Welfare and state centralisation

The expansion of the welfare state is said to have led to the direct involvement of local government in the provision of social services. Increased participation of local government in welfare services would furthermore produce a centralisation of power. In this article, the above sequence of links is investigated in eight West European countries. One observes no strong correlation between the level of welfare provision and the level of state centralisation. But this absence of links results from two strong associations: one positive between welfare effort and local government involvement, and the other negative between the latter and state centralisation.