Understanding Welfare reforms
Bruno Palier
Sciences Po - Paris, France
Outline
- The development of welfare state studies
- The new politics of the welfare state
- The three worlds of welfare reforms
- Explaining reforms : the three “i”
I. The development of welfare
state studies
Understanding Welfare expansion: Various independent
variables
A) the developmental approaches
* Marx and Polanyi
* Functionalism: the modernization theories
(industrialisation, democratisation)
Wilensky, Flora…
B) The role of the labour’s
organisation
The social democratic road to Welfare
The power resources approach (five steps:
targeted, vluntary State Subsidised,
Corporatist, Basic Security, Encompassing)
Korpi, Palme, Esping-Andersen…
a) Targeted
b) V oluntary S tate S ubsidized
d) Basic S ecurity
c) Corporatist
e) E ncompassing
C) The role of employers’ interest
- Micro-economic foundations:
Risk pooling, workforce management, VoC
(Swenson, Mares, Soskice, Iversen, Estevez-Abe)
D) Macro-foundations
- The role of state elite: building the State, building
political compromises
(Rokkan, Ferrera)
- Macro-economic foundations
Fordism, mass industry, mass consumption
(Regulation school)
II. The new politics of the
welfare state
The various causes of the welfare state crises:
- Growth to limits
(maturation)
- Globalisation
- De-Industrialisation
(the trilemna: equality, employment, budgetary restraint)
- Women's entry to the Labour Market
- Demographic Changes
- New macro-economic paradigm : from Keynes to
Schumpeter
II. The new politics of the
welfare state
From credit claiming to blame avoidance:
the era of retrenchment
- New problems, new policies, same
institutions: path dependency
(irresistible forces, immovable objects)
- Institutions matter : political institution
(electoral system, political regime…),
Welfare programmes, Policy feed back
III. The Three worlds of Welfare
Reforms
ESPING-ANDERSEN, Gøsta (ed.), 1996, Welfare States in Transition, National Adaptations in
Global Economies, London, Sage;
FERRERA, Maurizio, RHODES, Martin (eds.), 2000, Recasting European Welfare States, West
European Politics (Special Issue), April;
LEIBFRIED, Stephan (ed.), 2001, The Future of the Welfare State, Cambridge University press;
PIERSON, Paul, (ed.), 2001, The New Politics of the Welfare State, Oxford: Oxford University
Press;
SCHARPF, Fritz W., SCHMIDT, Vivien A., (eds.), 2000, From Vulnerability to competiveness:
Welfare and Work in the Open Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2 volumes;
SYKES, Rob S., PRIOR, Pauline, PALIER, Bruno (eds.), 2001, Globalization and European
Welfare states : challenges and changes, Londres : Macmillan;
TAYLOR-GOOBY, Peter (ed.), 2001, Welfare States Under Pressure, Londres, Sage
STEPHENS, john D., HUBER, Evelyne, 2002, Development and crisis of the welfare state :
parties and policies in global markets, Chicago : University of Chicago Press;
SWANK, D., 2002, Global Capital, Political Institutions, and Policy Change in Developed
Welfare States, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press;
WILENSKY, Harold, 2002, Rich Democracies: Political Economy, Public Policy, and
performance, University of California Press.
III. The Three worlds of Welfare
Reforms
- Beyond Retrenchment: recasting the welfare state
- Re-commodification, cost-containment,
recalibration
- The Anglo-saxon way,
- The Nordic way,
- The Continental impasses…
IV. Explaining reforms :
Measuring social policy changes:
Distinguishing among policy changes (P. Hall)
Social policies as public policies: goals and
instruments
3 sets of goals
4 instrumental (institutional) dimensions
Explaining reforms :
Tracing and comparing reform processes
« The three i »: three dynamics of changes
- Ideas : changing social policy paradigms
- Welfare Institutions : Beyond continuity
from path dependency to « Cumulative but transformative changes »
(K. Thelen, W. Streeck):
« displacement », « layering », « drift », « conversion », « exhaustion »
- Interests: Labour/Capital… New actors? State elite? Policy community?
The impact of political institutions
Explaining reforms
Three levels of analysis:
International ideas,
Welfare regimes (institutions)
National timing, conflicts and compromises