The Politics of Welfare State Reform

This article presents and discusses the state of the art in political science research on welfare state reform. While scholars first aimed at explaining the emergence and growth of the welfare state, national variation in its development, and crises of welfare state regimes, more recently the focus has shifted to the persistence and reform of the major welfare state institutions. Research in this direction has typically adopted an institutionalist perspective, stressing how institutional settings affect the feasibility and direction of reforms. These studies have shed light on important aspects of the question, in particular by demonstrating the role of path dependency and veto players in reform processes, but suffer from two main problems, namely the difficulty of defining the dependent variable in an appropriate way, and the neglect of the importance of power resources.     

公平还是福利？这是一个问题

应该以什么标准来评价公共政策？是公平和正义吗？抑或个人福利？关于这个基本问题的争论已经延续了许多时代。路易斯·卡普洛和斯蒂文·沙维尔这两位来自哈佛法学院的美国法经济学新生代思想家通过《公平与福利》一书,对当代道德哲学和法学理论研究提出大胆挑战：绝大多数的道德原则和福利之间的冲突远比人们一般性的认知更加尖锐;所有的道德原则,如果不是完全以福利为基础,有时候就会倾向采用一些让每个人都变糟的政策。他们的分析表明,绝大多数道德原则在表面上看起来很吸引人,但是如果进一步细查的话,它们都有某种功能性的解释,而这种解释在评价公共政策之时,并不能证明其被赋予独立重要性的正当性。基于《公平与福利》一书对政策分析的理论和实践有着深远意义,它已经在西方学术界引起相当热烈的讨论,本文在梳理书中基本理论和主要观点的基础上,对其思想的来龙去脉进行了批判性解读,并以此为契机,展望了法经济学运动的未来发展。     

Mass media attention to welfare state reforms: evidence from Britain, 1996–2014

One of the core questions facing political scientists is how politicians are able to implement cutbacks without suffering electoral backlash. A possible explanation might be that the mass media refrain from reporting on welfare state reforms in a consistent way. In order to explore this, two unique datasets have been collected: one contains information on all policy reforms of British old age pensions and unemployment protection from 1996 to 2014, and the other contains hand-coded media articles that allow the tracking on a monthly basis of what reforms are picked up. It is found that the mass media report on cutbacks, but not on expansions, and that they prioritise easy-to-understand cutbacks over cutbacks that are more technical in nature.     

Parenting in Families of Low Socioeconomic Status: A Review with Implications for Child Welfare Practice

Families involved in the child welfare system overwhelmingly draw from low socioeconomic (SES) populations. Impoverished children are placed in foster care at disproportionate rates. Addressing this dynamic requires understanding the adaptations low‐income families make when parenting under adversity so that accurate assessments of their needs occur. This article focuses on two aspects of child welfare practice: the evaluation of parenting capacity and service delivery. It examines, in particular, how well current practices and guidelines, as outlined in the literature, fit with more general research on families and parenting in low‐SES environments and offers suggestions for improving practice.     

Can the Welfare State as We Know It Survive? A View from the Crisis-Ridden South European Periphery

South European countries have been hit hardest and longest by the post-2008 economic crisis. This has brought their welfare states under acute strain. Unmet need has sharply increased while significant welfare reforms and (more or less) deep cuts and changes in social spending have been prominent in the repertoire of the crisis management solutions implemented by the governments (under European Union constraints and the strict rescue-deal requirements for Greece and Portugal). This introduction briefly reviews reform trends prior to and during the crisis in order to highlight convergent and divergent paths among the four countries and outline the major questions addressed by the contributions to this volume.     

Only Contradictions on Offer

Segal addresses feminism's future at a time when political energies are apparently in decline. She explores the contradictory models of feminism operating in political and media representations: the dominance of gender questions and gender anxieties, including the marked concern with models of 'proper' masculinity, inevitably implicates feminists in the political arena. The decline in political engagement among feminists is in any case disturbing, because women without power have been made the central targets of neo-conservative social policies in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, with the female 'welfare dependent' becoming particularly demonized. The failure of feminists to address such issues results from the decline of socialist feminisms, and a general failure within feminism to make class and race differences, and the inequalities that result from them, the central plank of its theories and politics. Segal calls attention to the divorce between feminist theory and feminist activism, and argues that the politics of the academy have largely contributed to a disciplinary specialization which militates against feminism's productive interdisciplinarity. While the literary paradigms that now dominate feminist thought have produced rich models for subjectivity and identity, the decrease in social science contributions to the field has led to a lessening of attention to existing social relations. Segal insists upon the necessity of a continuing engagement with cultural questions, but argues that these need to be combined with a commitment to radical social transformation if feminisms, in all their complexity and multifariousness, are to have a future.     

Reaching Out or Pulling Back: Macroeconomic Conditions and Public Support for Social Welfare Spending

In economic hard-times, do Americans call for increases in governmental assistance, or do they clamor for declines in government assistance? We address this question by identifying the impact of state-level macroeconomic conditions on public support for social welfare spending. We analyze individual-level data from the 1984–2000 National Election Studies, combined with state-level macroeconomic indicators of inflation, unemployment, and productivity. We find that state-level inflation, not state-level unemployment nor state-level productivity, consistently and consequentially shapes citizens’ support for social welfare. With rising inflation, Americans become more supportive of means-tested social welfare spending. Our analyses generally reaffirm the value Americans place on the social welfare safety net, especially during times of economic duress. When the going gets tough, Americans reach out, rather than pull back.     

Parteien und die Generosität der Altersrenten in Zeiten permanenter Austerität

Zusammenfassung: Die quantitative Sozialpolitikforschung weist ein doppeltes Defizit auf: Zum einen dominieren Analysen aggregierter Ausgaben(quoten), zum anderen fokussieren die meisten Studien zu Lohnersatzraten auf die Arbeitslosen‐ und Krankenversicherung, während die Rentengenerosität weitgehend ausgespart geblieben ist. Der vorliegende Artikel stößt in diese Lücke, indem er zunächst die theoretischen Besonderheiten der Rente diskutiert und zwei Hypothesen zu deren Rückbau und der Rolle der Parteien dabei formuliert. Im Anschluss an eine Methodendiskussion präsentieren wir die Ergebnisse von (robustheitsgetesteten) Regressionsanalysen der Veränderungen der Lohnersatzraten in 18 entwickelten Demokratien. Es zeigt sich, dass die Kürzungen der Lohnersatzraten im Rentenbereich weitaus geringer ausfallen als in den beiden anderen Bereichen, und dass sich die Parteieneffekte auffallend unterscheiden.     

‘Supportive Parenting’, Responsibility and Regulation: The Welfare Assessment under the Reformed Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (1990)

Section 13(5) of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 requires fertility clinics, before offering regulated treatment services, to take account of the welfare of any child who may be born as a result of the treatment and any other child affected by that birth. This paper presents the findings of an empirical study examining the impact on practice of the controversial reform of this section in 2008. While the broad values underpinning section 13(5) appear well embedded in clinic staff's engagement with ethical issues, there is little evidence that practice has been influenced by the 2008 amendments. A complex picture emerged regarding the implementation of section 13(5), particularly in its interaction with other factors, such as funding criteria and professional norms around counselling, implying a higher level of ongoing attention to likely parenting ability – particularly that of single women – than might be expected from a reading of the statute and guidance alone.