Wedded to Welfare? Working Mothers and the Welfare State in Communist Poland

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 455-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Perkowski
Keyword(s):  
Working Mothers ◽  
Maternity Leave ◽  
Institutional Care ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Equal Opportunities ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
East European ◽  
Welfare Benefits ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Welfare State

Using Poland as example, the article explores the operation of east European communist welfare states, with particular attention paid to benefits offered to working mothers. By exploring a number of diverse sources, I analyze the evolution and the meaning of institutional care and maternity leave in the life of professionally-active women. Studying a variety of factors that shaped the welfare policies of the time, including post-war industrialization, consumption, the demographic panic, and the struggling economy of the twilight years of communism, I attach particular importance to the early 1970s, when Poland saw a particular shift in gender-equality discourse. Welfare benefits played a key role in communists states, serving as a guarantee of equal opportunities or, in the case of mothers, as a tool for potentially facilitating employment. In time, however, they became chiefly tools designed to control the population and female fertility.

A nation of bureaucrats or a nation of workers? Welfare benefits as nation-building modernization tools in interwar Romania

2021 ◽  
pp. 095892872110357
Author(s):  
Sergiu Delcea
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
Negative Impact ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Welfare Benefits ◽  
National Question ◽  
The Welfare State

As one of the most potent hypothesis in political economy, the negative impact of ethnic diversity on the provision of public goods made the welfare state–nation state isomorphism seem a one-way connection. Against the grain of existing studies I argue, through a case-study of interwar Romania, that welfare states are constructed to proactively (re)build the nation, rather than retroactively emanate from it, once established. Rather than an ahistorical ethnolinguistic fractionalization, the article takes nationhood as historically fluid and contested because through institutionalized action, elites can and do proactively revamp the political arena, redistributing coalitions of winners and losers based on exogenously given criteria. The article therefore shows that nation forgers typically internalize the global social question through the topoi of local socio-economic problems construed as a national question. Because elites can pick and choose who becomes part of the national compact, the politicization of the perception of incomplete nationhood provides a sufficient ideational thrust for welfare policymaking, irrespective of pre-existing national solidarities. Consequently, welfare policies are typically layered as remedial or compensatory policies designed to foster a specific social mobility, deemed in a top-down fashion to be completing the nation.

scholarly journals Software-Sorted Exclusion of Asylum Seekers in Norway and Finland

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Funda Ustek-Spilda ◽  
Marja Alastalo
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Asylum Seekers ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Democratic Regimes ◽  
Welfare Systems ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Welfare State

As James Scott writes, to be able to govern, administrative bodies need to make objects of government legible. Yet migrant persons do not fall neatly into the categories of administrative agencies. This categorical ambiguity is illustrated in the tendency to exclude asylum seekers from various population registers and to not provide them with ID numbers, which constitute the backbone of many welfare states in Europe. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Norway and Finland, and in Eurostat and UNECE, we study how practices of population registration and statistics compilation on foreign-born persons can be beset by differential and at times contradictory outlooks. We show that these outlooks are often presented in the form of seemingly apolitical software infrastructures or decisions made in response to software with limited, if any, discretion available to bureaucrats, statisticians, and policymakers. Our two cases, Norway and Finland, are considered social-democratic regimes within Esping-Andersen’s famous global social policy typology. Using science and technology studies and specifically “double social life of methods,” we seek to trace how software emerges as both a device for administrative bookkeeping and also for enacting the “migrant” categories with particular implications for how the welfare state comes to be established and how welfare policies come to be implemented. We note that even if all statistical production necessarily involves inclusions and exclusions, how the “boundaries” are set for whom to include and exclude directly affects the lives of those implicated by these decisions, and as such, they are onto-political. This means that welfare policies get made at the point of sorting, categorizing, and ordering of data, even before it is fed into software and other administrative devices of government. In view of this, we show that methods enact their subjects—we detail how the methods set to identify and measure refugee statistics in Europe end up enacting the welfare services they have access to. We argue that with increasing automation and datafication, the scope of welfare systems is being curtailed under the label of efficiency, and individual contexts are ignored.

4. The welfare state 1.0

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Garland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Economic Governance ◽  
Publicly Funded ◽  
Employment Contracts ◽  
Poor Laws ◽  
Welfare Benefits ◽  
The Welfare State

The newly-emergent welfare states shared a distinctive set of features that set them apart both from the old poor laws and from state socialism. ‘The Welfare State 1.0’ identifies these defining features and describes how welfare states are structured. Welfare states generally have five institutional sectors: social insurance; social assistance; publicly funded social services; social work and personal social services; and economic governance. The WS 1.0 forms that predominated from the 1940s until the 1980s are described. Another feature of the welfare state landscape is sometimes called the ‘hidden welfare state’; it consists of welfare benefits that are channelled through the tax system or through private employment contracts.

3. Birth of the welfare state

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Garland
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Pension Schemes ◽  
National Insurance ◽  
Post War ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
The Welfare State

‘Birth of the welfare state’ describes the embryonic version of the welfare state in Germany with Chancellor Bismarck’s social insurance laws in the 1880s. A decade later governments in Denmark, New Zealand, and Australia launched the first old age pension schemes. In the early 1900s Liberal governments in Britain introduced workmen’s compensation, old age pensions, labour exchanges, and a system of National Insurance for sickness, invalidity, and unemployment. In the 1930s President Roosevelt established the American welfare state with the ‘New Deal’ legislation. The new welfare states were expanded post-war and by 1960 every developed nation had a core of welfare state institutions and every government had accepted responsibility for managing its national economy.

Welfare capabilities: Evaluating distributional inequalities and welfare policy in advanced democracies

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-305
Author(s):  
Adam Hannah ◽  
Jeremiah Thomas Brown ◽  
Andrew Gibbons
Keyword(s):  
Welfare Policy ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Preliminary Evaluation ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Policy Regimes ◽  
Material Resources ◽  
Better Life Index ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Capability Approach ◽  
The Welfare State

While the welfare state literature has made great advances in describing and explaining policy, comparatively less time has been spent systematically examining the outcomes of those welfare policies. Prominent debates have largely centred on the extent to which welfare states have been retrenched and whether they can be effectively classified by regime type. This article argues that while such debates have resulted in valuable theoretical and empirical advances, there is both a need and an opportunity to focus more closely on the outcomes of welfare policy. We propose using the ‘capability approach’ as an evaluative framework to consider differences in outcomes across mature welfare states. The approach, as operationalised here, regards the real-world opportunities that individuals hold, rather than only the material resources provided to them, as being essential to understanding their welfare. The article uses a new capabilities-oriented measure of welfare to make a preliminary evaluation of the outcomes associated with different types of welfare policy regimes. The measure emphasises distributional inequalities associated with the domains of health, education and the economic conditions experienced by individuals. We apply it to 18 advanced welfare states using data sourced from the 2016 wave of the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Better Life Index.

Social Policy in Europe in the Twentieth Century

1993 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-201
Author(s):  
Paul Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
National Income ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Welfare Benefits ◽  
State Expenditure ◽  
Post War ◽  
Economic Growth Rates ◽  
European Welfare States

The 1980s proved to be a tough decade for European welfare states. The post-war ‘welfare consensus’, which perhaps had never been quite so strong or coherent as many contemporary historians and commentators had assumed, was finally laid to rest. The five great spectres identified by Beveridge want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness had not been humbled by public welfare provision despite its ever growing scale and cost. At the beginning of the 1980s the OECD published a report on The Welfare State in Crisis which pointed out that as welfare state expenditure had roughly doubled as a percentage of national income in most west European countries since the late 1950s, so economic growth rates had plummeted. The European welfare states appeared to produce few positive welfare benefits, and this minimal achievement was produced at enormous cost which was to the detriment of overall economic growth and societal well-being.

scholarly journals Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert Obinger ◽  
Klaus Petersen ◽  
Peter Starke
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Demand Side ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
Welfare State Development ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Welfare State

The Introduction presents the overarching research question of the book, namely the question of whether and how war between nations has influenced the development of advanced welfare states. This question has received only scant attention from the welfare state literature so far. The Introduction reviews the fragmented literature in history and social science with a focus on national narratives and revisionist positions, and argues for a comparative angle which puts the various causal mechanisms linking mass war and welfare state development. These mechanisms are systematized, using a heuristic of supply- vs. demand-side mechanisms and three distinct phases of military conflict: war preparation, mobilization, and the post-war period.

Unlocking the Social Trap: Inequality, Trust and the Scandinavian Welfare State

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svenja Gärtner ◽  
Svante Prado
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Market Outcomes ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Collective Goods ◽  
Dynamic View ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Social Trap ◽  
The Welfare State

Recent research suggests that economic inequality thwarts attempts to establish a welfare state. The corollary of this view is that today's welfare states had witnessed an equality revolution already before the rise of social policies aiming at redistribution. The paper brings this insight to bear on the creation of the welfare state in Sweden, for many the very model of a universal welfare state, and enquires into whether equality really predated the formation of universal welfare policies in the 1950s. We present evidence on inequality based on labor market outcomes and corroborate the view that there has been a sharp reduction in inequality during the 1930s and 1940s. Hence Sweden underwent a true equality revolution prior to the establishment of the welfare state. A leveling of incomes is a necessary precondition for the rise of the universal welfare state, we suggest, because of trust, which correlates negatively with inequality. High trust levels solve the problems associated with collective goods and boosts support for universal solutions of income security. The paper provides a narrative in which the formation of institutions, the removal of large income differentials, and the creation of higher trust levels interacted in the 1930s and 1940s to form the foundation for the welfare state in the 1950s. It adopts a dynamic view of trust by departing from the assumption that trust arises endogenously as a concomitant to changes in the underlying fundamentals like income inequality and redesigned institutional frameworks.

scholarly journals ՍՈՑԻԱԼԱԿԱՆ ՇՈՒԿԱՅԱԿԱՆ ՏՆՏԵՍՈՒԹՅԱՄԲ ՊԵՏՈՒԹՅԱՆ ՄԵՋ ՄԱՐԴՈՒ ԱՐԺԱՆԱՊԱՏԻՎ ԿՅԱՆՔԻ ՍԱՀՄԱՆԱԴՐԱԻՐԱՎԱԿԱՆ ԲՆՈՒՅԹԸ/THE CONSTITUTIONAL NATURE OF “A DECENT LIFE FOR A PERSON” IN A STATE WITH SOCIAL MARKET ECONOMY/КОНСТИТУЦИОННЫЙ ХАРАКТЕР ДОСТОЙНОЙ ЖИЗНИ ЧЕЛОВЕКА В ГОСУДАРСТВЕ С СОЦИАЛЬНОЙ РЫНОЧНОЙ ЭКОНОМИКОЙ

2020 ◽  
pp. 10-24
Author(s):  
Rafik Petrosyan ◽  
Nune Jomardyan
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Social Market Economy ◽  
Equal Opportunities ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Sustainable Human Development ◽  
Decent Life ◽  
Starting Conditions ◽  
Social Market ◽  
The Welfare State

The article analyzes the concept of "decent life for a person" as one of the main goals of the welfare state. The study takes into account the developments of the last decade at the national and international levels which bring new approaches and demands to the welfare states. The need for sustainable human development has been considered as well. The authors studied the approaches and the issues of constitutional conception of "decent life for a person" based on the legal-comparative analysis of views in the scientific literature, provision of a people-centered constitution, the realization of everyone's rights, equal opportunities and conditions for starting conditions, as well as on the requirements of the concept “no one will be left behind”. The article also elucidates some possible solutions of these issues.

Individual Attitudes toward the Welfare State: A Test of the “Crowding Out Hypothesis” across European Countries

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durmus A. Yuksek ◽  
Ozgur Solakoglu
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Crowding Out ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Crowd Out ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Welfare State

Abstract Although numerous studies have confirmed the relationship between welfare states and social capital, their arguments have been contradictory. Some argue that strong welfare states crowd out social capital, while others consider the welfare state as a stimulator of social capital. However, research focusing on both the arguments simultaneously and considering whether or not welfare states can both make and break social capital is almost unavailable. Also, individual attitudes toward the welfare state have mainly been the neglected part of this research tradition. Concordantly, findings of this study suggest that regardless of the strength of the civil society, a welfare state can both crowd out and crowd in social capital. While the comprehensiveness of the welfare state plays a part in stimulating or rather unlikely destroying social capital, it is actually the particular design, implementation of the welfare policies, and legitimacy of the state officials that make or break social capital.

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