Search Results

Three major regime typologies are compared: welfare regimes, production systems (or ‘varieties of capitalism’), and labor relations between employers and trade unions. These ideal type classifications are compared with empirical indicators for eight European countries, Japan, and the USA. The institutional affinities between protection, production, and partnership institutions, and the consequences they have are considered.

This chapter elaborates a theoretical framework for the comparative analysis of social exclusion, with particular reference to migrants and ethnic minorities. It attempts to forge a synthesis of theoretical propositions within US research on ethnicity, race, gender, and class with insights from European comparative sociological studies on welfare regimes. It compares ‘racialized exclusion’ in the United States with the segregated urban spaces in which immigrants and new ethnic minorities tend to be concentrated in European societies. It also discusses the highly different development in different parts of the European Union (concentrating on the 15 states which made up the EU until 2004). The discussion reveals a complex interplay between path-dependent institutional strategies and multiple tendencies of convergence in the direction of a neo-American strategy of globalization and its characteristic forms of ‘advanced marginality’. Yet individual societies continue to cope with forces of globalization as well as processes of racialized exclusion in different ways and with different results. These differences are linked to their particular welfare regimes, institutionalized economic and political frameworks, and particular modes of organization of civil society.

Early retirement has become a major issue of current welfare state reforms in aging societies. This introductory chapter discusses the different protection-oriented ‘pull’ and production-oriented ‘push’ factors that caused more early exit from work prior to age 65. It argues for systematic comparison of welfare regimes, production systems, and labor relations, as well as the study of the key role of social partners in institutional change.

The first part re‐examines the three worlds’ typology of welfare capitalism: the liberal welfare regime, the social democratic welfare regime, and the conservative welfare regime. A summary overview of the three regime characteristics is provided. The second part looks at the historical and comparative robustness of regime typologies, and examines whether a three‐way typology adequately exhausts the variance of the different regimes found in different countries. Three cases are identified that call for an additional fourth ‘world’; these are the Antipodes, the Mediterranean, and Japan.

Assuming the validity of these three claims, a total of six models is reached for 19–20 nations. These three cases are examined under the headings The Antipodean Fourth World, The Mediterranean Fourth World, and The East Asian Fourth World (Japan possibly with Korea and Taiwan). This second section of the chapter also looks at families and welfare regimes.

This chapter demonstrates that the welfare state is the principal and proximate influence on a nation's amount of poverty. The welfare state is a complex of social policies and programs that distribute economic resources disproportionately to a nation's vulnerable populations. Every nation has vulnerable populations, but welfare states differ in the extent to which they protect the vulnerable against economic insecurity. To establish the first part of institutionalized power relations theory, this chapter examines multiple measures of the welfare state and poverty, while controlling for factors that critics argue are more important to poverty. Building on past research, the chapter explains the causal mechanisms by which the welfare state influences poverty. The analyses compare various specific features of the welfare state to explore their precise effects on poverty. Then, the chapter examines the impact of welfare state regimes and the effects of the key welfare state features across regimes. Last, the chapter tests the historical stability of the relationship between the welfare state and poverty. Ultimately, the welfare state is a stable and powerful poverty‐reduction mechanism.

The introduction discusses the idea of a mature welfare state, and shows that the welfare state of the 1970s can be regarded as mature basically because few, if any, major changes have occurred since then. Not only did the welfare state stabilize but so also did the embracing welfare regime. Looks at the welfare state crisis and the paradoxes within this, noting (as at the beginning of the book) that the shocks come principally from the labour market and declining family stability, thus bringing growing pressures on the welfare state itself, and implying that it needs to be examined. Suggests that it would be much more fruitful to analyse the crisis as pertaining to welfare regimes. Argues that the essence of the problem lies in the growing disjuncture between existing institutional arrangements and emerging risk profiles: the bottom‐line analytical question is how and under what conditions welfare regimes are being recast to respond to the new—post‐industrial—economic realities. The first two sections look at the public attitudes to the welfare state, and the welfare state as a Trojan horse. The following sections discuss new risks and new equalities of welfare regimes—how they deal with the Trojan horse—under the following headings: Managing the Labour Market; Labour Market Risks and Welfare Regimes; Family Risks and Welfare Regimes; and Welfare State Adaptation to Exogenous Shocks and New Risks.

Revisits welfare regimes through the analytical lens of the family, first making the point that modernization theory should not have been taken at face value, since even if history has, in general, eroded the role of households in welfare production, this is perhaps less salient than specific international variations (some nations are characterized by their advanced level of de‐ familialization of welfare responsibilities, others for their sustained adherence to familialism). In other words, some societies may have brought the idealized Parsonian family into being; others reproduce many of the features of the ‘pre‐industrial’ household. Most welfare state theory provides little help in understanding such variation, and the real problem begins with the association of the nuclear family with industrialism, for it is simply wrong to assume that it lost its welfare functions with the advent of welfare states. The second point addresses the prevailing, often feminist, arguments that models of welfare regimes that have been specified via a political economy perspective fail to hold up when subject to a gendered analysis. Alternative gendered typologies do, in fact, often contradict political economy typologies, but the contradiction may be spurious because different phenomena are being explained and compared. The objective of this chapter is not to debate gender theories, but to understand the position of the (changing) family in the overall infrastructure of welfare production and consumption: what happens to our political economy models of welfare regimes when we insert the family; what are the effects of family change on welfare states and, ultimately, on post‐industrial change? However, since household‐welfare production is largely—but far from exclusively—based on women's unpaid labour, gender differences in the family‐welfare nexus clearly must be addressed. The three sections of the chapter are: Households and Welfare Production; The Family and Comparative Welfare Regimes; and Familialism and the Low‐Fertility Equilibrium.

This chapter and the previous one revisit the political economy within which post‐war welfare regimes emerged, matured, and, now appear crisis‐ridden. Here, an analysis is made of social risks and welfare states. The post‐war welfare state was premised upon assumptions about family structure and labour market behaviour that, today, are largely invalid. Risks that in the 1950s or 1960s were assumed away are now becoming dominant, and vice versa. The post‐war welfare state being the child of the 1930s Depression and the ‘workers question’, was moulded on a society in which the prototypical client was a male production worker, who is now rather hard to find. A first step towards an understanding of the contemporary welfare state crisis must begin with: (a) a diagnosis of the changing distribution and intensity of social risks, and (b) a comprehensive examination of how risks are pooled and distributed between state, market, and family. The different sections of the chapter are: The State in the Welfare Nexus—the misunderstood family, and the welfare triad of state, market, and family; The Foundations of Welfare Regimes: Risk Management—family and market ‘failures’; and The distribution of risks and models of solidarity—class risks, life‐course risks, intergenerational risks, de‐commodification, and familialism and de‐familialism.

Seeks to use disaggregated measures of social expenditure derived from the OECD Social Expenditure Database (SOCX) to measure the extent of recent change in the structure of social provision and to identify types and trajectories of welfare state development. The account shows that change in welfare spending priorities in OECD countries has been much more modest than is commonly thought. It also demonstrates that disaggregated expenditure measures can be used to generate a typology of provision that closely mirrors Esping–Andersen’s three regimes model, but in a way that permits more precise measurement of regime change over time.

The introduction to this chapter discusses the question of why nations respond so differently to a set of social risks that are similar over various countries, and analyses three typical homines: Homo liberalisimus, Homo familias, and Homo socialdemocraticus. When the instincts of these ideal typical homines are combined, moral conflicts result, although a sufficient mass manages to profile itself in collective expression and sways society towards its preferred welfare regime. Old risks may fade and new ones emerge, but the response of a welfare regime will be, more likely than not, normatively path dependent. It is argued that since core institutional traits appear to be so unyielding to change, it is unlikely that the contemporary welfare state crisis will produce revolutionary change: there may be a blueprint for an ideal post‐industrial regime, but unless it is compatible with existing welfare regime practice, it may not be practicable. The author argues that, nonetheless, optimizing welfare in a post‐industrial setting will require radical departures, and these are discussed under the following headings: What is to be Optimized; Rival Reform Strategies; The Market Strategy; A Third Way?; and Equality with Inequality?

The chapter presents, in synthesis form, some key elements of what is now understood about welfare regimes, their respective pathologies of development, their current paths of reform, and the challenges that still confront them. The first section examines welfare state performance thematically, focusing on employment, the scale and shape of social security systems, and distributive outcomes. The second section takes Europe’s four welfare regimes (those of Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, continental Europe and Southern Europe) and analyses their respective strengths and vulnerabilities. The conclusion considers where the literature on welfare states is likely to go in the future.

Starts by discussing the perennial welfare state crisis, making the point that the contemporary crisis differs notably from its forebears. Rigidity is an endogenous symptom of the crisis, and the various symptoms include demographic ageing, and the growing risks of poverty and social exclusion (which spring from the malfunctioning of the labour market and the family). The aim of the book is to come to terms with the new political economy—the post‐industrial economy—that is emerging. To do this it pursues a set of interlinked arguments: the so‐called welfare state crisis, in which debate has been too focused on the state, when it should be on the interaction between the component parts of contemporary welfare regimes such as labour markets, the family, and the welfare state itself; the fact that the real crisis of contemporary welfare regimes lies in the disjuncture between the existing institutional construction and exogenous change; and the fact that the emerging risks of post‐industrial society come primarily from the revolution that is unfolding in both labour markets and households. Four phenomena form the unifying theme of the book: equality, risks, jobs, and the new political economy. Risks and jobs are dealt with in separate chapters; the introduction discusses equality and the new political economy.

The macroscopic changes to post‐industrial employment that were examined in the previous chapter are unlikely to affect all nations similarly. Job loss through de‐industrialization, e.g., will be more massive where existing industries are uncompetitive (as in Britain or Spain) and less devastating elsewhere—perhaps because firms are more adaptable (as in much of Danish, Italian, or German industry), but possibly also because wage costs decline (as in the US). De‐industrialization may or may not cause heavy unemployment, depending on skill and production structure, and also on how labour markets are managed; most of Europe has,e.g., transformed mass lay‐offs into early retirement. Similar root causes of post‐industrial employment will, therefore, have radically divergent outcomes—there is no such thing as one post‐industrial model because the institutional make‐up of nations differs, and so also does their choice of how to manage change. The different sections of this chapter are: Industrial Relations; Labour Market Regulation; The Dilemmas of Flexibilization; The Welfare State and the Reservation Wage; Wage Regulation; Employment Protection; The Regulatory Infrastructure and the Management of Industrial Decline; Managing the Equality—Jobs Trade‐Off; The Hump‐Shaped Curve—a quadratic measure of labour market rigidities; and National Idiosyncrasies and Welfare Regimes.

This chapter presents a multivariate time-series analysis of social welfare spending that compares Greece, Portugal, and Spain with other OECD countries, between the years 1960 and 1990. Included in this analysis are factors commonly found to affect social spending (e.g., per capita wealth and population age). These contributed to low levels of social spending in these three countries, but are insufficient to explain lagging program development. Three different measures of democratization, however, produce strong evidence that the authoritarian regimes of Spain and Portugal had seriously retarded program development, while the short duration of the “colonels' regime” in Greece had less of an impact. Indeed, the type of transition to democracy had a discernible impact on policy change: the Portuguese revolution was accompanied by immediate increases in social welfare spending; while the more gradual transition in Spain led to incremental policy change. In all three, democratization has allowed social welfare policies to converge on typical OECD levels over the following two decades.

This chapter presents a comparative theory and an empirical analysis of inequalities in economic opportunities and returns to education across birth cohorts. It focuses on the consequences of economic slowdowns in different types of welfare regimes and analyzes how discontinuities in economic trends produce diverse effects on the balance between birth cohorts. It shows that conservative (France) and the familialistic (Italy) welfare regimes are marked by strong inter-cohort inequalities at the expense of younger social generations. In contrast, social-democratic (Denmark) and liberal (US) systems show less inter-cohort redistribution of resources. As far as education goes, while there is no clear decline in the return to education in the latter countries, the former nations show strong drops in the value of intermediate levels of education. This means that national trajectories of social change have diverged, and we should anticipate the long-term consequences of these divergences.

This chapter examines the development of the welfare state from a political economy perspective. Initially, the emergence of post-war welfare state capitalism is examined, and subsequently international variations — Fordist welfare state regimes — are outlined and compared. The crisis and reform of developed welfare states as forms of labour market regulation and capital accumulation are then examined and contextualized within the wider economic and political structural shifts from Fordism to post-Fordism. The emergence of new forms of welfare — post-Fordist workfare state regimes — is also described. In the final section, the role of the welfare state as mediator in the social determinants of health is outlined and differences in population health and health inequalities by welfare state regime are examined.

This chapter examines the gender and cross-national differences in employment commitment among unemployed youth. Employment commitment is higher among young unemployed women than young unemployed men. Having children or a partner negatively affects employment commitment among unemployed females, while the reverse is true among men. Welfare regimes do not influence gender differences in employment commitment, but do impact actual labour market behaviour.

This chapter and the next revisit the political economy within which post‐war welfare regimes emerged, matured, and, now, appear crisis‐ridden. Here, an analysis is made of the democratic class struggle. The first section of the chapter looks at varieties of the struggle, and has subsections on models of industrial relations, employment regulation, and worker rights. The second section looks at de‐ruralization and post‐industrialization, and has subsections on family behaviour and full employment, and the declining correlates of class.