Round Up the Usual Suspects!: Globalization, Domestic Politics, and Welfare State Change

Abstract

W killed the growth of the welfare state? Its seemingly inexorable budgetary, programmatic, and personnel growth in the 1960s and 1970s ground to a halt in the 1980s, accompanied by the mutilation of programmes and rising unemployment. Was it an external intruder-globalization of one sort or another? Was it an inside job-domestic politics and demography? Or, as public choice theory suggests, was death self-inflicted by a combination of producer and client groups? As if this richness of suspects were not problem enough, the identity of the victim is also uncertain. In fact, the central mystery in the relationship between globalization and the welfare state is accurately identifying the victim; it is a mystery of concept formation in which, prosaically, no one is quite sure which dependent variable matters and how it is changing. Spending levels? Policies? Institutions? Wage equality? Employment levels? National autonomy? Two academic deformations of reality obscure the politics at the heart of this specific mystery. First, the richness of prior research on the formal or overt welfare state-systems of tax funded transfers and state provided or funded social services ameliorating life and economic risks for workersprovides a lamppost around which enquiries naturally cluster, asking how 'globalization' has affected those programmes, but ignoring areas of darkness away from the lamp. Second, a profound normative bias favouring welfare in most welfare state research obscures the fact that not all welfare is for workers, that the welfare state was never simply an instrumental tool for advancing labour's interests, and that 'welfare'-understood much more broadly as 'social protection'-was about sheltering all income streams, I thank Aida Hozic and David Waldner, respectively, for many long discussions of the film industry and social sciences in which they raised this alarm. Other useful comments came from

Politics of Risk-taking : Welfare State Reform in Advanced Democracies

“…Starke 2006: 106). This literature's argument is that the main cause for pressure on the welfare state -and thereby for welfare state reform -is socio-economic change and the ensuing problem load (see Schwartz 2001). Political-institutional variables are, conversely, intervening variables at most.…”

Political parties as drivers of post-crisis social spending in liberal welfare states

“…Another branch of the comparative literature consists of neo-functionalist perspectives, which argue that social expenditures are shaped by domestic and international pressures, rather than political parties and institutional arrangements (Schwartz 2001;Starke 2006). Domestically these pressures include social, economic, and demographic challenges that welfare systems are confronted with, such as ageing populations and a shift towards a post-industrial economy.…”

Tying Up the Loose Ends: The Determinants of Active Labour Market Policy in the Western Countries 1985-2013

“…Based on theoretical tradition (Schwartz, 2001), the argument is made that the level of government debt position and budget deficit are probably linked to the contraction of ALMP, due to the reduction in allocable public economic resources (Rueda, 2005, p. 68). The public economic resource angle is also linked to the possible effect of an ageing population on ALMP development.…”

“…The role of ALMP is argued from the perspectives of maintaining the capacity for work of the unemployed (Barbier & Ludwig-Mayerhofer, 2004), providing encouragement to work (Kananen, 2014), and preserving the functionality of the labour markets (Bonoli, 2012), making it a particularly interesting subject for debate (Jessop, 2002). A main research strand investigates whether the development of ALMP is dependent on endogenous or exogenous determinants (cf., Schwartz, 2001). The latter dynamic predicts that ALMP contracts or expands as a direct result of globalisation.…”