THE WELFARE STATE: A REGULATORY PERSPECTIVE
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12063 |
| Published date | 01 September 2014 |
| Author | DAVID LEVI‐FAUR |
| Date | 01 September 2014 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12063
THE WELFARE STATE: A REGULATORY PERSPECTIVE
DAVID LEVI-FAUR
The role of regulation and the regulatory state in social policy, redistribution, and the reforms
of the welfare state are increasingly important but often underestimated and misunderstood.
These problems are evident in Majone’s highly influential work where the regulatory state and
the ‘positive’ state stand as two alternative monomorphic forms of state. This article offers a
polymorphic alternative where the regulatory state may come to the rescue of the welfare state,
allowing independent extension, retrenchment, and stagnation of welfare via social regulation. The
article extends a regulatory governance perspective into the core of the welfare state, clarifies the
relations between fiscal and regulatory instruments, and demonstrates that the boundaries of the
regulatory state are wider than are usually understood. It turns our understanding of the welfare
state on its head, highlighting first the less visible regulatory layer, and then the more visible layer
of fiscal transfers.
INTRODUCTION
Efforts to capture the various morphs of the state and their dynamics have so far produced
a multitude of adjectives and labels such as welfare state, developmental state, positive
state, rent-seeking state, predatory state, minimal state, crony state, administrative state,
pluralist state, corporatist state, neoliberal state, and social-democratic state.1Some of
these adjectives convey positive images, while others convey contentious or bluntly
derogatory images. Some are well defined and others are not. Some are constructed
as monomorphic and essentialist concepts, while others adopt a polymorphic approach
which rejects essentialism in favour of institutional pluralism (Dunleavy and O’Leary
1987). The labels signify the pervasiveness of the state in our political imagination but
they also allow us to construct and defend scholarly territories building visible and less
visible walls around these concepts. In an effort to move beyond these divisions, this
article offers a theory of the state which builds upon, and brings together, two scholarly
communities – that of the welfare state and that of the regulatory state.
These two scholarly communities rarely interact systemically and the two concepts
are hardly ever studied together.2Instead, the regulatory state and the welfare state
are routinely presented as trade-offs, that is, alternatives and competing forms of state
organization, reinforcing the disciplinary walls between these communities. Each of these
types of state is associated with its own logic (social justice vs. procedural fairness), with
its own legitimacy (output vs. procedural) and with its own primary instrument of choice
(fiscal transfers vs. rule making).3The most explicit and influential dichotomy of this sort
derives from Majone’s work on the rise of the regulatory state (Majone 1994, 1997).
Majone did wonders for the growth of the field and correctly identified the so-called
rise of the regulatory state. Still, his framework fails to recognize that the regulatory
state and the welfare state can coexist and that the regulatory state may strengthen the
welfare state. Part of the problem stems from his monomorphic conceptions of the state
David Levi-Faur is in the Department of Political Science & School of Public Policy, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, Israel.
Public Administration Vol. 92, No. 3, 2014 (599–614)
©2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
600 DAVID LEVI-FAUR
where the state is either this or that – never both. Another problem stems from an often
unarticulated perception of the regulatory state as essentially a liberal form of state and
of the welfare state, and fiscal transfers as inherently egalitarian. Still, we should not
forget, the regulatory state can be very political and authoritative and the welfare state
can be paternalistic, dominating, and biased towards the middle class rather than the
poor. The application of regulatory instruments and fiscal transfer do suggest neither
fairness nor egalitarianism. These are political options rather than a guarantee for a
certain policy outcome. This article proposes a polymorphic approach to the state (and
state transformation and adaptation) which allows us to see more clearly the dialectic
relations between the regulatory state and the welfare state as manifestations of the
ever-expanding and diversifying dimensions of the administrative state.
Why study forms (Caporaso 1996) or morphs (Mann 1993) of the capitalist democratic
state? I believe that theoretical and empirical study of forms of state is a sine qua non of
understanding governance and politics more broadly. No political analysis and no mode
of governance can be taken seriously without reference to the state and its various forms
and images (Pierre and Peters 2000; Dryzek and Dunleavy 2009). Moreover, I point to a
series of confusions about the meaning of the regulatory state, about the transformation
of the state since the 1970s, and about the impact of welfare retrenchment and austerity
on the form and direction of the welfare state. The conceptual framework offered here
helps deal with these confusions by capturing the dynamics of fiscal transfers and social
regulation as independent yet potentially intertwined policy instruments. This framework
allows us to see theoretically, and in future research to examine empirically, the fact that
the state is not in decline but, on the contrary, is expanding via regulation, as part of the
expansion of governance more generally. This expansion, which was often measured in
terms of the growth rate of fiscal expenditures and of the numbers of employees of the
state, should now preferably be measured in terms of the growth of regulation (both its
quantity and its impact). This does not mean the fiscal transfers are not important or that
they are not growing, but they are neither the only nor the primary measure of the growth
of the state.
We need to examine the growth, decline, and retreat of the state along two dimensions
at least, the regulatory and the fiscal, and the expansion, stagnation, and retrenchment
of different morphs of the state at the same time; hence, a polymorphic approach. The
increasing capacity to regulate in general and to regulate fiscal transfers in particular is
one source of regulatory expansion. Another is the pillarization of social services (for
example, pension pillars as discussed by Ebbinghaus 2011; Leisering and Mabbett 2011).
Yet another is the growth and complexity of the mix of private and public provisions of
welfare (Shalev 1996) which serves also as a source of regulatory expansion. Demands
for transparency and accountability lead in the same direction (Feldman and Tyler, 2012;
Benish and Levi-Faur 2012) and as does the tendency to increase reliance on third parties
(Grabosky 2013). We find more regulation and this regulation may be used strategically
for retrenchment or expansion of institutions that serves equal distribution. In both cases
they are representing the embeddedness of regulation within the welfare state. The two
faces of the administrative state – the fiscal and the regulatory – are intertwined, creating
multiple forms of welfare state regimes.
Public Administration Vol. 92, No. 3, 2014 (599–614)
©2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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