Routledge Handbook of European Welfare Systems

Sonja Blum, Johanna Kuhlmann, Klaus Schubert, Sonja Blum, Johanna Kuhlmann, Klaus Schubert

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367259150
• eBook ISBN: 9781000732146
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Published ten years after the first edition, this new Handbook offers topical, and comprehensive information on the welfare systems of all 28 EU member states and their recent reforms, giving the reader an invaluable introduction and basis for comparative welfare research. Additional chapters provide detailed information on EU social policy, as well as comparative analyses of European welfare systems and their reform pathways. For this second edition, all chapters have been updated and substantially revised, and Croatia additionally included.

The second edition of this Handbook is most timely, given the often-fundamental welfare state transformations against the background of the financial and economic crises, transforming social policy ideas, as well as political shifts in a number of European countries. The book sets out to analyse these new developments when it comes to social policy. In the first part, all country chapters provide systematic and comparable information on the foundations of the different national welfare systems and their characteristics. In the second part, using a joint conceptual foundation, they focus on policy changes (especially of the last two decades) in different social policy areas, including old-age, labour market, family, healthcare, and social assistance policies.

As the comparative chapters conclude, European welfare system landscapes have been in constant motion in the last two decades. While austerity is not to be seen on the aggregate level, the in-depth country studies show that all policy sectors have been characterised by different reform directions and ideas. The findings not only reveal both change and continuity, but also policy reversal as a distinct type that characterises social policy reform. The book provides a rich resource to the international welfare state research community, and is also useful for social policy teaching.

Part 1
Introduction

1
Reform pathways of European welfare systems

Analysing change and continuity in a broadened geographical and temporal perspective

Johanna Kuhlmann and Sonja Blum

1 Introduction¹

‘The welfare state is at once one of the great structural uniformities of modern society and, paradoxically, one of its most striking diversities’, Harold Wilensky stated in his famous comparative analysis of welfare state development (1975, p. 1). What he observed more than 40 years ago still holds true today, especially when the focus is on Europe: Today, all European countries provide some form of welfare system, albeit in considerably different ways. For European citizens, the provision of welfare to cushion the social vicissitudes and risks has become an important component of their life and a crucial achievement of the 19th century and especially the 20th century, with the Bismarckian social insurance laws from the 1880s, the Beveridgean National Health Service from 1948, and the instalment of parental leave rights in the Nordic countries during the 1970s forming cases in point. These and similar policies have significantly shaped our present understanding of the welfare state and often also served as reference points for the development of European welfare systems. What is more, welfare states are not unrelated entities: Rather, interdependencies have proven to be important, and regularly social policies from one country serve as a role model for other countries. And yet despite these similar points of reference and frequently similar challenges and contexts, European welfare systems have by no means converged: Rather, welfare state development is still significantly shaped by national factors.

Welfare states are not only diverse, but also dynamic, consistently being challenged by both exogenous and endogenous factors. The Second World War, the oil shock (1974), the collapse of the Soviet Union (1990), and the global financial crisis (from 2007) can be named as important turning points, which resulted in considerable changes in the trajectories of European welfare states (Castles et al., 2010). Welfare states have also been shaped by demographic, societal, and political developments, such as increasing life expectancy, changes of traditional family models, and transformations in party systems, with the recent rise of right-wing populist parties being a notable example (Röth et al., 2018).

These changing pictures of the welfare state influence how it is researched: Although the question of stability and change has for a long time been debated in comparative welfare state research (Pierson, 1994; Palier, 2010b; Béland and Powell, 2016; Streeck and Thelen, 2005), both the theoretical concepts for analysing stability and change and the empirical findings regarding the actual scope of change in different welfare systems are quite diverse. As Castles et al. (2010, p. 5) summarised, ‘there is hardly a variable which has not been regarded as influential’ with regard to how and why welfare states come into being, and how and why they change over time. To name but a few, factors that have been identified as influential include socio-economic pressure (Wilensky, 1975), political parties (Schmidt, 1978), power resources of capital and labour (Korpi, 1983), political institutions (Immergut, 1992), ideas (Hall, 1993), religion (van Kersbergen and Manow, 2009), transnational interdependencies (Rodgers, 1998) – the list could be continued to the point of exhaustion (see also Kuhlmann, 2019). This variety makes a mapping and, even more so, testing of these factors quite challenging.

In the first edition of this Handbook of European Welfare Systems, a review of comparative welfare state research to date (Schubert et al., 2009a; see also Auth et al., 2018) identified, though with much overlapping, three main directions: The first was the development of welfare state categories and clusters; the second the analysis of retrenchment and other welfare state transformations; the third the question of convergence or path-dependency between the welfare states. Reviews – especially of such a broad and mature field as comparative welfare state research – can only be written in retrospect and with some time lag. Trying to look at the ‘major strands’ of current welfare state research, the wood may be impossible to see for the trees. Now, ten years after the first edition, the strands seem to have taken some different shape and directions: Welfare state typologies are still discussed and widely used, but we feel that this issue no longer dominates the debate. The same might be said for possible convergence processes between welfare states. The debate on path-dependency has gained traction since the famous observation by Streeck and Thelen (2005) that incremental changes can – over time – result in transformative changes, which also implies that reform processes in welfare states can to some extent be path-dependent, but this does not exclude the possibility of resulting in overall convergence. Vis-à-vis these two areas, the literature investigating welfare state transformations has kept or even expanded its dominance (see e.g. Bonoli and Natali, 2012; Hemerijck, 2013; Taylor-Gooby et al., 2017) (see Section 2 for a more detailed assessment of the development of the literature over time).

Against this backdrop, the aim of this chapter is to develop an analytical framework that allows capturing the changes that welfare systems – European welfare systems in particular – have been experiencing. Thus, while the Handbook character of this volume is kept, as all chapters briefly present the main characteristics of the national welfare systems, our aim is to pay particular attention to the dynamics of European welfare systems in the last two decades. Two conceptual underpinnings guide our understanding of welfare system change and the empirical analyses: First, by including all 28 EU member states at the time of writing this chapter, we argue that understanding the change of European welfare systems benefits from a broadened geographical perspective that also includes ‘unusual suspects’ of comparative welfare state research. Second, and partly interrelated to the first, we adopt a procedural perspective of welfare system change. Such a perspective acknowledges that ‘reference points’ against which to measure and qualify welfare state change are country-specific (and certainly not always directed at the post-war ‘golden age’) and that timing and process matter for welfare state reform (see e.g. Pierson, 2004; Palier, 2010b). Against this backdrop, the chapter develops a three-dimensional approach for analysing welfare system change, thereby recognising that changes of welfare systems can cover many dimensions and questions – a fact that has become widely known in comparative welfare state research as the ‘dependent variable problem’ (Green-Pedersen, 2004; Clasen and Siegel, 2007; Pierson, 1994).

The following section will take a brief retrospect at the comparative welfare state literature over time. In Section 3, we conceptualise welfare system change along three dimensions, which will be taken up in all country chapters and also drive our qualitative comparative analysis (see Blum and Kuhlmann, this volume). Section 4 draws some general conclusions.

2 Trends in comparative welfare state research: a very brief retrospect of the literature

Theories of the welfare state have mainly been developed since the 1950s (Castles et al., 2010): Going hand in hand with the ‘golden age’ of the welfare state, these theories primarily focused on welfare state expansion. The ‘welfare modelling business’ (Abrahamson, 1999), which Schubert et al. (2009a) identified as the first contemporary trend of comparative welfare state research, reaches back to the 1950s but gained traction in the 1970s, particularly with Titmuss’ (1972) distinction of the residual welfare model, the industrial achievement-performance model, and the institutional redistributive model. With the marginal and institutional welfare types, Korpi (1980) developed two poles to which the individual states largely could be attributed. In retrospective, this line of research seems to have had its heydays during the 1990s and early 2000s, when Esping-Andersen’s (1990) ground-breaking publication, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, became the most important basis of discussion for many years. Indeed, his distinction of a social-democratic, liberal, and conservative welfare regime type still enriches and provokes the debates (see e.g. Ferrara, 1996; Manow, 2002; Bambra, 2005; Emmenegger et al., 2015), but has at the same time been heavily criticised. This is partly due to the fact that additional ‘worlds of welfare capitalism’ have been identified, which are in the European context especially the ‘Mediterranean world’, and post-socialist countries which are either conceptualised as their own group or as constituting a subgroup, e.g. within the Bismarckian welfare systems (Arts and Gelissen, 2010; Palier, 2010b). Other scholars have criticised that the typology lacks a gender dimension (Sainsbury, 1999).

From the late 1980s, the second strand of comparative welfare state research identified by Schubert et al. (2009a) gained traction, namely the analysis of retrenchment (or, more general, welfare state transformations). Pierson’s (1994, 2002) works on a ‘dismantling’ of the welfare state and a climate of ‘permanent austerity’ have received much attention ever since. A basic common feature of large parts of this literature has been the notion of a welfare state ‘crisis’ (see e.g. Flora, 1985; Svallfors and Taylor-Gooby, 1999; Huber and Stephens, 2001). Since the end of the 1990s, the crisis discourse was associated with the globalisation debate and newly revived by getting closely involved with the nexus of globalisation-welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1996a; Crouch, 2000; Scharpf, 2000). In view of increasing international competition, the welfare state would thus seem in need of revision (Brady et al., 2005) or even completely outdated (Zürn, 2003). The notion of a quantitative dismantling of welfare state policy noticeably gains significance with the question of a qualitative dysfunctionality – whether national welfare systems can still be controlled and the state is experiencing a loss of sovereignty with processes of Europeanisation and globalisation (see e.g. Crouch, 2000; Castles, 2004; Ferrera, 2005). Surprisingly, however, despite the described climate of ‘permanent austerity’ and attempts to cut back social benefits, scholars stated that, overall, welfare states remained remarkably stable (Pierson, 1994), which was characterised in the debate as ‘welfare state resilience’ (Starke, 2006) and falls in the third strand of comparative welfare state research as identified by Schubert et al. (2009a), namely the question of convergence or path dependence.

Beginning from around the mid-2000s, the debate on path dependence has considerably changed, as the notion of ‘frozen’ welfare state landscapes (Esping-Andersen, 1996b), status quo maintenance, and reform incapability particularly of the conservative regime type was overhauled by empirical realities (Palier and Martin, 2007; Palier, 2010a; Häusermann, 2010), and encompassing changes have been proven across different social-policy sectors, such as pension, unemployment, and family policies (Palier, 2010a). The dualisation debate has added another facet to this literature, referring to a labour market where the rights of core workers (so-called insiders) are being maintained, while a growing group of workers at the margin of the labour market (so-called outsiders) is less protected by social insurance arrangements (see e.g. Emmenegger et al., 2012). Yet the observation of welfare state change did not remain limited to conservative welfare states: Significant departures from the status quo have also been identified for welfare states traditionally assigned to other regime types (Cerami and Vanhuysse, 2009; Nyby et al., 2018). While most of the research on path-dependency engages in in-depth case studies of specific welfare states, convergence approaches have mostly relied on quantitative data, analysing whether and in what ways welfare states are getting closer to each other (Starke et al., 2008; Schmitt and Starke, 2011).

During the past years, the ‘crisis and transformation’ literature has been again a central feature of the debate, putting developments after the financial and economic crises starting in 2008 and thereabouts into focus. In this context, research has shown that European welfare systems are confronted with similar challenges but react to them in very different ways (Schubert et al., 2016; Blum et al., 2014; van Kersbergen et al., 2014). Last but not least, what was ten years ago still rated as a ‘sub-theme’ of the literature strand on retrenchment and other transformations of the welfare state, namely research on ‘new social risks’ (Bonoli, 2005) and a ‘new welfare state’ (Esping-Andersen et al., 2002; Taylor-Gooby, 2004; Bonoli and Natali, 2012), has since its emergence in the late 1990s gained in importance and now constitutes a literature strand on its own, being strongly connected to the ‘social investment state’ (Morel et al., 2012; Hemerijck, 2017) – a debate that we will take up in the next section.

3 Conceptualising welfare system change

In this section, we will develop a framework that guides the analysis in the chapters of this book. Like in the first edition of this Handbook, we focus on welfare systems (rather than welfare states in a more narrow sense) as the main level of analysis, indicating ‘all welfare arrangements relevant to secure social risks and to open up new social possibilities’ (Schubert et al., 2009a, p. 21, emphasis in original). First, as a foundation, we will stress why the analysis of welfare system change benefits from a broadened geographical and a procedural perspective (Section 3.1). On this basis, we are going to outline our three-dimensional analytical approach, which includes a content dimension, an ideational dimension, and an output dimension of change (Section 3.2). Section 3.3 summarises the elements of this developed analytical framework.

3.1 Welfare system change in geographical and temporal perspective

It has been highlighted how the past few decades were marked by developments that have significantly changed the picture of Europe – reaching from the end of the Cold War, over the globalisation process of the world market, to the dynamics of the European integration process itself. On the one hand, the criticism of the ‘three worlds of welfare capitalism’ as a regime typology was fuelled by the Eastern enlargement in 2004, when eight Central and Eastern European countries plus two ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of box
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Country studies
• Part 3 EU social policy and comparative perspectives