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.