How administrative reforms influence the capacity for implementing the social investment state
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13882627231159101 |
| Author | Niklas A. Andersen,Karen Nielsen Breidahl |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Social services as critical infrastructureGuest Editors: Renate Reiter and Tanja Klenk |
How administrative reforms
influence the capacity for
implementing the social
investment state
Niklas A. Andersen and Karen Nielsen Breidahl
Aalborg University, Denmark
Abstract
For several decades, the social investment (SI) state has been heralded as the saviour of the welfare
state, while at the same time being criticised for being just another instance of neoliberal down-
sizing of the welfare state. Recently, efforts have been made to provide clearer conceptualisations
of how to assess the existence and impact of SI. However, these attempts have hitherto mainly
focused on the policy functions and instruments of the SI state. This article contributes to existing
research by offering a novel analytical framework on the capacity needed by street-level organisa-
tions (SLOs) to implement the central policy functions of the SI state, and by elucidating how
administrative reforms influence this capacity. The article applies the framework to the implemen-
tation in Denmark of Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs) in local job centres. This case is con-
sidered an SI ‘flagship’in terms of formal policies, while also having undergone multiple
administrative reforms, which makes it highly illustrative for the central argument of the article
–that the success or failure of an SI approach is not only determined by politics and formal pol-
icies. The empirical analysis reveals how the capacity to implement SI policies has been enhanced
by administrative reforms; this has been done by giving job centres more room for discretion and
enhancing their ability to make long-term investments and to promote integrated service provision
across different service areas. However, at the same time the local job centres remain closely
monitored and controlled through an external accountability performance measurement system.
Keywords
Social investment, operational capacity, street-level organisations, integrated services, active
labour market policies, analytical capacity, policy capacity
Corresponding author:
Karen Nielsen Breidahl, Department of Politics and Society, Aalborg University, 1 Fibigerstræde, Aalborg, 9220, Denmark.
Email: knb@dps.aau.dk
Special Issue: Social services as critical infrastructure
European Journal of Social Security
2023, Vol. 25(2) 139–157
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/13882627231159101
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Introduction
Throughout recent decades, the idea of the social investment (SI) state has been viewed as a blue-
print for a new social model, which is better equipped than both the traditional
Keynesian-Beveridge welfare state model and its neoliberal counterpart to tackle the (demographic,
social etc.) challenges of contemporary society (Esping-Andersen et al., 2002; Hemerijck, 2018;
Morel et al., 2012). As a policy paradigm, the SI state thus treads a path between the Keynesian
and the neoliberal model, endorsing neither the passive social insurance schemes of the former
nor the curtailment of benefits and rights of the latter. Instead, the SI state is framed as being con-
cerned with furthering citizen-capabilities and improving employability by ‘raising and maintaining
human capital “stock”throughout the life course and easing the “flow”of contemporary labor
market transitions’(Hemerijck, 2018: 812).
Literature on the SI state can be divided into two distinct waves. The first wave mainly centred
around whether a turn towards an SI state has taken place (Hemerijck, 2013) and whether this could
be viewed as a solution to the challenges facing modern welfare states (Barbier, 2012; Hemerijck,
2017; Nolan, 2013). Sometimes these debates have been fuelled by a lack of conceptual clarity as to
why SI policies –in the eyes of both proponents and critics –have come to represent a wide variety
of both specific policy instruments and normative propositions. In recent years, a second wave of
scholarly attention has thus moved away from discussions of the principles of SI towards efforts to
provide more precise conceptualisation and operationalisation of how to measure its existence and
impact (Andersson, 2018; Heitzmann and Matzinger, 2021; Hemerijck, 2018; Kvist, 2014; Plavgo
and Hemerijck, 2021). This second wave of SI literature has mostly focused on what can be termed
the politics of the SI state –i.e. electoral support, public attitudes etc. (e.g. Busemeyer et al., 2018;
Marx and Nguyen, 2018) –or the formal policies of the SI state –i.e. the formal content of the pol-
icies underpinning SI (e.g. Kvist, 2014; Morel et al., 2009).
The current article is situated firmly within the debates of this second wave of SI literature, but it
seeks to move the discussion forward by shifting the focus away from the politics and formal pol-
icies of SI towards the operational conditions of the SI state. The article thus puts forward the argu-
ment that the success or failure of the SI approach is not only determined by politics and formal
policies. It is also dependent on ‘prevailing governance structures and institutional actors’
(Hemerijck, 2018: 819) and their influence on the ‘capacity of the SI state’. Drawing on the litera-
ture on policy capacity, we define policy capacity as the ‘set of skills and resources –or compe-
tences and capabilities –necessary to perform policy functions’(Wu et al., 2017: 3). Unlike
most of the policy capacity literature, we concentrate on the capacity of street-level organisations
(SLOs) (Brodkin, 2011a) to implement policies in practice, rather than the capacity of governments
or parliaments to enact SI policies. Consequently, we also shift the focus from the study of the
formal policy reforms of SI (e.g. investments in life-long learning, expansion of childcare, etc.)
to the administrative reforms determining the conditions under which policies and services are
administered and delivered.
The article thus aims to move existing research on SI forward in two ways: 1) by offering an
analytical framework that specifies the central dimensions of capacity necessary for implementing
central policy functions of the social investment state and 2) by elucidating how administrative
reforms influence this capacity of the social investment state.
Compared to the existing conceptualisations of SI, we redirect the focus away from formal
policy reforms to administrative reforms, and from policymaking to implementation. First, we
review how the existing literature conceptualises the SI state, through the lens of the policy capacity
140 European Journal of Social Security 25(2)
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