances, stable ideological commitments, or some combination thereof. Drawing on new panel data from the General Social
Survey, we further this debate by examining whether becoming unemployed or losing income affects individuals' preferences
for redistribution. Using individual-level fixed-effects models, we show that preferences for redistribution are malleable,
rather than fixed, corresponding to predictions offered by a materialist perspective. Individuals want more redistribution
when they experience unemployment or lose household income. Ultimately, we contribute new empirical insights that further
the sociological understanding of the forces shaping political preferences.
A major shift in welfare state research occurred at the turn of the century as researchers moved from explaining the development of welfare states and variations in spending across welfare states to a focus on welfare state outcomes. One of the key outcomes examined in the literature is inequality. While much of the early literature examined overall spending, followed by analysis of specific taxes and transfers related to old age, unemployment, disability, health, and families, more recent research has included a broader range of welfare state policies including work-family policies and flexicurity. This essay highlights some important developments in the research on welfare states and inequality.
In this article we examine the occurrence of social capital in 21 different countries. Our study starts from the premise that the countries under scrutiny represent different kinds of welfare state regimes. The concept of social capital we separate here into bonding social capital, bridging social capital, generalized trust and informal support. Our main question is whether or not social capital varies systematically between different welfare state regimes. In this respect, our aim is to put to the test two opposite assumptions: the society-centred hypothesis that assumes that strong welfare states may weaken the preconditions in which social capital emerges and the institution-centred hypothesis that assumes that social capital emerges expressly in societies with strong welfare state institutions. Although mainly confirming the latter assumption, our research findings also emphasize the fact that the different forms of social capital are connected to welfare state regimes in different ways. On the basis of our results, it is possible that the welfare state both prevents and promotes the development of social capital, depending on the respective meanings given to social capital.1
In this paper we theoretically and empirically explore the question whether the unequal distribution of different aspects of social capital (networks, trust, norms) over a number of social dimensions (gender, age, income, employment status, and educational level) is smaller in countries with more developed welfare systems. Our data cover 13 Western industrialized countries and two periods in time (1981, 1999). The paper adds to the existing literature in several ways: by focusing explicitly on the empirical study of social capital inequality, by relating this subject to (quantitative and qualitative) welfare state characteristics, and by studying it from a cross-national and longitudinal perspective. We find that in the sample of countries analyzed there is no clear relationship between social capital inequality and welfare state characteristics. However, whether generally welfare states do not reduce social capital inequalities remains an issue for future research.
European countries show substantial variation in family policy and in the extent to which policies support more traditional male-breadwinner or more gender egalitarian earner–carer family arrangements. Using data from the European Social Survey, the authors implemented multilevel models to analyze variation in fertility intentions of 16,000 men and women according to individual-level characteristics and family policy across 21 European countries. Both traditional and earner–carer family support generosity were positively related to first-birth intentions for men and women. In contrast, only earner–carer support maintains its positive relationship with second birth intentions. Family policy is not in general related to third and higher order parity intentions.
Since the late 1970s, the developed welfare states of the European Union have been recasting the policy mix on which their systems of social protection were built. They have adopted a new policy orthodoxy that could be summarised as the ‘social investment strategy’. Here we trace its origins and major developments. The shift is characterised by a move away from passive transfers and towards the maximalisation of employability and employment, but there are significant national distinctions and regime specific trajectories. We discuss some caveats, focusing on the question whether the new policy paradigm has been established at the expense of social policies that mitigate poverty and inequality.
In the contemporary welfare state literature, both Japan and Southern Europe are often held to be distinct regimes. A comparative examination of the evidence for Japan suggests that this is not true. Japan's fusion of key el ements of catholic-conservative welfare states (occupational segmentation and familialism) with a liberal, American-style dominance of private welfare plans gives the appearance of a hybrid system. On balance, there is little to in dicate a distinct 'Pacific' model. Regardless, any attempt at labeling the Japanese welfare state is premature since it has not yet sunk its roots, institutionally speaking.
This article addresses the question of whether globalization impacts individual preferences to exclude immigrants from national welfare systems (‘welfare chauvinism’). Intergroup contact theory and arguments from the ‘new cosmopolitanism’ debate suggest that cross-border social contacts (‘social globalization’) foster a willingness to include and accept newcomers. However, group conflict theory suggests that trade openness (‘economic globalization’) can unleash feelings of insecurity and trigger welfare chauvinism. While these approaches point in different directions, we argue that the impact of globalization on welfare chauvinism differs across socio-economic status groups. Using cross-national data from the European Social Survey 2008/2009, we find scarce support for the hypothesis that social globalization reduces welfare chauvinism in general. However, there is evidence that it diminishes exclusionary attitudes among those with relatively high socio-economic statuses. Moreover, we find no general evidence for an impact of economic globalization on chauvinism, but a positive interaction of intensified engagement with global market forces and higher socio-economic status.