This chapter considers the intellectual roots of the welfare state in changing views about states and their competences from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries. This happens in particular national contexts, with differing patterns of both democratization and bureaucratization. From the beginning, we can observe patterns of international learning and policy transfer. This process is traced through a number of national cases: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the English-speaking nations, Sweden and the United States. Although the welfare state has come to be identified with social citizenship and ‘social justice’, its ideational and normative roots are much more diverse and contested than this. And although the welfare state came to be identified with social democrats, especially after 1945, its origins more usually lie with liberal, or even conservative, forces and ideas.
It is frequently argued that we are living through a new era of welfare state ‘convergence’. Under the impact of increasingly globalized international economic forces, governments everywhere are said to be driven to adopt much the same policy agenda of retrenchment and retreat. In this paper, we test the plausibility of this expectation by considering the recent experience of welfare state reform in three English-speaking nation states–Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We find that whilst all three nations have faced common challenges and have had recourse to similar sorts of policy instruments, there is enough diversity in their experience to suggest that ‘politics still matters’ and that suppositions of ‘convergence’ need to be heavily qualified.
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