Читать книгу Exploring the World of Social Policy - Hill Michael - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIn trying to offer an account of social policy that takes a world view rather than one centred upon one country, it is essential to make use of ideas developed in comparative studies. Even if many of the world’s smaller, poorer and less powerful countries are left out, any account organized country by country would resemble a dictionary, with brief unrelated comments on each country mentioned. Comparative studies uses typologies to explore the extent to which there are clusters of countries with commonalities, and the extent to which differences between those clusters or between individual countries within them can be explained.
It was always a matter of urgency that social policy studies should break away from a narrow preoccupation with single countries. Some of the early attempts to do this simply drew upon information from a narrow sample of countries, putting accounts of policies alongside each other in separate chapters in a way that announced ‘other places are different and that is interesting’. The rise in interest in the spread of policies from country to country in the frame of ‘policy borrowing’ or ‘policy transfer’ (Rose, 1993; Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996, 2000) also stimulated attention towards similarities and differences between countries in the form of questions about why some transfers worked and some failed (or involved radical transformations). But there is a more fundamental reason why a systematic approach to comparison is important. The testing of hypotheses using the experimental methods favoured by natural scientists is largely ruled out for the study of policy processes, as researchers cannot control the variables and political processes themselves, making experimentation inappropriate. Hence, as Durkheim argued in his classic book on comparison in the social sciences (1982, p. 141):
We have only one way of demonstrating that one phenomenon is the cause of another. That is to compare the cases where they are both simultaneously present or absent, so as to discover whether the variations they display in these different combinations of circumstances provide evidence that one depends on the other.
Of course, taking the lead suggested by Durkheim depends on what one wants to explain, but if, as intended in this book, the objective is not to explore and test the efficacy of specific policies but rather to provide an informed account of policy variation and the explanations for its occurrence, then it needs to be accepted, as Higgins (1981, p. 223) suggests, that ‘Comparison, as a technique or method, is so crucially a part of any form of evaluation that one might wish to argue that comparative social policy is the parent discipline and any methodology not employing comparisons is of a lower order.’
The origins of comparative studies
Comparative approaches to the examination of social policy emerged from challenges to theories that saw its development as part of a modernization process in which economic, urban and demographic change were seen as explanatory variables producing policy convergence across the world. These challenges replaced this approach with typologies, recognizing the varied nature of social policy growth. ‘Regime theory’ has tended to dominate this work, first seeing political and economic variables as important for the varied features of social policy, and then becoming supplemented by examination of wider cultural and social factors and even by notions of the importance of ideas, factors which take comparative analysis far beyond a more crude assessment of public spending.
A simple comparison of social policy expenditure by different nations shows, not surprisingly, that high levels of such expenditure only occur in the richer nations of the world. The OECD average for social spending is around 20 per cent (OECD, 2019), but similar data are of limited reliability outside the OECD group of nations. Put simply, there is a relationship between high levels of GDP per head and high social expenditure, but this is a very imprecise relationship. This is particularly evident at the lower end of the spending ranking, where very prosperous nations such as the US, Australia, the Netherlands and Switzerland are relatively low spenders (OECD, 2019). Furthermore, as suggested in Chapter 2, it should not be taken for granted that high state social expenditure is necessarily a good indicator of effective use of that spending to reduce inequality.
Hence, the starting point for comparative analysis was a quest to explain the combination of evidence of a loose association between national prosperity and social policy expenditure with the other factors which might explain variation in that association. The evolving relationship between economic market systems and the state was an important driving force (Wilensky and Lebaux, 1965). Industrialization was seen as the generator of distributional changes in society and a source of demands for new ways of dealing with consequential disadvantages (Rimlinger, 1971). To then explain the expanding role of the state, arguments from welfare economics were applied. Firms recognized that meeting the health, educational and other welfare needs of their workforce imposed costs, which could make them uncompetitive by comparison with firms which did less. Hence, there was an increased tendency to look to the state as a means of enforcing the ‘socialization’ of those costs, sharing them more widely through society while lessening demands on private businesses.
The Marxian version of that argument was most forcefully presented by O’Connor (1973) and Gough (1979). This saw industrial capital as facing two kinds of problems. One of these, already set out in Chapter 2, is that the efficient operation of capitalism required attention to be given to the maintenance of a fit and trained labour supply. It was in the interests of individual capitalists that the cost of doing this should be ‘collectivized’, that is, taken on by society as a whole. This function was most readily performed by the only overarching body – the state. The other problem facing capital was unrest in a society in which employment was insecure, rewards from employment were low and age and ill health created particular vulnerability to hardship. Marxist theory proposes that capitalism needs a ‘reserve army of labour’ as a means to keep wages low, and that workers are regarded by capitalists as ‘factors’ of production to be employed as cheaply as possible, and with no regard to their nuclear or extended family responsibilities. These are inherent characteristics of capitalism which, for Marx, will contribute to its ultimate downfall. However, if the state can deal with some of these problems, without at the same time undermining the basic economic relationship between capital and labour, then the otherwise gradually accumulating discontent about the system can be reduced.
Both the non-Marxist theory and the Marxist theory are largely functionalist in character given their assumption that these developments are the necessary consequences of industrialization, and have thus been criticized as deterministic, paying little attention to the choices made by actors or to variations in response from place to place (Ashford, 1986). Nevertheless, these theories contributed to generalizations about welfare development, taking the discussion away from naïve emphases upon ‘progress’ or the growth of compassion. Industrialization was of course recognized as making an important contribution to increases in the standard of living, and with higher levels of personal income comes the possibility for the state to raise high levels of taxes to pay for social policies. Some exponents of the modernization thesis went on to consider the demographic effects of industrialization, urbanization and high levels of income, specifically lowered birth rates and raised life expectancy (for example Wilensky, 1975).
These emphases upon modernization were challenged by others who either sought to examine the quantitative evidence more carefully, recognizing the absence of a simple correlation between, for example, social expenditure and national prosperity (Flora and Heidenheimer, 1981; Pampel and Williamson, 1989), or sought to add qualitative considerations (Higgins, 1981; Ashford, 1986; Flora, 1986). These studies, and particularly the latter group, recognized that even if there were broad general influences to which countries were responding, there was a diversity of ways of doing this. This diversity might arise because of the varying strength of the influences on social policy development from country to country. Hence, attention shifted very much to the varieties of welfare arrangements, stimulated by the increased recognition of the complex influences upon policy change and also perhaps by the evidence that the convergence predicted by some of the earlier theorists was not occurring. It was from this that the approach that now dominates comparative social policy studies – regime theory – arose.
Esping-Andersen’s regime model
The origins of Esping-Andersen’s argument about how distinct types of welfare systems may be distinguished lie in work by Titmuss (1974; reproduced in Alcock et al., 2001), which suggests that three models may be distinguished according to their principles of redistribution:
•The institutional redistributive model, which provides services regardless of market participation and is based on the principle of need.
•The industrial achievement model, which holds merit (interpreted as productivity) as the determinant for meeting welfare needs.
•The residual welfare model, which assumes the private market and the family to be the main sources of welfare, with the state only coming into play temporarily when these institutions break down.
Taking his lead from these ideas, Esping-Andersen’s (1990) approach to comparative analysis is rooted in the notion that some social policy systems may reflect and contribute to social solidarity. It also derives from arguments which have seen social policy development as an important element in the alleged ‘truce’ between capital and labour within democratic societies, in which social policies may be concessions to the latter that contribute to the preservation of the capitalist order (Streeck, 2014). The concept of ‘decommodification’ is used by Esping-Andersen to define the extent to which some policy systems achieve a universalism which treats all sections of society alike. Decommodification is used to describe the extent to which individuals’ social entitlements are relatively independent of their positions in the labour market.
Esping-Andersen (1990, pp. 26–7) identifies what he describes as three regime types:
1.The ‘liberal’ welfare state, in which means-tested assistance, modest universal transfers or modest social insurance plans predominate. This indicates low levels of ‘decommodification’. The word ‘liberal’ in the definition refers to liberal economic ideas which see the free market as the ideal device for allocating life chances, and the primary role for the state being to enhance economic efficiency. Esping-Andersen puts Australia, the US, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and the UK (with some qualification) in this category.
2.Nations which Esping-Andersen labels as ‘conservative’, where state-led development significantly shaped the evolution of social policy institutions. In these societies neither strong pro-market ideologies nor democratic movements were important for this development. Instead, a strong state sought to incorporate interest groups to ensure their support for the regime, hence the use of the term ‘corporatist’ to also describe the welfare character of these nations. The consequence was welfare systems in which ‘the preservation of status differentials’ is more important than either ‘the liberal obsession with market efficiency’ or ‘the granting of social rights’. This second category includes Italy, Japan, France, Germany, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands.
3.The ‘social democratic’ countries, those ‘in which the principles of universalism and decommodification of social rights was extended also to the middle classes’; in these places ‘the social democrats pursued a welfare state that would promote an equality of the highest standards’. Denmark, Norway and Sweden are the nations in this category.
The decommodified systems of the Nordic countries are thus contrasted with conservative and liberal systems which more clearly reflect labour market divisions and market ideologies. These are attempts to classify national systems as a whole; the inclusiveness of the Nordic system is seen relative to other systems. But it is important to bear in mind that in this approach the nations in the ‘conservative’ group are not simply identified as middle ones, with levels of spending between the other two. They may indeed be high spenders; the key point is that such spending will tend to be distributed proportionately across the socio-economic spectrum in ways which are likely to reflect Titmuss’ idea of ‘merit, work performance and productivity’. The method Esping-Andersen adopted to develop his regime model involved comparative statistical analysis of the extent to which some key social security benefits delivered extensive social support without making labour market participation a crucial qualifying condition. Decommodification is thus a variable, systems being placed along a commodification–decommodification continuum.
Esping-Andersen justifies his approach in two ways. First, he argues against the ‘simple class mobilization theory of welfare state development’ in which welfare development can be seen as coming from the growth of demands by less advantaged people through an emergent democratic political process. Instead he sets out a more complex theory which can be seen as built upon that idea. He presents a picture of regime development in which historical forces are interactive. Political coalition formation is seen as contributing in distinctive ways to ‘the institutionalisation of class preferences and political behaviour’ (1990, p. 32). Empirically, Esping-Andersen explores the influence of selected independent variables – a measure of the share of Left parties in government, a measure of the share of Catholic parties and ‘absolutism’ alongside measures of GDP per head and GDP growth – and shows that these political variables have a key influence on the dependent variable: decommodification. This part of his enterprise may be seen as focusing on the explanation of regime difference. The theory suggests, in Arts and Gelissen’s (2002, p. 139) words, alternative ‘regime-types, each organized according to its own discrete logic of organization, stratification and societal integration’.
Second, Esping-Andersen makes claims for the predictive capacity of his model, arguing that ‘a theory that seeks to explain welfare-state growth should also be able to understand its retrenchment and decline’ (1990, p. 32). That is a challenge taken up in his later edited work (1996), emphasizing differences in the ways the different regimes have responded to global economic challenges, giving attention to issues about family arrangements (a point of criticism for its neglect in his 1990 work) to predict responses to demographic change and increasing female labour market participation (1999), and exploring future scenarios (2002). The claim that the model has a predictive value will be explored further in Chapter 4.
Esping-Andersen’s work has spawned an enormous literature (see Emmenegger et al., 2015) and poses the question as to why a study conducted in the 1980s using a limited sample of OECD member countries (when that organization itself was much smaller) should be so influential in shaping scholarship. Inevitably, some of the responses to his work criticize his methodology. Bambra (2005) and Scruggs and Allan (2006) have even found errors in his original work. Studies have been developed with alternative indices and other methodologies (see Arts and Gelissen, 2010, table 39.1, for a summary of these).
Much discussion has centred on the implications of using a typology. As indicated above, this approach has been presented as advancing a superior approach to the analysis of welfare state development to theories that postulate uniform or unidimensional processes. Esping-Andersen (1999, Chapter 5), in an answer to his critics, makes the case for parsimony and questions whether the presence of ambiguous cases matters for the strength of the overall approach. A less defensive response could be that while arguing against a multiplication of types, the recognition that ambiguities can throw up important questions about what is happening in specific countries is productive in theory development.
Clearly there is an alternative response to the inadequacies of global generalizations. This is to stress the unique characteristics of each individual system (see Schubert et al., 2009). But there is a midway point between these alternative perspectives. Comparisons may be made between detailed developments in individual countries, developing ‘middle range’ theories. There is a good case to be made for this approach, recognizing that social policy ‘systems’ are complex mixtures of policies than may bear relatively little relationship to each other (see Kasza, 2002).
Arts and Gelissen (2002, pp. 138–9) provide a valuable discussion of reasons to be cautious about the use of a typology for theory development. Their starting position is as follows:
Do typologies based on ideal types have theoretical and empirical value … ? The conclusion emerging from the philosophy of science literature is clear: not if ideal types are goals in themselves, but only if they are a means to a goal; namely, the representation of a reality, which cannot yet be described using laws (Klant, 1984). This means that typologies are only fruitful to an empirical science that is still in its infancy. In contrast, a mature empirical science emphasizes the construction of theories and not the formulation of typologies.
They, not surprisingly, see the ‘sociology of welfare states’ as in its infancy. In this sense, typologization is ‘a means to an end – explanation – and not an end in itself’ (Arts and Gelissen, 2002, p. 140). In a similar vein, van Kersbergen and Vis (2014) point out that Esping-Andersen confuses his typological method with ‘ideal type’ analysis, but they go on to argue for the use of typologies as way to ‘reduce complexity for analytical and comparative purposes’. Their argument is that reducing complexity through typologization is the purpose of the exercise rather than a flaw in the approach per se (van Kersbergen and Vis, 2014, pp. 67–74). Simplification, therefore, inasmuch as it is located in the ideas and evidence important for the explanation of differences, is significant in propelling further research. Here lies the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this section about why Esping-Andersen’s work is so important.
It is long time since Esping-Andersen’s original book was published, and the central issue is surely that regime theory aims to go beyond simple typification to make suggestions about how to explain differences. In that sense it may be used in ways that are not bound by Esping-Andersen’s theory. The development of regime theory can be separated into two kinds of work. One of these is work that – using essentially the countries featuring in Esping-Andersen’s original theory – suggests alternative ways of identifying regimes. The other is work that explores issues and problems about extending ‘worlds of welfare’ outside the original sample of nations (or those closely similar to them). While these tend to be mixed up together, particularly in the first of Arts and Gelissen’s incisive reviews (2002), some of the issues, notably those concerning gender divisions, arise under both headings, and are considered here in separate sections.
Reshaping the original regime types?
Esping-Andersen’s underlying explanatory approach involves the suggestion that decommodification has been a goal of social democratic parties. He thus correlates the political strength of social democracy in various countries with decommodification. This is a proposition that is challenged in Castles’ and Mitchell’s work (see Castles, 1985; Castles and Mitchell, 1992). In describing Australia and New Zealand as perhaps belonging to a ‘fourth world of welfare capitalism’, Castles and Mitchell (1992) draw attention to the fact that political activity from the Left may, in some places, have focused not so much on the pursuit of post-income equalization through social policy, as the achievement of equality in pre-tax, pre-transfer incomes. Hence the authors challenge what they term ‘the expenditure-based orthodoxy’, which assumes that only higher social spending will lead to more and better distribution of income. Castles’ (1985) earlier work also drew attention to the particular emphasis on protecting wage levels in Australian and New Zealand Labour politics. Castles and Mitchell also make a second point, again about Australia but also with relevance for the UK: that the Esping-Andersen approach disregards the potential for income-related benefits to make a very ‘effective’ contribution to redistribution. Australian income maintenance is almost entirely means tested, but potentially challenges the liberal principles of this mechanism because it is not simply concentrated on redistribution to those with the lowest incomes.
Mitchell (1991) brings to the argument an interest in exploring the relationships between income differences in societies before and after government interventions, suggesting that it is the size of the ‘gap’ between rich and poor, and the extent to which policies close that gap, that needs to be the object of attention, rather than simply aggregate expenditure. She examines income transfer policies in terms of their contribution to both the reduction of inequality and the eradication of poverty – alternative social policy goals which need to be interpreted in their wider political contexts. She also compares income transfer systems in terms of efficiency (the relationship between outputs and inputs) and effectiveness (the actual redistributive achievement of systems).
This work, and that of Mitchell in particular, while offering what is perhaps now a historical account of Antipodean public policy (recently economic liberal trends in these countries have been strong), is important for raising questions about the wide range of influences on incomes, and the variety of policy options available to political actors who want the state to try to manage income distribution. Arts and Gelissen (2002), in their survey of alternatives to the Esping-Andersen model, identify an additional category that some authors have distinguished within the ‘liberal’ regime group, which is called ‘radical’ (see Kangas, 1994) or ‘targeted’ (Korpi and Palme, 1998). Its characteristic is an absence of social insurance, but some evidence of the use of means tests to effect substantial redistribution. It bears some resemblance to the fourth world identified by Castles and Mitchell, and may include the UK and Ireland.
Esping-Andersen’s strong emphasis upon mainstream political processes has been challenged by those who see other ideologies and sources of power as important for the determination of income maintenance policies. Particularly important in this respect have been writers who have been concerned about the lack of analysis of relationships between men and women, and of family ideologies, in Esping-Andersen’s work. There is now a significant literature on this, including early edited collections such as Sainsbury (1994) and Lewis (1993, 1997b), monographs (O’Connor, 1996; Sainsbury, 1996; Daly, 2000; Daly and Rake, 2003), and articles (Lewis, 1992, 1997a; Orloff, 1993; Sainsbury, 1993). Attempts to retypologize welfare states according to women’s interests, such as Lewis (1992), remind us that the ‘solidarity’ of the Swedish model rests upon an expectation that there will be high labour market participation by women, and that this has implications for the state in terms of provisions for care services as well as gender equality in social security entitlements and employment protection. There is much differentiation in the extent to which women’s employment is supported by these provisions, producing and reinforcing patterns of employment, reward and entitlement that are disadvantageous to women both in and out of the labour market (see Chapters 5 and 6 for further discussion).
Gender analyses recognize the political choices being made about how social relations between women and men are translated into policy, including the role the state will play in supporting family life and whether this will manifest itself in the direct provision of care or the provision of cash benefits to enable people to buy care. The answers to these questions have, in practice, considerable implications for the labour market participation of women. The high female labour market participation rates in the Nordic countries have partly been generated by a willingness of the state to pay women to carry out caring tasks which elsewhere have to be carried out by (generally female) parents and relatives themselves. While this approach has benefits for women, it has not significantly influenced the overall gender division of labour (Irving, 2015). A second point of significance that has emerged from the retypologization of welfare states, has added further empirical evidence to the argument that women’s political participation is crucial to the development of social policies in women’s interests. Early on, Siaroff’s (1994) typology of welfare states identified a group of ‘late female mobilisation’ countries (Southern European nations plus Ireland), which were otherwise dissimilar but lacked gender equality across a range of indicators. This critique of Esping-Andersen also draws attention to the importance of familist ideologies in influencing the politics of social security and determining the expectations embedded within it, and more recently has had particular pertinence for analyses of welfare politics in Mediterranean Europe and in East Asia (Sung and Pascall, 2014; Papadopoulos and Roumpakis, 2017). Esping-Andersen’s original sample only featured Italy and Japan from these regions.
The need for geographical extension is taken up in the following section, but it is also important to highlight that it is not just the range of countries which has prompted elaboration of welfare regime theory. One of the core elements of the feminist critique of mainstream welfare regime theory is that it privileges class over other structures of inequality. The absence of other dimensions of social relations is significant in comprehending the distributive drivers of welfare states, and crucial to understanding both development and change in social policy. The work of Ginsburg (1992) and Williams (1995) addressed these gaps, but as Williams has since argued (2016), the methodological and theoretical strengths of comparative analysis in foregrounding political forces came at the cost of neglecting much of the critical social policy scholarship around gender and race that had emerged in the 1980s. Thus, notwithstanding the gender critique of welfare regime theory, Williams argues (2016, p. 632) that there has been a lack of ‘any systematic engagement with the multiple social relations of gender and race in themselves or in their relation to class’. Analyses and typologization of ‘migration regimes’ (Castles, 1995; see also Castles and Miller, 1993, 2003) have offered an alternative lens through which the social relations of race and ethnicity can be seen in the comparative operation of citizenship, while Green and Janmaat’s (2011) specification of ‘regimes of social cohesion’ explores comparatively more abstract ideas of societal diversity and commonality. Williams (2015) has elsewhere argued for the need for more ‘conceptual alliances’ in social policy study that connect the political economy both with different ‘organizational settlements’ in welfare provision, and ‘all those social, moral and cultural practices in which the social formation consolidates, fragments and reconstitutes itself – through conceptions of nationhood, citizenship, religion, moral worth, and so on’ (p. 101). This highlights the sociological thinness of regime theory, which also becomes more obvious when its geographical boundaries are stretched.
To return to the geographical concerns, as noted previously, Esping-Andersen’s original work was limited to the study of eighteen OECD countries. Arts and Gelissen’s second review of regime theory (2010) identifies the Mediterranean (or Southern Europe), East Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe as places where alternative or ‘emergent’ welfare regimes may be found. To these regions, Gough and Wood (2004) elaborate regime theory to add countries where, broadly speaking, welfare regimes are absent. This extension of regime theory beyond the original OECD worlds, and particularly to countries where political and industrial structures and policy actors are shaped very differently to advanced economies, presents some important tests for regime theory.
Attention has been drawn by those who examined the issues about gender in regime models to the extent to which there is a Roman Catholic and/or Southern European (see also Ferrara, 1996; Siaroff, 1994) approach to the design of social security – alternatively to be seen either as more ‘protective’ of women outside the labour market or as increasing their ‘dependency’ within the family. Ferrara argues that the income maintenance systems of the Southern European countries are fragmented and ineffective and often characterized by ‘clientelism’, in which political patronage is important. His view is supported by others. It is implicit in the regime categorizations developed by Bonoli (1997), Leibfried (1992) and Trifilletti (1999). Castles (2004, p. 179) adds a ‘Southern European’ category to his four-part identification of ‘families’ of nations, stressing the extent to which the states in this category are what he calls pensioners’ welfare states with high levels of state expenditure on middle-aged and older people and low levels of fertility. Hence there is a quite widely identified different ‘world’ in Mediterranean Southern Europe which includes Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal. But there may be others among the countries where social policy is more ‘emergent’: Turkey and some of the countries of the Balkan peninsula for example.
A similar theme of family ideologies is raised in the literature on the East Asian countries. Here the theoretical question is whether the highly industrialized Eastern economies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong) can be fitted into Esping-Andersen’s typology, at least as later ‘arrivals’. There does seem to be a case for seeing the first three in that list (Singapore and Hong Kong have been more influenced by British colonial policies) as joining Esping-Andersen’s corporatist-statist conservative group. This is a view that has been given support in Ramesh’s (2004) examination of social policy in the last four of the five nations listed in this paragraph. An alternative is to see them as having features which are more specifically ‘Eastern’, which explain areas of limited development. The main argument along these lines has been the suggestion that ‘Confucian’ family ideologies lead to a greater delegation of welfare responsibilities to the family and extended family (Jones, 1993). The problems with this argument are that (a) in any underdeveloped income maintenance system the family will, faute de mieux, have to take on greater responsibilities, and (b) the use of ‘Confucian’ ideologies as a justification for inaction by the political elite cannot be regarded as evidence that political demands can be dampened down in this way, in the absence of other evidence demonstrating popular acceptance of that ideology.
Kwon (1997) seems to take a relatively agnostic stand on these issues. He does, however, point out another dimension in the policy processes in South Korea and Taiwan: the importance of state-led policies initiated in an era of authoritarian government. The groups who first secured social protection in these societies were the military and civil servants. Support for the military as a precursor to wider income protection measures is not a differentiating feature of East Asian countries, however, as Skocpol (1995) has shown this to have been an important factor in US developments. Measures to extend some insurance-based benefits to industrial workers followed next in South Korea and Taiwan, and securing the support of the emergent industrial ‘working class’ was important for the state-led growth which is regarded as so significant in these societies (Ku, 1997; Kwon, 1999). More universalistic policies only really got on to the political agenda with the emergence of democracy in these countries in the 1980s.
At the same time, Castles and Mitchell’s argument about other ways in which states may promote social welfare may also be relevant for East Asian societies. Over much of the period between the Second World War and the severe financial crisis which shook East Asia in 1997, these societies experienced substantial growth with minimal unemployment. Hence, inasmuch as governments secured social support, they did it through their success in generating rapid income growth for the majority of the people. Data showing relatively low income inequality in South Korea and Taiwan offer additional evidence in support of this proposition (Ramesh, 2004, pp. 21–2).
Holliday has developed an alternative approach to the analysis of the special characteristics of East Asian societies, describing them as belonging to a ‘regime’ type characterized by ‘productivist welfare capitalism’ (Holliday, 2000, 2005), in which the orientation towards growth has been of key importance for social policy development. This point is relevant beyond East Asia given the argument that global economic forces make it increasingly difficult to defend the ‘social democratic’ version of the ‘truce between capital and labour’, or to extend it to later developing welfare systems. In this sense there are grounds for arguing that the ‘liberal’ regimes in Esping-Andersen’s theory are also ‘productivist’. But Holliday (2005, p. 148) suggests that the state has taken a more positive role in East Asian societies: ‘In a productivist state, the perceived necessity of building a society capable of driving forward growth generates some clear tasks for social policy, led by education but also taking in other sectors.’ While Holliday is making some important links here with discussions of these societies as exemplars of state-led growth, it is worth noting that in emphasizing education policy he is citing a policy area not considered by Esping-Andersen in his formulation of regime theory (see Chapter 7 for further discussion on this point).
An important reservation about the suggestions that East Asian societies are following a trajectory not envisaged in Esping-Andersen’s theory, is that it is important in comparative studies not to lose sight of the extent to which policy learning takes place over time and between nations. The newly industrialized Asian economies have had the opportunity to observe the strengths and weaknesses of the policies adopted earlier in other places and to learn from them selectively. They have, inevitably, been engaged with the new global debate about the economic costs of generous welfare benefit systems but have drawn their own conclusions on the value of social spending.
There is another kind of contribution to the debate about East Asia which goes further than questions about whether nations can be slotted into Esping-Andersen’s regime typology or whether there are other types of regime. This is an argument that the whole regime approach embodies ‘Western’ ethnocentric assumptions about the role of the state and about welfare development as a product of the ‘truce’ between capital and labour (see Walker and Wong, 2004). The early comparative analyses of East Asia, while elaborate, were focused on a number of (relatively) small East Asian states with little attention to China. More recently, and particularly since the 2008 crisis, interest in the development in social policy in China is increasing (Cook and Lam, 2011) as its global influence has transformed. In their earlier analysis, Walker and Wong (2004, p. 124) observed that China had not been considered a ‘welfare state’ because it
lacks a Western-style political democracy and is not a fully capitalist economy. In spite of these two institutional ‘anomalies’ from the perspective of the Western construction, it had managed and is still able to provide sufficient social protection to its urban population, albeit with enormous difficulties at the present moment.
They note that ‘a poverty line, with its accompanying benefit provisions, was first promulgated in 1993 in Shanghai and now covers all urban areas’, and contrast this with their previous analysis of provision in the pre-reform era (prior to 1978) when ‘comprehensive welfare was provided through the “work-units” (that is, state-owned enterprises, government bureaux and so on) which could mirror the central idea of “from cradle to grave” welfare of the classic perception of the idealized Western welfare state’ (Walker and Wong, 2004). This reference to the earlier model of work-unit-based welfare (also sometimes called the ‘iron rice bowl’, Leung, 1994) reminds us that up until the late 1980s the Soviet Union (and its satellites) offered a similar challenge to comparative theorists (see for example Deacon, 1983), while at the time of writing only Cuba and North Korea remain as societies that may claim to follow a centrally planned economic model. An interesting challenge here for the Esping-Andersen approach is whether these cases represented extreme commodification or extreme decommodification: the former since the key link to welfare was with work, the latter because work-unit protection extended to families rather than individuals.
This leads us on to consideration of Russia and the former Soviet-dominated countries of Eastern Europe. With significant trends towards privatization, Russia may be seen as moving into the ‘liberal’ camp, while in Central and Eastern Europe there is a continuing struggle between both internal and external pressures to adopt the liberal model (sold forcefully by bodies like the World Bank, see Deacon, 1997) and the vestiges of pre-Soviet conservative models. Comparative study of social policy in countries in this region within the regime typology framework has increased considerably since the 1990s (see for example Pascall and Manning, 2000; Cerami, 2006), facilitated by their similarity in core features with the original OECD countries studied by Esping-Andersen.
Walker and Wong’s challenge reminds us, however, that the efforts to classify welfare regimes actually discounts much of the world, including Islamic Middle Eastern and North African countries, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and (to some extent) Latin America. Gough and Wood (and their associates) (2004) engaged in a bold attempt to deal with this problem in their exploration of ways to analyze welfare systems (including of course their absence) in the poorer countries of the world. They take as their starting point Esping-Andersen’s regime theory, noting that while the original concern was with explaining ‘welfare state regimes’, in Esping-Andersen’s later work (1999) this shifts into the simpler form of ‘welfare regimes’. They argue that Esping-Andersen is generalizing about societies with two crucial characteristics: the presence of predominantly capitalist employment and a democratic nation state. Hence the significance of the idea of the welfare state as a product of state intervention to secure a ‘truce’. Therefore, for Gough and Wood it is important to see welfare state regimes as one ‘family’ of welfare regimes in a world in which there are others, where those defining characteristics are not present. These others are identified as ‘informal security regimes’ in which families and communities may play key roles as providers of welfare, and ‘insecurity regimes’ in which even these do not provide effective welfare. Hence, regime theory is used by Gough and Wood and extended in important ways to contribute to the analysis of welfare worldwide (see also Sharkh and Gough, 2010, for their use of cluster analysis to extend this approach).
Important elements in Gough and Wood’s analysis of regimes include exploration of the implications of an absence of secure formal employment, of states that function ineffectively or even exploitatively, of weak or absent communities and even of families that do not protect their members. Attention is also given to various respects in which welfare outcomes depend heavily on actions outside the regimes – not just the impact of global capitalism and of aid via governments and non-governmental organizations, but also the extent to which welfare in many societies depends upon contributions from family members living and working elsewhere in the world.
As noted earlier, while countries in Latin America did not figure in early regime theory, as with post-Soviet Europe, there has been increasing interest in the welfare state characteristics of the richer Latin American countries in particular. Barrientos’ contribution to Gough and Wood’s book explores the way in which Latin American regimes have shifted from being rudimentary conservative ones (within the Esping-Andersen ‘family’ of regimes) to liberal ones. Among these countries it is possible to see choices being made between these options, most notably in Chile, which has had a special role in shaping the global pensions debate. Chile has experienced oscillations in this respect, with the period of Pinochet’s dictatorship enabling North American neoliberal economists to make the country a testing ground for free market theories. The important point in considering both Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, is the extent to which it is possible to talk of states making choices between regime models. These choices are not ‘free’ in the sense that they are constrained by countries’ positions in relation to parameters of global politics and global markets. The contemporary evolution of welfare states illustrates clearly the problems of using regime theory linked to the development of mature welfare states to predict current policy decisions (see Chapter 4 for further discussion).
In recognition of this problem, Gough and Wood’s (2004) work offers suggestions on how regime theory may be extended, and their concerns with the interconnectedness of systems, both through multi-national economic activities and with flows of remittances and international aid. They thus offer a new perspective on comparative analysis and tools for those who want to pursue these lines of enquiry. Yet still, their analysis does not extend to China or India or most of the Islamic world. All the analysis in this section leaves no unequivocal case for a new regime type outside the Esping-Andersen model, despite a more widely argued additional world embracing Southern Europe with perhaps parts of South East Asia and Latin America. Beyond this it may be questioned whether other efforts to stretch the use of regime modelling go too far, merely noting vestiges of the welfare approaches characteristic of Western Europe, or simply their absence.
While the roots of regime theory lie in a concern to delineate differences in the politics of welfare, modern usages focus much more on the extent to which it is possible to characterize as opposed to explain social policy systems, with the implication that the issues about explanatory power are now more concerned with explaining responses to new developments rather than origins. The original concern with the politics of welfare remains significant nevertheless. The extent to which particular welfare arrangements have political support from coalitions that protect them has been explored (Pierson, 1994, 2001) and related approaches that stress the importance of institutional pathways, in shaping change where welfare states have come under attack (Taylor-Gooby, 2001, 2002; and further discussion of this approach in Chapter 4). These ideas have had particular resonance since the late 2010s when both established and emerging state commitments to welfare have never been more fragile.
Since much of the contemporary controversy about welfare policies concerns the applicability of strongly market-oriented approaches, there may be a case for a simpler regime categorization system. It is often easier to draw a line between the liberal systems and the rest, than between the social democratic and the conservative regimes. The advocates of the social democratic approach are in many respects marginalized in the post-2008 world, and although the dissemination of models of social policy is occurring, the battle lines are in effect between the liberal and the conservative approaches.
This alternative way of considering social policy systems has much in common with Hall and Soskice’s (2001) classification of varieties of capitalism. They distinguish between ‘liberal market economies’ and ‘coordinated market economies’, where they argue (2001, p. 8) that in the former,
firms coordinate their activities primarily via hierarchies and competitive market arrangements. … Market relationships are characterized by the arm’s-length exchange of goods or services in a context of competition and formal contracting. In response to the price signals generated by such markets, the actors adjust their willingness to supply and demand goods or services, often on the basis of the marginal calculations stressed by neoclassical economics.
In the ‘coordinated market economies’, by contrast,
firms depend more heavily on non-market relationships to coordinate their endeavours with other actors and to construct their core competencies. These non-market modes of coordination generally entail more extensive relational or incomplete contracting, network monitoring based on the exchange of private information inside networks, and more reliance on collaborative, as opposed to competitive, relationships to build the competencies of the firm … economies are more often the result of strategic interaction among firms and other actors.
In these latter countries, the state is crucially a more active partner, linking with a range of interest groups (in the way described in Esping-Andersen’s categorization of the conservative regime).
In an analysis which examines both theoretically and empirically the varieties of capitalism and the typologies of the welfare regime approach, Schröder (2009) concludes that countries nest within a scheme of difference that becomes more complex as more factors are included in comparison. Thus, rather than competing to provide a single explanation of difference between countries, the range of typologies established by different authors offers a more ‘fine-grained’ picture of variation among states that diverge on the key axis of difference – the liberal economic model or its absence (see Schmidt, 2009, for example, who writes of ‘state influenced market economies’). As in the elaborations of specifications of Esping-Andersen’s conservative regime, the ‘non-liberal’ countries in the Mediterranean and Asian regions are regularly found to be different from continental Europe. An analysis by Lallement (2011) sees this difference as important for understanding the responses to the 2008 economic crisis, where being ‘liberal’ has been shown to have significant purchase on both the form and extent of policy reform. In a similar vein, Hay and Wincott’s (2012) post-crisis assessment of European countries also finds that beyond the liberal/non-liberal division, what emerges are clusters of similar countries rather than ‘worlds’ with hard boundaries. More importantly for social policy, however, is their argument that whether countries compete in the global market on the basis of ‘cost’ (cheap labour, cheap exports and so on) or ‘quality’ (high-level skills, high-end manufacturing) determines their welfare commitment.
What Hay and Wincott’s (2012) work reveals for advanced European economies (which also has resonance for the rest of the world) is that although convergence towards a liberal economic model is neither evident nor certain, within the operation of global capitalism the space for national idiosyncrasies of welfare arrangement is perceived by governments to be far more limited than it was in the period following the Second World War.
Some of the limitations of the welfare regime approach in dealing with social policy developments not located in advanced economies have already been explored. But it is also a feature of contemporary social policy making, particularly relevant for countries with economies that are developing and/or emerging, that key areas of regulation traditionally associated with the emergence of social provisions such as trade and labour are increasingly bound by agreements and legal frameworks that operate at the global, or at least international level. This is most obvious and well documented in relation to the European Union, but other IGOs such as the World Bank, IMF, ILO and World Trade Organization play an increasingly important role in shaping the parameters of social policy, particularly in countries where the political-administrative architecture is less established or unstable. Chapter 4 recognizes these issues as a challenge that needs to be resolved in building on regime-related explanations of the development of welfare arrangements.
This chapter started by noting diversity as summarized by comparative expenditure statistics, and went on to show that early efforts at comparative generalization gave rather more attention to common trends than to diversity. The theoretical work that really marks the shift away from that approach is Esping-Andersen’s stress upon the idea of different regimes, which has been examined in the context of the ideas of some of his main critics. Esping-Andersen’s original development of regime theory continues to represent the dominant approach to social policy comparison. To dissent from the view that there are in various senses ‘families’ of social policy systems can only imply a wish to either stress the uniqueness of systems or to confine study to limited comparisons of specific aspects of social policy. Nevertheless, the application of regime theory remains much weaker where countries lie outside the standard frameworks of comparison, but where social policy is practised, highlighting the need to think beyond the ‘worlds of welfare’ and better account for worlds of social policy. Identification of this issue also links with another problem about the extent to which the central tenets of regime theory rest upon analysis of income security policies (or, more recently, employment policy). This is given attention in subsequent chapters on specific policy domains and is followed up in detail particularly in the chapter on health policy. It does seem anomalous that despite the enormous importance of health care within social policy the work specifying regimes gives it minimal attention. This is true, above all, in Esping-Andersen’s own work (where health care does not even appear in the index of his original three worlds work). It can only be said that, such has been the influence of the regime approach, it has fed into questions about the use of typologization in all the policy fields explored in this book.
On the other hand, it is still appropriate to challenge with the question: why typologize? If the academic study of social policy necessarily has an inherent social purpose then typologizing for its own sake with no wider significance would have little point. It is important therefore not to lose sight of Esping-Andersen’s argument that regime theory is designed to highlight the dynamics of social policy systems past, present and future. This provides a clear rationale not to depart too radically from a judiciously theorized model, or to ensure that if departure is deemed necessary there are good reasons based on the identification of an alternative dynamic, rather than simple observations that some systems are different. The arguments setting out the limits of Esping-Andersen’s model are important in themselves for comparative analysis inasmuch as they highlight different processes in the ever-changing world of social policy. In this respect a fallible but well-theorized taxonomy is useful precisely because it highlights the complex nature of differences between societies. But to what extent does it, in the end, help to explain policy choices? This topic forms the starting point for Chapter 4
