Politics and the New American Welfare States

Federal law allows states to create new welfare policies determining who can receive welfare, what types of clients are exempted from new welfare work requirements, and the value of cash benefits. This project tests nine different theoretical explanations of welfare policy to explain why states have reacted differently to this new authority. We test these explanations on Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) policies promulgated between 1997 and 2000. Our findings confirm the strong role of race in TANF politics that Soss et al. (2001) recently reported, but we also find that other constituent characteristics, and institutions, paternalistic goals, and state resources have a consistent influence on welfare policy. These results indicate that different approaches to welfare are attributable to the unique, and very potent, combination of political characteristics in each state.     

Party Politics and the Organization of the Danish Welfare State, 1890–1920: The Bourgeois Roots of the Modern Welfare State

The role of the Social Democrats in the establishment of the Scandinavian welfare state has been challenged in recent years. Institutional legacies have conditioned post-war Social Democratic reforms, and the bourgeois parties have played a larger role than so far acknowledged. By exploring the origin of five core policies of the early Danish welfare state, it is shown that policy legacy theses cannot account for the pattern of policy organization. Focusing on party and class dynamics, it is demonstrated that the bourgeois parties, and in particular the Liberals, had a crucial influence on the choice of funding model and administrative structure. The distributional and administrative interests of core constituencies shaped the preferences of the bourgeois parties decisively.     

福利与政治——简评卢曼的福利政治观

与传统的结合于基本人权、弱者救助的社会福利倡导观念不同,卢曼更看到了在当代社会中这种简单的福利观念对社会发展带来的负面影响和对社会矛盾的刺激。卢曼认为,社会福利问题的观察和解决需要借助于系统理论。政治、法律、教育、经济都是一个个封闭而自治的系统,相互之间的简单干预都会影响到彼此的正常功能。它们彼此之间的积极性的影响只能通过系统间的结构性耦合来实现。这些观点对我国当前的福利研究和制度设计会带来一定的启发。     

'Beyond Left and Right': The New Partisan Politics of Welfare

The 'new politics of the welfare state,' the term coined by Pierson (1996) to differentiate between the popular politics of welfare expansion and the unpopular politics of retrenchment, emphasizes a number of factors that distinguish countries' capacities to pursue contentious measures and avoid electoral blame. Policy structures, vested interests, and institutions play a prominent role in accounting for cross-national differences in leaders' abilities to diffuse responsibility for divisive initiatives. One important omission from the 'new politics' literature, however, is a discussion of partisan politics. 'Old' conceptualizations of the political right and left are implicitly taken as constants despite radical changes in the governing agenda of many leftist parties over the last decade. Responding to this oversight, Castles (1998) has recently probed the role of parties with respect to aggregate government expenditures, only to concludethat parties do not matter under 'conditions of constraint.' This article contends that parties are relevant to the 'new politics' and that, under specified institutional conditions, their impact is counterintuitive. In some notable cases the left has had more effect inbruising the welfare state than the right. One explanation for these cross-cutting tendencies is that parties not only provide a principal source of political agency, they also serve as strategies, thereby conditioning opportunities for political leadership. By extension, they need to be situatedwithin the 'new politics' constellation of blame-avoidance instruments.     

Identifying Welfare State Regimes: The Links Between Politics, Instruments and Outcomes

With new sources of cross-national data appearing on income distribution and the characteristics of redistributional policy instruments, it is now possible to take the comparative analysis of welfare states well beyond the conventional focus on government expenditures. This study of 18 OECD nations examines the linkages between various aspects of the income redistribution process, elaborates a typology of welfare state regimes and locates the political origins of each of these regimes.     

Politics and the State

Political theorists disagree about whether 'politics' and 'the political' should bedefined narrowly or broadly. Defenders of broad conceptions argue that narrow definitions exclude phenomena that ought to be included and lead us to misunderstand the relationship between different forces in society. Defenders of narrow conceptions argue that broad definitions collapse the distinction between the social and the political, and deprive politics of any distinctive identity. I shall argue that neither of these arguments is successful and that disputes over whether we should adopt a narrow or a broad view of politics are, for the most part, merely verbal.     

Housing and the Welfare State in Norway

This article discusses housing and the welfare state in Norway in 1980 and 2005 by applying Esping‐Andersen's theories of welfare state regimes to this sector. How should Norwegian housing policy be understood in light of Esping‐Andersen's conceptual framework, and what is the impact of post‐industrial change? In 1980, Norwegian housing policy was mainly characterised by social‐democratic traits such as market regulation, substantial public expenditure and universal subsidies for both renters and a large owner‐occupied housing sector. The effects of post‐industrial changes, including deregulation of the credit and housing markets, marked a major turn in housing policy and the housing market in Norway. By 2005, Norwegian housing policy was mainly characterised by traits that are typical of a liberal welfare regime: market economics, low public expenditure and subsidies for small, targeted groups, while other segments of the Norwegian welfare state remain characterised by social‐democratic traits. Esping‐Andersen's claim that the effect of post‐industrial transformation was different in different welfare regimes is thus not supported by the case of the Norwegian housing sector.     

Welfare Dualism in Two Scandinavian Welfare States: Public Opinion and Party Politics

Recent research on the legitimacy of the welfare state has pointed to a potential negative impact of immigration. While much of this research has been concerned with a possible weakening of the general support for economic redistribution, this article analyses popular support for the introduction of a two-tier (dualist) welfare system, and focuses on the interplay between public opinion and party competition. It uses survey data from Denmark and Norway: two similar welfare states where elite politics on migration and welfare dualism has been markedly different over the last decade. It finds that the level and structure of popular support for welfare dualism are fairly similar in the two countries, but that attitudes toward dualism have a stronger impact on left–right voting in Denmark where the politics of welfare dualism has been actively advocated by the populist right party and pursued by a right-wing coalition government.