The Political Economy of Regulating for Welfare: Regulation Preventing Loss of Access to Basic Services in the UK, Sweden, the EU, and Israel

Abstract

What does the state do to prevent consumers from losing access to basic services in the market due to financial hardship, and under what conditions will this occur? Bringing together the literature on regulatory governance and the welfare state, this article compares regulatory regimes that prevent loss of access to services in the UK, Sweden, and Israel in housing credit, electricity, and water, as well as to the electricity and housing credit sectors in the EU, from the early 1990s to the 2010s. The article finds that regulation to address this issue was introduced in all but the Swedish cases. This highlights the significance of the welfare state context in addressing these issues through regulation, as more residual welfare regimes are associated with more social protection through regulation.

“Soft Power” Of The West In The “Cold War” With Soviet Mythologemes

“…The Western bourgeoisie, seeing that the Marxist ideas after the October Revolution, and especially after the successes of the Soviet Union in building a socially oriented state, are beginning to take possession of the population of their own https://doi.org/10. 15405/epsbs.2021.12.03.21 Corresponding Author: Vasiliy A. Smirnov Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference eISSN: 2357-1330 166 countries, decided to share part of the national wealth with their masses, creating a system of the so-called "state welfare" or, as it is called in another way, the welfare state, the essence of which is described in detail in many foreign studies (Haber, 2020). Citizens have a certain basic income in this state, among other things (Martinelli, 2020).…”

“Soft Power” In Mythology Of Soviet Civilization: Soviet Intelligentsia’S Value System Transformation

“…And if the elite of the USSR began to feel sympathy for the Western way of life approximately starting from the 1960s, then the turn of the Soviet intelligentsia "facing the West" on a massive scale began during "Perestroika". It seemed to the Soviet intelligentsia at that time that Perestroika would become a springboard that would help transform the USSR first into a society where there is "socialism with a human face" -the so-called "hybrid state" according to modern political science terminology (Kim, 2020), and then make it a democratic country with a market economy which is immanent in all the features of Western society, including market, democracy, a multi-party system, private property, the system of a social bourgeois state (Haber, 2020), etc. Western "soft power" acted in two directions through the so-called channels for forming public opinion (authoritative citizens of the USSR, people's deputies, opposition media).…”