Public Opinion, Public Policy and the Welfare State

A recurring problem in political analysis is to link public opinion to public policy. Public opinion has often come to mean the replies to structured questions in representative surveys. The task of connecting opinion and policy is complicated by the difficulty in interpreting replies to these surveys. The burgeoning literature on public opinion and the crisis of the welfare state has failed to provide a consistent account of what aspects of policy might be driven by public demand or vice versa. The interpretations of survey data are either misleading or highly selective. This applies to two crucial areas, attitudes towards poor minorities and opinions about state and private welfare. In order to provide a better understanding of the problems of linking policy and opinion and to offer some guiding principles for research in this area, this paper attempts to clarify some of these difficulties.     

Social Policy and Social Citizenship: Britain's Welfare States

In Britain the imagery and rhetoric of the postwar welfare stateremain powerful—citizens should have equal access to publicservices based on need not place of residence. Devolution issometimes depicted as a threat to this tradition. This articleshows that the immediate risk of a social policy race to thebottom is small. Moreover, because of the peculiarities of Britishterritorial politics the traditional imagery was never borneout in practice; the article traces policy variation beforeand after devolution. Finally, locating British social policywithin the comparative framework of "nationalization" and "citizenship,"I argue that Britain lost its status as an exemplary welfarestate partly because it failed to provide an adequate territorialframework for the development of social policy.     

共建共治共享:社会公益参与产业精准扶贫的政策工具创新

推进精准扶贫精准脱贫,离不开精准研策和精准施策,需要借助有效的公共政策工具。在社会层面形成大扶贫格局是打赢脱贫攻坚战的重要制度安排,广泛动员社会力量参与扶贫事业是实现精准扶贫的政策工具选择。产业扶贫事关贫困地区造血机能,是精准扶贫的重要内容,社会公益参与其中并引导和帮助村民发展产业是实现贫困群众稳定可持续脱贫的根本路径,然而在实践中往往面临志愿性政策工具失灵的理论困境以及诸多现实难题。通过对"马兰实验"的个案研究,可发现一种以"共建共治共享"为特征的社会公益参与产业精准扶贫的独特机制:"共建"即多方主体共同兴办扶贫产业,"共治"即各方主体共同管理扶贫产业,"共享"即各方主体共享产业成果,借此形成一套由社会公益组织小农户融入现代产业发展的有机衔接机制。该机制能够有效地防治志愿性政策工具失灵,形成精准高效的扶贫共同体,进而实现社会资源的优化配置和精准脱贫的可靠推进。     

Human Rights,Public Budgets,and Epistemic Challenges

Ideally, governing institutions would be designed so that they would produce and implement with certainty ‘human rights-compatible budgets’, i.e. budgets that adequately reflect the obligations enshrined in human rights. However, there are various reasons why a government may ultimately fail to produce such budgets. This article focuses on under-examined challenges for budgeting for human rights: epistemically oriented challenges. More specifically, the article engages in ‘horizon scanning’, and it maps key underlying factors that can be conducive to epistemically oriented challenges to produce and implement human rights-compatible budgets. In addition, the article considers the road ahead from the perspective of institutional design.     

Welfare Reform and Models of Public Policy: Why Policy Sciences Are Required

Policy could be studied on the basis of three different models: ideological, social science, and policy sciences. Policy in accordance with ideology may not necessarily rely on solid rigorous research to back it up. Policy made solely in accordance with a rigorous social science model might be able to demonstrate a causal relationship between a given policy and desired outcomes, and in the process establish a clear role for good research in the policy process. But it often fails to account for the larger social and political context in which policy is formulated. Good policy should be based on rigorous social science research, while also factoring in the values of the broader society, that is, ideology. This would imply that in order to bridge the gap, that good policy should be formulated in accordance with the policy sciences model because it connects the rigorous methodology of the social sciences with the larger social policy context, that is, the broader policy process. When analyzing the reform of 1996 within the framework of these models, it becomes clear that while the legislation is highly ideological, it is not based on any serious research that would satisfy the criteria of the social science model. It fails the policy sciences model, in part, because its absence of clearly defined objectives, or a single objective, makes the task of measurement difficult. On the contrary, this legislation is a good example of why the policy community would do better to rely more on the policy sciences.     

Productivist Welfare Capitalism: Social Policy in East Asia

The article engages with the literature on the 'East Asian welfare model' by using Esping-Andersen's 'worlds of welfare capitalism' approach to analyze social policy in the region. It describes the main features of a productivist world of welfare capitalism that stands alongside Esping-Andersen's conservative, liberal and social democratic worlds. It then shows that Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan are all part of this world, though they divide into sub-groups within it. To account for productivist welfare capitalism in East Asia, the article focuses particularly on bureaucratic politics at the unit level, and on a range of key shaping factors at the system level. It closes by considering the implications of East Asian experience for comparative social policy analysis.     

公共政策体制与社会公正

公共政策对于社会公正的实现具有重要意义，这种意义首先发生于体制层面。在界定公共政策体制内涵的基础上，通过实现社会公正的责任体系找到公共政策体制与社会公正之间的关联逻辑，并从公共政策体制构成出发分析二者关联的具体内容，同时从宏观上考虑到公共政策在实现社会公正中所遭遇的悖论，提出：体制性思考是解决悖论的钥匙，良好的公共政策体制有利于实现社会公正。     

Fragmented Welfare States: Federal Institutions and the Development of Social Policy

Despite political scientists' growing appreciation of the ways in which institutions influence political processes, the “new institutionalism” has so far had a limited impact on the comparative study of welfare state development. This article discusses some broad issues concerning institutions and public policy by exploring the implications of one set of institutions — those associated with federalism — for the politics of social policy. Federal institutions encourage three distinctive dynamics: they influence the policy preferences, strategies, and influence of social actors; they create important new institutional actors (the constituent units of the federation); and they generate predictable policymaking dilemmas associated with shared decision-making. Comparisons between social policy development in Canada and the United States are used to demonstrate that while federalism clearly matters, how it matters will depend on the characteristics of a particular federal system and the ways in which federal institutions interact with other important variables.     

The Chechen Exception: Rethinking Russia's Human Rights Policy

Orthodox interpretations of human rights policies and practices in post-Soviet Russia are often construed by external critics through a historicist lens of tsarist and Soviet-era authoritarianism. Contemporary Russia's adherence to emerging international human rights norms is commonly judged in sole reference to its human rights disaster in Chechnya. In this article, we contest the notion that human rights abuses in Chechnya fully illustrate Russia's stance on international human rights. We suggest that Chechnya is the exception in the post-Soviet era, and that Russia has increasingly brought its human rights standards in line with the West. We use a historical comparative context as well as Russia's discursive response to NATO's intervention in Kosovo and its UN Security Council voting record as empirical evidence for our argument. ¹     

Human Rights Reporting: Rights,Responsibilities, and Challenges

This essay critically examines the intersections between news media and human rights in the context of the existing human rights framework. A survey of the fundamental provisions of international human rights law and of the evolving case law of human rights organs relating to media freedom and responsibilities reveals that existing gaps and underspecified obligations render problematic the normative guidance offered by the framework in addressing the pertinent human rights issues. However, this is part of the story. The problems associated with normative guidance are compounded by media practitioners’ contending approaches on the role of the media as “promoters of human rights.” The interplay between these factors is then examined through the prism of the two communities’ converging commitment to “truth-seeking.” This commitment can provide entry points to a more constructive engagement between the news media and the human rights community.     

Swedish Corporatism in Social Welfare Policy, 1986–1994: An Empirical Examination

Recent literature suggests that Swedish politics is decorporatizing. This article reports on the results of a survey of Swedish interest groups active in social welfare policy, administered in 1986 and 1994. The results cast considerable doubt on the decorporatization thesis. Little change is discernible between the two surveys on indicators of key corporatist behaviours on the part of interest groups and government. The immediate goal of the article is to provide evidence that the Swedish system is not, in fact, decorporatizing to the extent cited in recent literature. A larger aim, however, is to push the study of corporatism in a more empirical direction. The value of the theory will be enhanced if researchers are more precise about what it means and what behaviours should follow from it.     

Social Policy by Other Means: Theorizing Unconventional Forms of Welfare Production

Abstract

The goal of this special issue is to highlight the importance of unconventional social policies, theorize their development in comparison with traditional welfare state accounts and outline a new research agenda. In this introduction to the special issue, the editors present the concept of social policy by other means as encompassing two kinds of unconventional social policy (from the point of view of mainstream comparative research): First, functional equivalents to formal systems of social protection and, second, non-state provision of benefits. The concept builds upon a sizeable, but fragmented literature in comparative welfare state research. While numerous examples demonstrate that social policy by other means is more pervasive in both OECD and non-OECD countries than often acknowledged, a brief survey of the top 20 articles in the field reveals that this fact is not sufficiently reflected in the academic literature. With reference to both existing studies and the contributions to this special issue, the editors go on to explore (1) the different forms of social policy by other means, (2) explanatory theories and (3) their effectiveness in terms of social outcomes. They close by outlining a research agenda.     

Beyond the Social Market: Rethinking Capitalism and Public Policy

Despite its worthy motives, social market philosophy provides neither a useful analytical framework for understanding modern capitalism, nor the policy tools to address our present economic and social predicament. The concept of ‘market failure’, with its underlying assumption of market equilibrium, does not capture the systemically adverse outcomes of collective market forces. A more sophisticated understanding of capitalist economies, and the societies in which they exist, would recognise that the market economy is a dynamic but not self‐regulating system. It is embedded in, and impacts on, four other economies – of the natural environment, of family and care, of voluntary association, and of the public sector – which operate under different motivations and allocative principles. The role of government is central, to balance the values created by different kinds of institutions and to constrain the dynamic impacts of market forces. A number of policy conclusions are offered arising from this framework.