Contemporary Challenges to Welfare State Development
| Author | Christopher Pierson |
| Date | 01 September 1998 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00167 |
| Published date | 01 September 1998 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Contemporary Challenges to Welfare
State Development
CHRISTOPHER PIERSON
University of Nottingham
That convenient division of academic labour which once made study of welfare
states principally the responsibility of sociologists has broken down. Of course,
there were always a few political scientists and rather more economists who
concerned themselves with the making of social policy. In the last ten years,
however, and for a number of reasons (ranging from the ageing of the popula-
tion to the end of the Cold War) questions of welfare have risen towards the top
of the political studies agenda. Such a development is long overdue, given the
importance of welfare provision in both governments' activity and spending, as
well as its centrality in discussions of rights, equality, justice, citizenship and so
on in contemporary political theory. But it also presents a problem. Recent
years have seen an avalanche of new workon the welfare state. Within the broad
®eld of political studies this has involved work in political theory, in the study of
policy making, on new forms of public administration, on the role of parties and
elections, on changes in public opinion and on the structure of public ®nances.
It has also sponsored a great deal of inter-disciplinary work with historians,
sociologists, demographers and (international) political economists. No con-
temporary survey of the many things happening to, and being said about,
welfare states could pretend to be exhaustive. I shall, for example, say compara-
tively little about the crucial development of feminist theories of welfare and
citizenship or about the ongoing conservative critique of welfare dependency,
both of which have been very ably and recently reviewed.1I shall also have
comparatively little to say about important developmentsin the use of statistical
techniques to illuminate patterns of welfare state development.2My more
modest intention here is to assess the state of our knowledge in ®ve or six key
areas that have developed in the 1990s and to draw some general conclusions
about future prospects for the welfare state and its political study.
#Political Studies Association 1998. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 CowleyRoad, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Political Studies (1998), XLVI, 777±794
1For excellent surveysof the recent literature see J. O'Connor, From Women in the WelfareState
to Gendering Welfare State Regimes, Special Issue, Current Sociology, 44, 2 (1996); N. Barry,
`Conservative thought and the welfare state', Political Studies, 45, 2 (1997), 331±45; P. Wilding,
`The welfare state and the Conservatives', Political Studies, 45, 4 (1997), 716±26.
2As, for example, in A. Hicks and J. Misra, `Political resources and the growth of welfare in
auent capitalist democracies',American Journal of Sociology, 99, 3 (1993), 668± 710 and T.Janoski
and A. M. Hicks, The Comparative Political Economyof the Welfare State (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
1. Comparative Welfare State Development: the Regimes Debate
Within the UK, the welfare state has often been seen, rather quaintly, as a
uniquely British achievement (give or take the occasional reference to
Bismarck's authoritarian precursor). The greater dissemination of individual
case studies and the emergence of a genuinely comparative politics of welfare
state development over the past decade has made this particular conceit unsus-
tainable. To a range of detailed single-country surveys (such as Jones' Australian
Welfare State and Armitage Social Welfare in Canada Revisited) have been
added a number of multi-country surveys, following the heroic example of Peter
Flora's ®ve-volume Growth to Limits.3These national case studies have shown
how parochial our conceptions of welfare innovation have traditionally been
(with New Zealand and several European states introducing old age pensions
well ahead of Britain, for example). The newer comparative literature shows
both notable similarities (sometimes very explicitly the product of `policy
transfer') and substantial and persistent dierences between dierent states'
approaches to social provision.
Probably the most sustained interest in the comparative literature has been
focussed on the discussion of diering welfare state regimes.There has long been
a (rather generalized) division between broadly `Beveridgian' and `Bismarckian'
welfare states and the wily old master, Richard Titmuss, further distinguished
between a residual welfare model (minimal state relief of destitution), an
industrial achievement-performance model (in which welfare status re¯ects
employment status) and an institutional redistributive model (in which universal-
ist services are provided across the population in relation to need).4The really
in¯uential account in recent discussions, however, has been that outlined in
Gosta Esping-Andersen's (1990) Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.5The
variation in welfare states is not best captured, so Esping-Andersen argues, by
focussing exclusively upon levels of social expenditure (as had most of the
previously prevailing literature). There is no straightforward continuum from
`mean' low spenders to `generous' big spenders. We have to look beyond
expenditure levels to consider the terms and conditions upon which resources
and opportunities are (re)distributed. We have, therefore, to look at diering
types of welfare state regime. Two axes are of especial importance in identifying
these welfare state regimes: ®rst, the extent to which they decommodify wage
labour and second, the extent to which they stratify the status of welfare
recipients.
Using these criteria, Esping-Andersen isolates three `typical' clusters of
welfare state regimes. Liberal welfare states are dominated by the logic of the
market. Bene®ts are modest, often means-tested and stigmatizing. They tend to
be low spenders. Examples are the UK, the USA, Canada and Australia.
Conservative/`corporatist'welfare states are less in thrall to markets but their
bene®ts tend to be strati®ed and overall redistributive eects are `negligible'. In
many instances, these corporatist regimes are shaped by Church traditions and
this tends to determine their conservative attitudes to the family and gender, as
3Michael Jones, The Australian Welfare State: Evaluating Social Policy, 4th ed. (Sydney, Allen
and Unwin, 1996); A. Armitage, Social Welfare in Canada Revisited (Ontario, Oxford University
Press, 1996); P. Flora (ed.), Growth to Limits (Berlin, De Gruyter, 1986/87).
4R. Titmuss, Social Policy (London, Allen and Unwin, 1974), pp. 30 ±1.
5G. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge, Polity, 1990).
778 Review Article
#Political Studies Association, 1998
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