Gender, welfare state regimes and social policy beyond advanced capitalism: Pathways to decommodification in middle‐income countries

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keerty Nakray
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Middle Income Countries ◽  
Advanced Capitalism ◽  
Welfare State Regimes

scholarly journals Retrenchment and restructuring in an age of austerity: what (if anything) can be learned from the affluent democracies?

2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (suppl) ◽  
pp. S7-S11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Pierson
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
State Reform ◽  
New Politics ◽  
Middle Income Countries ◽  
Policy Dynamics ◽  
Welfare State Reform

The article discusses some difficulties of drawing implications from welfare state reform in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for "middle-income countries", and whose welfare states have been less well institutionalized. It is argued that globalization's role in contemporary social policy dynamics were not unimportant, but social processes occurring within national contexts were probably more important. There is not a single "new politics of the welfare state" but distinct political dynamics in different "regimes" or "configurations", which are characterized by different problem loads and different structures of political opportunity. Different factors are crucial in explaining outcomes in different configurations and there is little reason to expect much convergence in social policy outcomes across regime type. Contemporary welfare state reform is depicted as a process of restructuring rather than dismantling, what can encourage the possibilities for developing coalitions advancing multi-dimensional agendas of welfare state reform.

Rethinking the Western Construction of the Welfare State

1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Walker ◽  
Chack-Kie Wong
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Welfare Regimes ◽  
Asian Pacific ◽  
Welfare State Regimes ◽  
Populous Country ◽  
Pacific Area ◽  
The Welfare State

This article employs case studies of China and Hong Kong to question the western ethnocentric construction of the welfare state that predominates in comparative social policy research. The authors argue that welfare regimes, and particularly the “welfare state,” have been constructed as capitalist-democratic projects and that this has the damaging effect of excluding from analyses not only several advanced capitalist societies in the Asian-Pacific area but also the world's most populous country. If welfare state regimes can only coexist with western political democracies, then China and Hong Kong are excluded automatically. A similar result occurs if the traditional social administration approach is adopted whereby a “welfare state” is defined in terms only of direct state provision. The authors argue that such assumptions are untenable if state welfare is to be analyzed as a universal phenomenon. Instead of being trapped within an ethnocentric welfare statism, what social policy requires is a global political economy perspective that facilitates comparisons of the meaning of welfare and the state's role in producing it north, south, east and west.

scholarly journals Worlds of Welfare and the Health Care Discrepancy

2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Bambra
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Health Care Provision ◽  
Care Provision ◽  
Welfare Regimes ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Welfare State Regimes

The nature of welfare regimes has been an ongoing debate within the comparative social policy literature since the publication of Esping-Andersen's ‘Three Worlds of Welfare’ (1990). This article draws upon recent developments within this debate, most notably Kasza's assertions about the ‘illusory nature’ of welfare regimes, to highlight the health care discrepancy. It argues that health care provision has been a notable omission from the wider regimes literature and one which, if included in the form of a health care decommodification typology, can give credence to Kasza's perspective by highlighting the diverse internal arrangements of welfare states and welfare state regimes.

Insiders, Outsiders, Skills, and Preferences for Social Protection: Evidence From a Survey Experiment in Argentina

2021 ◽  
pp. 001041402110243
Author(s):  
Irene Menéndez González
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Survey Experiment ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Informal Labor ◽  
Middle Income Countries ◽  
Nationally Representative ◽  
Latin American Countries

Standard theories in comparative political economy predict that labor market insiders oppose redistribution to poorer, often informal, labor market outsiders. In contrast, I argue that not all insiders oppose redistribution to outsiders. Extending recent work emphasizing the importance of economic insecurity for insiders, I argue that exposure to risk leads to greater polarization regarding preferences for non-contributory social policy between low- and high-skilled insiders. I test implications of this logic using a survey experiment from a nationally representative sample in Argentina and complement this with analysis of observational data for 16 Latin American countries. I find strong evidence of polarization regarding preferences over social protection among low- and high-skilled insiders. The experiment reveals that low (high)-skilled insiders primed about the risk of becoming outsiders become more supportive of transfers to outsiders (insiders). The article provides new micro-foundations for insider–outsider coalitions in support of social policy expansion in middle-income countries.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. xxx-20
Author(s):  
Daniel Béland ◽  
Kimberly J. Morgan ◽  
Herbert Obinger ◽  
Christopher Pierson
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Welfare State Regimes ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Near Future ◽  
Second World ◽  
The Welfare State

This synoptic introduction guides the reader through the major themes in this comparative analysis of the developed welfare states. It first outlines the origins of the welfare state and its development down to 1940. It then considers the impact of the Second World War on social policy and traces the apparent successes of expanding welfare state regimes in the thirty years that followed the war. It then assesses the critique and challenges that arose for this welfare state settlement from the mid-1970s onwards and the idea of a ‘crisis of the welfare state’. These challenges were simultaneously ideological, political, economic, and demographic, and are sometimes seen to have created new circumstances of ‘permanent austerity’. The contemporary welfare state faces a set of challenges very different to those which arose after 1945 in which the near-future context is set by the continuing impact of the Great Recession after 2008 and the new world of social policy created by COVID-19.

scholarly journals The worlds of welfare: illusory and gender blind?

2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 201-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Bambra
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Welfare Capitalism ◽  
Individual Welfare ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Policy Variation ◽  
Welfare State Regimes

The nature of welfare state regimes has been an ongoing debate within the comparative social policy literature since the publication of Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990). This paper engages with two aspects of this debate; the gender critique of Esping-Andersen's thesis, and Kasza's (2002) assertions about the ‘illusory nature’ of welfare state regimes. It presents a gender-focused defamilisation index and contrasts it with Esping-Andersen's decommodification index to illustrate that, whilst individual welfare states have been shown to exhibit internal variety across different policy areas, they are both consistent and coherent in terms of their policy variation by gender. It concludes, in contrast to both the gender critique of Esping-Andersen, and Kasza's rejection of the regimes concept, that the ‘worlds of welfare’ approach is therefore neither gender blind or illusory, and can, if limited to the analysis of specific areas such as labour market decommodification or defamilisation, be resurrected as a useful means of organising and classifying welfare states.

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