Culture and the Politics of Welfare

Exploring Societal Values and Social Choices

J. Hudson, N. Jo, A. Keung

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137457486
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137457493
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This text offers an in-depth examination of the influence of culture on welfare states. It suggests new ways in which cross-national differences in culture might be measured and, using a range of approaches, utilizes these measures to explore the role culture plays in shaping differences in social policy frameworks across high income countries.

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Exploring the Cultural Context of Welfare Policy Making

Abstract: After reviewing debates on the role of culture in shaping cross-national variations in social policy, we argue that culture is best viewed as a significant but not decisive influence on patterns of welfare. We argue that empirical analysis has been somewhat constrained by conceptions of culture that are either too broad or too narrow, offering an ‘in-between approach’ that identifies stable patterns of societal values that we suggest can act as useful proxy measures for the cultural context of policy making. Examining European Values Study /World Values Survey data covering a period from 1981 to 2009 we identify eight examples of societal values on which we build in the remainder of the book.

Keywords: culture; societal values; welfare state models

Hudson, John, Nam Kyoung Jo and Antonia Keung. Culture and the Politics of Welfare: Exploring Societal Values and Social Choices. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137457493.0006.

Exploring culture and welfare

It is commonly claimed that culture matters in welfare, not least because social policies are based on the shared answers to normative questions such as why someone should care about others?, who deserves our care? and what should be done by governments?, the answers to which reflect diverse understandings of human nature that are shaped by different values systems in different countries and at different times (Deacon, 2002: 1; Marshall, 1972; Titmuss, 1974: 49; van Oorschot, 2000). Indeed, key theorists who have examined the links between culture and welfare have suggested that widely and deeply embedded cultural values form a key context for social policy making and are likely to be a significant factor in explaining cross-national variations in welfare (Pfau-Effinger, 2005). To this end, comparative social policy analysts have shown a growing interest in questions around culture in recent years and a paper by Pfau-Effinger (2005) published in the Journal of Social Policy is, at the time of writing, among the top ten most cited papers in the journal’s history with over 200 citations according to Google Scholar.¹ On the whole, however, culture remains an issue largely dealt with in passing – or implicitly – in comparative analyses of welfare, with relatively little attention paid to how culture relates to the commonly cited welfare regimes or models of welfare that underpin much comparative welfare states research.

The absence of extensive empirical investigation of such issues has been partly due to the limited availability of data on cultural dimensions, but difficulties in operationalising culture empirically have also played a role. Recent developments have addressed both of these issues directly. The European Values Study (EVS) and the World Values Survey (WVS) now provide us with detailed quantitative data on values stretching back over several decades with more than four waves of each having been completed spanning a period from 1981 to 2009. As importantly, detailed debates about how this data might be analysed in order to identify proxy measures of culture have provided us with established methodological approaches on which to build. Indeed, in an earlier work we (Jo, 2011) provided a key contribution to the recent literature in this regard basing our approach on the analysis of stable societal values.

In this chapter we review debates on the role culture plays in shaping cross-national differences in welfare. In so doing, we draw out key conceptual themes found within the literature on culture and welfare and, in so doing, also outline the distinctive contribution provided by our own analytic and methodological frameworks. Building on this work we then examine EVS and WVS data in order to extract examples of societal values that might act as a useful proxy for culture and, in turn, facilitate empirical explorations of welfare-culture linkages. We round off the chapter by demonstrating these examples of societal values operate independently from commonly identified ‘welfare regimes’ and so merit separate inclusion in analytic models seeking to explain cross-national variations in welfare.

Culture and models of welfare

The ‘welfare modelling business’ (Abrahamson, 1999) has been at the heart of comparative social policy analysis since the publication of Esping-Andersen’s (1990) path-breaking The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism and attempts to classify welfare states continue to command much attention (see Abrahamson, 2011; Powell and Barrientos, 2011). Indeed, with the increased availability of reliable comparative data from bodies such as the OECD (Castles, 2002) and a continual refinement of classificatory methods (see Hudson and Kühner, 2010), it is hardly surprising that there should be a lively and ongoing debate nearly 25 years after Esping-Andersen’s classic first appeared in print. We will not rehearse the basics of the welfare regimes debate here (but see Arts and Gellisen (2002), Abrahamson (1999; 2011) and Powell and Barrientos (2011) for overviews), other than to note that the core theme from this literature is broadly supported by many comparative scholars: that each nation’s welfare system on balance reflects a long-term historical path of development and that distinctive paths of development exist that reflect the outcome of complex long-term social, political and economic processes in which historical-institutional forces play a key role in fostering the path-dependence of welfare systems (Abrahamson, 1999; Esping-Andersen, 1990). As hinted above, culture has played a largely implicit role in these debates, though it has also been suggested that culture can foster the path-dependence of welfare systems² (Jo, 2011; Pfau-Effinger, 2004a; van Oorschot, 2006: 24); for instance, deeply embedded cultural values can bolster support for existing social provisions if the two are well matched. Indeed, in reflecting on the longue durée of policy, Pierson (2004: 39) notes that there can be significant positive feedback effects at play that reinforce dominant ideas in a society over time, meaning collective understandings in a society may be path-dependent too.³ How, then, have key theorists in the welfare typologies debate approached questions of culture?

In his ground breaking The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism Esping-Andersen (1990) made two passing references to culture (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 13 and 191), but there were no substantive references to questions of culture despite the fact that his three welfare regime types are presumed to be fundamentally shaped by ‘the historical legacy of regime institutionalization’ (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 29). This might be regarded as something of an omission, particularly given that some of the factors he placed under the umbrella phrase ‘historical legacy of regime institutionalization’ might be viewed as cultural influences: for instance, with respect to the conservative/corporatist regime he (1990: 27) suggested the influence of the Church and a related commitment to preserving ‘traditional familyhood’ were key. His follow-up text (Social Foundations of Post-Industrial Economies) offered few additional clues, though a footnote talked of ‘a culture of universalistic solidarities’ in Scandinavian societies (Esping-Andersen, 1999: 78).

However, his edited collection Welfare States in Transition – published in-between the two solo contributions highlighted above (Esping-Andersen, 1996a) – is interesting insofar as some of the contributors explicitly highlighted culture as a key factor in understanding welfare state types. For instance, Castles (1996: 111, emphasis added), based on his analysis of Australia and New Zealand, noted that ‘Policy options are broadly shaped by the economic forces and social and cultural structures which shape a generation’s dilemmas and opportunities’, while Goodman and Peng (1996: 193, emphasis added) suggested that East Asian welfare states such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan had developed on the basis of seeking ‘solutions from within [their] own traditional cultural framework rather than adapting Western patterns’. Indeed, Esping-Andersen (1996b: x, emphasis added) observed in the introduction to the book that the different regions examined within it are ‘quite distinct in terms of cultural and political legacies, economic development, and shared social policy traditions’. Perhaps one of the reasons Welfare States in Transition gave culture a more prominent role is that it embraced perspectives, and cases, that featured heavily in early challenges to the trichotomous classification of welfare regime ideal types outlined in The Three Worlds of Welfare. Hence, for instance, Castles’ (1996) chapter built directly on his work with Mitchell (Castles and Mitchell, 1993) that argued Australia and New Zealand were misclassified by Esping-Andersen as liberal regimes because key features such as redistribution through collective bargaining had been missed despite their centrality to these distinctive ‘wage earners welfare states’. Meanwhile, the chapter by Goodman and Peng (1996) built on, among others, Jones’ (1990, 1993) suggestion that a distinctive ‘Confucian’ model of welfare could be found in East Asia in which values distinctive from those found in ‘Western’ countries lead to a welfare system that is also distinct. What is interesting here is not only that both of these strands sparked important debates about the existence of an additional and distinctive welfare regime in their region (see Arts and Gellisen, 2002), but also that in both instances culture was seen as a central factor in understanding distinct welfare state types.

Castles (1998; see also Castles and Mitchell, 1993) ultimately offered a rival set of welfare types based on: ‘the identification of differences between groups of nations defined in terms of common cultural, historical and geographical nations [termed] ‘families of nations’ [ ... ] which correspond substantially to the borders of what appear to be quite clearly identified cultural zones’ (Castles, 1998: 8, emphasis added). In other words, he placed culture centre stage in defining welfare state clusters. Many of those involved in driving the East Asian welfare model thesis took a similar approach, Jones’ (1990; 1993) arguing a common core of Confucian beliefs underpinned a distinct model of welfare while Rieger and Liebfried have suggested that ‘Confucian culture can be identified as the fundamental cause of an independent path of welfare state evolution in East Asia’ (2003: 243).

However, despite these important strands of debate, it is fair to say that the ways in which culture and welfare regimes interact or intersect is relatively underexplored. Moreover, it should be noted that the culturally deterministic approaches espoused by those such as Jones (1990, 1993) are now generally eschewed (Hudson, Kühner and Yang, 2014): with respect to claims about a culturally rooted East Asian welfare model, for instance, critics have pointed to the diversity of social policy frameworks found in the region (see e.g., Jacobs, 2000 Peng, 2002; Ramesh and Asher 2000; Walker and Wong, 2005; White and Goodman, 1998), with Kwon (1998: 27) concluding that cultural-historical approaches are relatively ‘weak in explaining the precise national profiles of social policy and differences between welfare systems’ in the region.

More nuanced contributions to the debate on culture and welfare dispense with culturally deterministic perspectives altogether and instead see culture as one of the factors that might interplay with other forces in shaping social policy. For instance, in Pfau-Effinger’s (2005; cf. 2004b: 37–61) ‘welfare culture approach’ the impact of culture on welfare policy making is mediated by a social system, her model recognising the roles of political actors, social structures and institutions in policy making. This is a more sophisticated model altogether, and its reasoning naturally leads to the admission that cultural dimensions are not the sole determinants of social policy (Deacon, 2002: 8; Pfau-Effinger, 2005: 11) and are probably ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Exploring the Cultural Context of Welfare Policy Making
• 2  Exploring the CultureWelfare Nexus: A Quantitative Comparative Analysis
• 3  Exploring the CultureWelfare Nexus: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis
• 4  Exploring the CultureWelfare Nexus: Key Trends, Key Cases
• 5  Conclusion: Bringing Culture Back In to Comparative Social Policy Analysis
• Bibliography
• Index