research paper welfare state

The Irish Welfare State in the Twenty-First Century pp 13–35 Cite as

Welfare States: How They Change and Why

Fiona Dukelow 3 &
Mary P. Murphy 4
First Online: 05 October 2016

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In this chapter, Fiona Dukelow and Mary Murphy sketch the landscape of research on welfare state change and set out some of the ways the impact of the economic crisis and the prospect structural change need to be informed by the lessons of previous research on how welfare states change and why. The chapter then proceeds to discuss a set of core structural drivers of welfare state change and their bearing on Irish welfare state change, including neo-liberalisation, internationalisation and the politics of welfare. The final section develops a framework for understanding and tracking the variety of ways structural change may be occurring, outlining four key questions: What is welfare for? Who delivers welfare? Who pays for welfare? Who receives welfare?

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Employment: 75% of the 20–64-year-olds to be employed; Education: Reducing the rates of early school leaving below 10% and at least 40% of 30–34-year-olds completing third-level education; Fighting poverty and social exclusion: at least 20 million fewer people in or at risk of poverty and social exclusion.

While we do not develop the methodology here, it is plausible to think that the framework could lend itself to comparative methodologies such as fuzzy set. It is also possible to understand shifts in dynamics and functions in Polanyian terms as a function of three dynamics; state redistribution; market production or commodification; and reciprocal societal relations and to assess structural change in terms of the relative shifts between these three sources or dimensions of welfare (Buroway 2015 ).

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Dukelow, F., Murphy, M.P. (2016). Welfare States: How They Change and Why. In: Murphy, M., Dukelow, F. (eds) The Irish Welfare State in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57138-0_2

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Article contents

America’s wars on poverty and the building of the welfare state.

David Torstensson David Torstensson David Torstensson was awarded his doctoral degree in American history from Oxford University in 2009. The title of his dissertation is “The Politics of Failure: Community Action and the Meaning of Great Society Liberalism.”
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.276
Published online: 03 March 2016

On January 5, 2014—the fiftieth anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s launch of the War on Poverty—the New York Times asked a panel of opinion leaders a simple question: “Does the U.S. Need Another War on Poverty?” While the answers varied, all the invited debaters accepted the martial premise of the question—that a war on poverty had been fought and that eliminating poverty was, without a doubt, a “fight,” or a “battle.”

Yet the debate over the manner—martial or not—by which the federal government and public policy has dealt with the issue of poverty in the United States is still very much an open-ended one.

The evolution and development of the postwar American welfare state is a story not only of a number of “wars,” or individual political initiatives, against poverty, but also about the growth of institutions within and outside government that seek to address, alleviate, and eliminate poverty and its concomitant social ills. It is a complex and at times messy story, interwoven with the wider historical trajectory of this period: civil rights, the rise and fall of a “Cold War consensus,” the emergence of a counterculture, the Vietnam War, the credibility gap, the rise of conservatism, the end of “welfare,” and the emergence of compassionate conservatism. Mirroring the broader organization of the American political system, with a relatively weak center of power and delegated authority and decision-making in fifty states, the welfare model has developed and grown over decades. Policies viewed in one era as unmitigated failures have instead over time evolved and become part of the fabric of the welfare state.

Great Society
War on Poverty
America’s welfare state
President Johnson
Community Action Program

Since President Lyndon B. Johnson left office in 1969 competition between America’s two major political parties has in many ways centered on their relationship to the conflicts of the late 1960s. On most major issues, whether it is how the United States is governed, what role the federal government should play vis-à-vis the states, how minorities—ethnic or sexual—should be treated, or the role of the Supreme Court in interpreting the Constitution, the real and imaginary divisions the 1960s spawned continue to profoundly shape American politics. By and large these divisions have discredited American liberalism, making the 1960s known as the decade of “liberal overreach.” 1 American conservatives have for decades argued that the expansion of government through the Great Society programs was a mistake and often failed to help its intended recipients, the poor and underprivileged. 2 Charles Murray in his mid-1980s social policy blockbuster Losing Ground flatly stated that: “We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.” 3

While historians and social scientists have generally been more nuanced in their assessment of the Great Society, there is still a distinct sense in the literature that if not outright failures, the Johnson administration’s social programs did not live up to their expectations and were, at the very least, a missed opportunity. 4 Indeed, in one of the leading textbooks on American postwar history William Chafe has argued that the antipoverty effort was fundamentally flawed because policy makers never realized that what was really needed to fight poverty was a massive jobs program and redistribution of income. Other historians have agreed. They have argued that a massive program of employment and/or large-scale income redistribution would have been much more successful and desirable than the War on Poverty. 5

This broadly negative judgment on the Great Society (and in particular the War on Poverty) has become part of the wider narrative on the American welfare state. Ramshackle and largely ineffective, it is often accused of and criticized for not living up to the size and standards set by other developed countries, most notably in Europe. The manner in which the United States fights (or doesn’t fight) poverty is an important example often referred to as illustrating this broader point. Negative pronouncements are made every year in conjunction with the Census Bureau’s publication of the official poverty rates. The perennial questions asked are variations on if America needs a new war on poverty or why decades on (since the original 1964 launch) the war is still being lost. 6 Indeed, critics of varying political colors point to how rates of poverty have barely budged since the mid-1960s and that compared to European countries the United States is far behind and spends ever less on the poor. 7 In the late 1950s and early 1960s the poverty rate stood at over 20 percent. 8 By the early 1970s this had fallen to close to 10 percent and the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest ( 2013 ) estimated rate is 14.5 percent. 9 For example, noted economist and public policy doyen Jeffrey Sachs in 2006 argued in Scientific American that the United States (and other “Anglo Saxon” modeled countries) had fallen behind the high-tax and high-spend Nordic region on most indicators of economic performance. 10 He claimed that “the U.S. spends less than almost all rich countries on social services for the poor and disabled, and it gets what it pays for: the highest poverty rate among the rich countries and an exploding prison population.” 11 Others have argued a similar point. In 2001 a National Bureau of Economic Research paper argued that the United States was indeed much less generous to its poor and did not fight poverty as well as many European countries. 12 The authors argued that this was primarily a result of a political system that by and large was geared against income redistribution and a concomitant lack of broad public support for income redistribution primarily due to racism.

The Great Society and War on Poverty programs offer a fascinating prism for understanding the evolution of the 20th-century American welfare state. Its postwar development is not only a story about a number of “wars” or individual political initiatives against poverty, but also about the growth of institutions within and outside government to address, alleviate, and eliminate poverty and its concomitant social ills. From the New Deal to modern-day reform efforts including the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 , the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid coverage through Medicare Part D and the most recent Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, one of the key characteristics of the American welfare state is its piecemeal and gradual evolution. While there have been a number of “big bang” reform efforts, overall the story of the postwar period is the incremental development of a welfare state that has evolved and changed as part of other major political and socioeconomic changes and processes. This development has not been driven only by a policy or reform initiative’s perception of success; more intriguingly, policies and reforms considered as grave political errors or failures in a particular era have over time become staples of American social policy. In this respect the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty initiative is instructive. It was largely discredited at the time and since, and few would argue that the Great Society and War on Poverty have an enviable reputation—political or otherwise. Yet the faith of its biggest and most maligned component—the Community Action Program—illustrates how a social policy can fail politically and by reputation, yet survive. Over the long-term the program itself and the ideas underpinning it have become an institutionalized and elemental part of the American welfare state.

“Fighting Man’s Ancient Enemies”: The War on Poverty and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society

I want to be the President who educated young children to the wonders of their world. I want to be the President who helped feed the hungry and to prepare them to be taxpayers instead of taxeaters. I want to be the President who helped the poor to find their own way and who protected the right of every citizen to vote in every election … This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease, and ignorance, we shall overcome. 13 — Lyndon Johnson, Special Message to the Congress, March 15, 1965 Johnson’s cause—the thing for which he hoped to be remembered—was the Great Society, his effort to outpace the New Deal, outflank group conflict, override class structure, and improve the lot of everybody in America. 14 — Richard Neustadt, in Presidential Power , 1976 edition

When he spoke about poverty, Lyndon Johnson spoke with passion. Whether it be from his childhood growing up in rural Texas, his experience from a year out from college teaching destitute Mexican schoolchildren in Cotulla, south Texas, or in his first major political assignment during the mid to late 1930s managing the Texas National Youth Administration, the 36th president of the United States had a deeply personal relationship with poverty. Throughout his years in public office, in speeches and on the campaign trail, Johnson would frequently—no matter what the topic—revert back to images of the poor and of the basic needs and wants of all peoples, regardless of their color or background. In his public and private remarks the president expressed his belief that most people had the same basic wants and desire for education, medical care, and an opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty. Because this conviction was absolutely central to his presidential program, Johnson never saw the War on Poverty and poverty itself as being discrete policy issues isolated from his overall domestic program. On the contrary, most of the Great Society’s legislative goals and victories—the extension of civil rights, voting rights legislation, setting federal standards and providing funding for elementary and secondary education, funding health care for the elderly and poor through Medicare and Medicaid—were part of the same idea of building on the New Deal to provide and extend equality of opportunity to all. 15

But poverty was never defeated. Instead of leading the fight on poverty, the President’s Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and its local staff were accused of playing an active part in the Newark riots of 1967 , funding criminal gangs in Chicago, supporting the staging of racist theater performances in New York City, and embezzling federal money in Mississippi. Such key War on Poverty components as Community Action, the Job Corps, Legal Services, Upward Bound, and even the popular Head Start, were often mentioned in sensational news stories of violence, corruption, and financial mismanagement. Almost as quickly as it had risen to the top of the national policy agenda, the War on Poverty and its programs became one of the topics the president and White House least wanted to discuss. By the end of LBJ’s presidential term when poverty as an issue did present itself, it was in the context of the growing welfare rights movement and the newfound militancy of the poor. Revealingly, for these the president did not have much sympathy. For example, during the summer of 1968 the Poor People’s Campaign—originally a campaign idea by Martin Luther King Jr.—marched and set up a camp in Washington DC. Giving speeches and meeting with administration officials, the campaign demanded that the federal government and Congress do more for minorities and the poor. But the president was not moved. Illustrating just how much the times had changed from four years earlier, when the antipoverty campaign had been launched and Johnson had laid out his Great Society vision, LBJ complained to Agriculture Secretary Freeman: “the very people we are seeking to help in Medicare and education and welfare and Food Stamps are protesting louder and louder and giving no recognition or allowance for what’s been done.” 16 In a remarkable glimpse of the subsequent staple conservative criticism that was to define the Great Society in a post-LBJ world, the president lamented the undesirable social consequences that his programs seemed to have resulted in: “Our efforts seem only to have resulted in anarchy … The women no longer bother to get married, they just keep breeding. The men go their way and the women get relief—why should they work?” 17 If Vietnam became LBJ’s foreign policy albatross, the War on Poverty was viewed by many as his domestic one. Indeed, Time magazine in 1966 wrote that “next to the shooting war in Viet Nam, the spending war against home-front poverty is perhaps the most applauded, criticized, and calumniated issue in the U.S.” 18

Not much has changed since the 1960s. Ronald Reagan’s famous 1987 sound bite—“we had a war on poverty—poverty won” 19 —if not a wholly accepted verdict, still rings true to a lot of subsequent observers and the American public. Indeed, the chief political legacy of the Great Society and War on Poverty programs can best be understood through this prism of chaotic failure. Politically the results have been stark and largely negative for the Democratic Party. Drained by the war in Vietnam and the general perception that although government programs were not directly responsible for urban rioting and student militancy, they were not doing enough to discourage them, the Johnsonian brand of consensus politics that had so dominated the Democratic Party for nearly two decades fell apart. Beginning in 1968 Democrats in a post-Johnson world embraced what many voters deemed social and political radicalism and abandoned the center ground. Indeed, presidential elections since have often been fought on the issues and perception of the issues permeating from the 1960s. In the words of former presidential speech writer to George W. Bush David Frum, Republicans have been “reprising Nixon’s 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century.” 20 The results have been profound: since 1968 virtually no Democratic presidential candidate either running as a self-described liberal or labeled as one by his Republican opponent has won an election. In fact, those who have run as outspoken liberals—George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984 —lost forty-nine states each and were beaten in some of the biggest landslides in American electoral history.

For the American welfare state the political legacy and poor reputation of the Great Society programs have meant that it has often found itself facing criticism of not doing enough for its intended recipients while maintaining a deep unpopularity with the general public. As sociologist John Myles has put it, there is a general perception that “for middle-aged, middle-income Americans, the welfare state is virtually all cost and no benefit.” 21 Yet while critical in contributing to these negative perceptions of the welfare state, the negative political history and legacy of the Great Society is only half of the story. Paradoxically, many of the most heavily criticized anti-poverty programs are the most misunderstood, as they have had, and continue to have, a long-lasting impact on social and welfare services in the United States.

Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: The Community Action Program and the Divisions of the 1960s

While more famous programs, such as Project Head Start and Legal Services, have achieved higher levels of visible success and entrenchment within the American social policy framework, it is arguable whether any of the War on Poverty programs have been more influential on American social policy than the Community Action Program (CAP).

When it was launched in the mid-1960s, Community Action was meant to be a way of funneling federal support directly to local communities and involving these communities in the design and implementation of local anti-poverty action programs. It was in many ways intended to bypass conventional interest groups and involve a multitude of stakeholders. Indeed, communities consisting of the poor, local government, and business and labor interests would come together and form not-for-profit Community Action Agencies (CAAs) to coordinate, engage, and devise plans for tackling the problems of local poverty. The CAP designers believed that locally planned and implemented programs would stand a better chance of successfully fighting poverty and coordinating existing federal, state, and local efforts than any program that was centrally designed and managed through existing federal departments. In particular this was a view supported and promulgated by the president’s economic counselors including Walter Heller and Charles Schultze of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and Bureau of the Budget (BOB), respectively. Yet the CAP quickly became one of the Johnson administration’s most heavily criticized and maligned programs. At root was a basic and unresolved disagreement over what Community Action actually meant.

To some the idea of Community Action was simply a management vehicle, a way of coordinating the many disparate and overlapping anti-poverty programs existing within the federal, state, and local bureaucracies. Community Action was in this light viewed as a deliverer and coordinator of services to combat poverty. Certainly, consultation with the poor and participation of the poor were elemental parts of this approach, but this version of Community Action was not about political or social empowerment. It was simply a new way of more efficiently coordinating programs and engaging the poor in an effort to help them help themselves. 22 Bypassing state government and distributing federal funds directly to the CAAs was administratively a relatively new approach, 23 but one based on what the White House and administration viewed as the “traditional and time-tested American methods of organized community effort to help individuals, families and whole communities to help themselves.” 24 This was also the view held by many in Congress. For example, Republican congressman Albert Quie was a staunch supporter of the Community Action concept, if harsh critic of the OEO, arguing that the Community Action concept devolved power locally. 25 Similarly, Carl Perkins, a member of the House Education and Labor Committee to which the poverty bill was referred to in March 1964 , supported the idea of local community involvement and participation of the poor. 26

But to others, Community Action translated into direct political empowerment—a way of forcefully confronting political and economic power structures. It was a way of taking, and giving, power to the poor by means of confrontation. This type of Community Action was closely associated with the thinking of Saul Alinsky, a former Chicago academic and community organizer who ran several independent community organizations around the country and later became associated with some of the more radical OEO-funded programs in Syracuse and Chicago. Crucially, this brand of Community Action became the popularized perception of the program and was extensively covered by major news outlets and in Congress throughout the 1960s. 27

President Johnson’s views on what Community Action would do to shake up social policy and local government appear to be very different and certainly a lot less radical than those of other proponents of Community Action. As he would later reveal in his memoirs: “This plan [community action] had the sound of something brand new and even faintly radical. Actually, it was based on one of the oldest ideas of our democracy, as old as the New England town meeting—self determination at the local level.” 28 The tragedy of Community Action, the OEO, and the War on Poverty is that these efforts never had the type of leadership and clarity of purpose that could have made this vision a political reality and from the beginning effectively sidelined the noisy minority of radicals both within the OEO and on the ground. The anti-poverty director Sargent Shriver was never wholeheartedly committed to the Johnsonian view of the War on Poverty and Community Action. While this does not mean that he was committed to a more radical view of Community Action, Shriver’s political ambitions and willingness to cater to some of his more radical constituents and own staff meant that the fundamental confusion about the purpose of Community Action and the War on Poverty—highlighted in management survey after management survey of the agency—was never resolved. 29 When the anti-poverty director finally attempted to grapple with this fundamental problem in 1967 by amending the anti-poverty legislation to include more representation of local government, the OEO had already reached a political endgame. Once the ghettos started burning and conflict and militancy firmly replaced consensus and peaceful civil rights, neither the OEO director nor the White House were in any position to stem the tide.

When CAP was launched, Shriver expressed the sentiment that it relied “on the traditional and time-tested American methods of organized community effort to help individuals, families and whole communities to help themselves.” 30 While this was certainly the view that the president took, Shriver never consistently or convincingly maintained this position. Norbert Schlei, Department of Justice lawyer and drafter of the original Economic Opportunity Act in 1964 , has argued that relatively early on there was a real shift in the emphasis of the poverty program, a shift that came from the anti-poverty director himself:

I think the whole concept [of maximum feasible participation and Community Action] began to evolve and it got to be much more this matter of putting the target population in charge, putting the local people in charge of the federal money … I really hadn’t understood that that was part of it … I think that even while it was not yet passed [the EOA] there appeared some drift in the whole thinking about community action … Some of it came out of Shriver. I would hear Shriver say things that made me feel that there had been some evolution in thinking since I was directly involved … the idea of putting the target population in a power position and the idea of putting the local government people in a power position seemed to me to be talked about like they were much more integral to the whole idea than I had understood originally. 31

Other OEO insiders have supported this view. For example, Eric Tolmach, who worked on CAP in the OEO, has also described Shriver as sending very mixed messages to those within the agency who supported radical Community Action. Tolmach argued that Shriver felt that by supporting radical CAPs “it separated him from the average bureaucrat in town, and it gained him some credibility on the one hand with large groups of people who were for doing this kind of thing, and with the poor.” 32 This is an important aspect of the history of the War on Poverty as it ties in with the bigger narrative of the changing politics of poverty and the Democratic Party during the mid to late 1960s.

Ambitious Democratic politicians such as Sargent Shriver and Bobby Kennedy—and even some Republicans like New York mayor John Lindsay 33 —saw the radicalization of the political discourse that permeated this period as an opportunity as well as a shift in how future elections and voters would be won. For Shriver, building up and maintaining a natural constituency through the poverty programs was a way of connecting with this new type of politics and its new constituents. Indeed, some have argued that this was in fact Shriver’s raison d’être for staying on as OEO director. In his oral history interview for the Johnson library, Ben Heinemann (chairman of one of the internal White House policy task forces) described Shriver’s and the president’s working relationship as “terrible” and commented that the only reason Shriver stayed on was “ambition” and a desire to “remain in the public view.” 34 The anti-poverty director, Heinemann said, “didn’t have a good alternative [to the War on Poverty] that would still have been in the public eye.” 35 That he was intent on running for office was clear to Heinemann, who described Shriver in 1967 as being “anxious to talk … about the possibilities of his running for Governor in Illinois in ’68.” 36

But Shriver’s constituency and brand of New Politics did not have the kind of national electoral impact for which he had hoped. In 1968 the Democratic presidential coalition fell apart with Richard Nixon and George Wallace combining to shave off almost 20 percentage points off LBJ’s 1964 margin of victory over Goldwater. The New Politics never emerged as a winning electoral force; instead, it created the bedrock for the success of the Republican coalition. In no small measure this was caused by the perceived radicalism of the New Politics constituents: younger voters, Vietnam protesters, and radical civil rights and welfare activists. Many of these groups took their roots in the poverty programs and the type of militancy that became the public image of the OEO. These groups contributed to splitting the Democratic Party by pushing white blue-collar voters into the GOP and shaping subsequent winning Republican presidential coalitions. When Shriver finally ran as George McGovern’s vice presidential candidate in 1972 , Richard Nixon leaned heavily on his opposition to this New Politics coalition and scored a historic victory on par with Johnson’s eight years earlier. Similarly, in 1976 when Shriver was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, he did not win a single primary; his best showing was in Vermont, where he came in second, gaining 28 percent of the vote and losing to the eventual nominee, Jimmy Carter.

In many ways, the history of Community Action represents a microcosm for the wider War on Poverty and Great Society effort. Maligned at the time, both the very nature of the program and its achievements tell a different story. Now lost in the broader fireworks of the 1960s, the Community Action Program at the time became the prime example of everything that had gone wrong with the anti-poverty effort and a symbol of the Johnson administrations’ and “big government’s” overreach. The most famous and scathing criticism came from former White House and executive branch insider D. P. Moynihan, whose negative assessment of the War on Poverty set the tone for both contemporary understanding and subsequent analysis. 37 In 1968 he went as far as to claim that intended or not, Community Action had contributed to the past summers’ rioting: 38 Although vehemently denied in government press release after press release, this image of the OEO and Community Action Agencies as playing a prominent part in the tearing up of the American social fabric persisted in the popular as well as the political mind.

Yet for all the bad press and brouhaha it is not clear that a majority, or even a large minority, of Community Action Agencies were engaged in the types of activities as depicted in the media. Certainly, there were many instances in which a local agency got into political trouble and hit the front pages of the national newspapers for all the wrong reasons, but these instances are not representative of the policy directions taken by all, or even a majority, of the agencies that had been established by the mid-1960s. By 1967 there were almost 1,100 Community Action Agencies in operation, and only a handful of these can be described as having been marked by the type of radicalism and conflict that has come to define the entire program. And, as accurately noted by historian Alice O’Connor, these grants were primarily from the CAP’s experimental demonstration programs. 39 These facts were noted and understood at the time within the White House. Internal memoranda and research suggests that there was broad support and understanding for the real achievements of Community Action within the War on Poverty. 40 For example, in the recommendations to President Johnson of the 1966 Taskforce on Government Organization it was argued that “community action agencies remain the best available instrument for integrating and focusing government and private social service programs at the local neighborhood and community level” and that “at their best, community action agencies reflect a thoroughly American, solidly conservative approach to social problems: they are locally inspired and controlled, and responsive to the disadvantaged people whom they seek to serve.” 41 Even President Johnson himself lent the program his vocal support in the 1967 State of the Union address, which dealt in some detail with the War on Poverty and, if anything, reaffirmed the president’s commitment to fighting poverty through localized Community Action. 42 Yet, these messages never reached the broader public or, until recently, the scholarship. 43 But for all the negative press, Community Action has lived on and continued to shape American social policy.

While the OEO was finally disbanded by President Gerald Ford in 1976 , Community Action has survived as a federally funded program. Today there are over 1,000 Community Action Agencies. 44 The latest data from the National Association for State Community Services Programs shows that in 2013 Community Action Agencies served close to 16 million individuals (part of 6.7 million families) of which over 70 percent were at or below the federal poverty line. 45

But in contrast to its role set out in the original Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 , the federal government now plays a reduced part in the funding and monitoring of national Community Action. Instead, much of the responsibility has since the 1990s been transferred to the state level.

Created as a new federal agency by Congress in December 1974 , the Community Services Administration (CSA) replaced the disbanded OEO. Never part of the Executive Office of the President, the CSA remained a separate independent agency outside the established federal bureaucracy until its own subsequent closure in 1981 . That year President Ronald Reagan replaced, and Congress approved, the CSA with a small Office of Community Services lodged in the Department of Health and Human Services. This office remains in operation and is today responsible for the government-supported Community Action effort. But under the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981 the federal government’s direct role in funding local CAPs was replaced by Community Service Block Grants (CSBG). No longer do federal grants go directly to local Action Agencies. Instead CSBGs are distributed to the states, which then in turn administer them to organizations that are officially designated Community Action Agencies under the CSBG Act. 46 These block grants are applied for by individual states and approved on an annual basis by the Office of Community Services. Outside of government, Community Action is represented by the National Association of Community Action Agencies, a group formed in 1971 to provide a national voice for Community Action. This association professes to be a “national forum for policy on poverty and to strengthen, promote, represent, and serve its network of member agencies to assure that the issues of the poor are effectively heard and addressed.” 47

It would seem that if longevity is any measure of success, there is a strong argument to be made that Community Action has been anything but a failure. Although the CAAs of today are different from those of the 1960s, the requirement that Community Action boards should be made up of a combination of the poor, local and state government, and the private sector is still there. 48 Outlasting the Office of Economic Opportunity, the continued existence of these CAAs suggests that while the centralized operational arm of President Johnson’s War on Poverty could not survive on its own, the local organization, run for and by local communities, could, and has. This is a powerful testament to the idea that decentralized policymaking in social and welfare policy involving all relevant stakeholders is as an enduring part of American social policy as ever. Remarkably, this belief has since the late 20th century crossed party and ideological lines, becoming a defining characteristic of modern American conservatism.

From Community Action to Compassionate Conservatism

In the mid-1990s compassionate conservatism became part of the mainstream political lexicon. Pioneered by Texas academic Marvin Olasky in his 1992 The Tragedy of American Compassion , compassionate conservatism was embraced by a number of influential Republican thinkers, politicians, and strategists. Indeed, during this time many Republican think tanks and grassroots organizations acutely felt the need for the Republican Party to redefine itself, and move away from the popularized image of the party with a cold heart, dead-set against helping the poor and needy. John Ashcroft, Ralph Reed, Bob Dole, Bill Bennett, Jack Kemp, Dan Coats, and Jim Talent all became part of this burgeoning compassion movement. Loudest of the voices calling for a new direction was freshly appointed Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, who pleaded for more compassion in the GOP. During his first session as Speaker he repeatedly made reference to Olasky’s work when outlining the need for Republicans to adopt a new conservative agenda. 49

But it was not only in Washington that Republicans were talking about compassion. While George W. Bush had shown an interest in the founding ideas of compassionate conservatism as early as 1993 —even meeting with Professor Olasky—and had during his first term as governor made it easier under Texas state law for private and religious charities to operate, Bush would not become compassionate conservatism’s national face until his 1998 gubernatorial re-election. On victory night of his landslide win he declared that he had big plans for the future, wanting to give the Republican Party a new look, that of compassionate conservatism. 50

During the following primary campaign for the Republican 2000 presidential nomination, Governor Bush set out his vision and philosophy for what compassionate conservatism meant to him and a future Bush administration. In a defining speech summing up the work of a task force of policy analysts and academics he had appointed in February, Bush in July 1999 outlined what compassionate conservatism meant and what as president he could do for America’s poor. Central to this speech, and the governor’s conception of compassionate conservatism, was the idea that anti-poverty initiatives should be local and as far as possible designed and run by third-sector agencies. He argued that local communities, religious organizations, and other nongovernmental groups should together with local, state, and the federal government fight poverty and provide opportunity for the poor, homeless, and needy:

We will make a determined attack on need, by promoting the compassionate acts of others. We will rally the armies of compassion in our communities to fight a very different war against poverty and hopelessness, a daily battle waged house to house and heart by heart. This will not be the failed compassion of towering bureaucracies. On the contrary, it will be government that serves those who are serving their neighbors. It will be government that directs help to the inspired and the effective. It will be government that both knows its limits and shows its heart. And it will be government truly by the people and for the people. 51

To Governor Bush, such a plan to fight poverty stood in stark contrast to the efforts of the War on Poverty and the Great Society, which he accused of being too bureaucratic, government-centered, and lacking in true compassion:

In the past, presidents have declared wars on poverty and promised to create a great society. But these grand gestures and honorable aims were frustrated. They have become a warning, not an example. We found that government can spend money, but it can’t put hope in our hearts or a sense of purpose in our lives. 52

The ideas of fighting poverty through local charities and religious organizations became a defining feature of Bush’s successful presidential campaign. Compassionate conservatism and the belief that faith-based organizations could revolutionize the way in which the federal government delivered its social welfare programs became one of the campaign’s core selling points on domestic policy. Indeed, as early as June 1999 political correspondent Adam Nagourney of the New York Times was writing about compassionate conservatism as being Governor’s Bush’s defining political slogan. 53 Once he took office, the president’s Faith-Based Initiative was at the center of his compassionate agenda. While the actual legislation put forward for the initiative was primarily about the federal government not discriminating against religious groups when providing funding for local anti-poverty and social welfare services, at its heart the initiative was as much about local action being the best remedy for social problems like poverty, drug addiction, and single parenthood. 54 Yet what Governor and then President Bush failed to at least publicly acknowledge was that the influence of the War on Poverty and Community Action had already extended and heavily influenced the manner in which America’s welfare state actually provides and delivers its public services. The Great Society’s, War on Poverty’s, and Community Action’s most important social policy legacy is perhaps the contribution it made toward the outsourcing of service provision to the third sector and nonprofits.

Community Action and Modern American Social Policy

Local, decentralized, usually not-for-profit and nongovernmental—in all but a few instances, these are the defining characteristics of the providers of many of the public services Americans receive today. Since the 1960s and the launch of the Great Society programs, the growth in the provision of governmental services through the third sector has been astonishing. Although in sheer numbers the Social Security program is still the number one social welfare program today, many public services are not provided through or by the American government. Instead, government services are now largely provided by nongovernment entities and nonprofits in particular. This is especially pronounced with regard to social services and human services, where nonprofit organizations actually deliver a larger share of the services government finances than do government agencies themselves. 55 Through some of the biggest federal welfare and human services programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, student aid, and food stamps, the American state at all levels—federal, state, and local—serves mainly as the ultimate payer and regulator, but not provider of public services.

Similarly, and while conceptually different, the expansion of the use of grants-in-aid programs since the 1960s has also significantly bolstered the use of nonprofits and nongovernmental entities in the provision of public services. Through grants-in-aid the federal government provides block grants to state and local governments with relatively few programmatic requirements on how services should be provided. These grants are then used and distributed by state and local governments, which contract out the provision of services to nonprofits and the private sector. 56

In 2011 it was estimated that over 30 percent of the federal government’s budget went to the direct purchasing of public services or grants to provide such services. 57 For nonprofits in particular the growth has been significant both for direct purchases and grants, growing by an estimated 195 percent for the former between 1977 and 1997 and over 330 percent for the latter in the two decades between 1982 and 2002 . 58

While the seeds of the use of nonprofits and nongovernmental entities existed prior to the 1960s, the Johnson administration’s anti-poverty and welfare programs greatly expanded and institutionalized the use of the third sector in the provision of public services, primarily through the War on Poverty programs and the use of Community Action. Indeed, political scientist and noted historian of the third sector Peter Hall saw the War on Poverty as central to the growth of the postwar nonprofit sector:

if the political right supplied the rhetoric for efforts to down-size government, liberals and progressives could take credit for actually implementing large-scale privatization, first through local nonprofit organizations—many of them faith-based—subsidized by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and later through deinstitutionalization of the mentally disabled and the subsequent creation of a vast system of community-based treatment and care provided by nonprofits operating under contract with state and local government. 59

Conclusion: America’s Wars on Poverty and Welfare State

In his classic 1990 dissection of the welfare state, Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen outlined three welfare state regimes: liberal, corporatist, and social democratic. 60 With its traditional reliance on the power of the market, strict entitlement rules and means-testing, low social welfare benefits, and a culture of individualism the United States was described as the archetypical liberal regime standing in stark contrast to most European nations. 61 While Esping-Andersen’s work has been much criticized since—and revised by the author—the idea that the American welfare state is fundamentally different (indeed even exceptional) in size, purpose, and function from other developed Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies lives on both inside and outside academia. But what does the evidence actually show?

Traditionally, measures of welfare states and social protection look at the availability of social insurance (e.g., unemployment and health insurance) and availability of welfare and assistance programs, as well as labor market policies. 62 More often than not these are measures of total public and government expenditure. Using these traditional measures of social spending as an initial gauge of the size of the welfare state it is clear that the United States has historically spent less than other developed countries on social and welfare services. For instance, OECD data from 2014 show public social expenditure in the United States totaled just over 19 percent of GDP. 63 This is in comparison to an average of between 28 and 32 percent in France, Finland, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, and others. Clearly the United States is behind these countries. And for this year the United States was also below the OECD average of 21.62 percent but ahead of both Canada and Australia. But levels of public spending do not necessarily tell the whole picture.

Less attention has been paid to private or third-sector spending and activities and indirect variables such as the impact of tax laws. Regarding the latter, instead of authorizing direct social spending, American lawmakers have long used the federal tax code as a social policy tool. The most notable example in which the tax code works as a government subsidy by tax exempting certain types of benefits is the employer-based health insurance benefit, which is exempt from income and payroll taxation. While this benefit has been in place since the 1940s it was formalized into law in the 1954 Revenue Act. 64 The growth and development of this benefit has profoundly shaped the American welfare state and while nominally in the nonpublic sphere of spending it is nevertheless a significant de facto concession of tax revenue for the federal government. In 2013 this was estimated to amount to a loss of revenue to the federal government of $250 billion or roughly 7 percent of the total 2013 federal budget. 65 Moreover, if one looks beyond levels of public social expenditure and also include spending outside of government the U.S. position changes dramatically. Looking at the latest total public and private spending estimates by the OECD the United States actually has one of the highest rates of social expenditure—and biggest welfare states—in the world at close to 29 percent of GDP in 2011 , behind only France. 66 Table 1 shows this data for the United States and other OECD countries.

Table 1 Net total social expenditure (public and private), % of GDP, OECD countries 2011. 67

By comparison the country and welfare model the American welfare state is most often contrasted with, Sweden, is quite far behind with a rate of 24.6 percent of GDP net social expenditure in 2011 . Furthermore, if one looks at the trajectory of public social expenditure over a longer time-frame it is not at all clear that the American postwar experience is any different from that of other developed countries or the EU. OECD data going back to 1960 suggest that while always lagging behind average public spending levels in the EU (which is explained by the higher levels of nonpublic spending) U.S. government expenditure has since the 1960s followed an almost identical trajectory. Table 2 shows public social expenditure from 1960 to 2014 comparing levels in the United States, Japan, EU21, and OECD.

Table 2 Public social expenditure, % of GDP, United States, Japan, EU-21, and OECD, 1960–2014. 68

As Table 2 shows, the spending patterns and trajectory are very similar across all countries and regions. Interestingly, the data in the table also suggest that social spending has over the long term, by and large been immune to changes in government and political affiliation. For example, except for the Reagan years, social expenditure in the United States grew quite markedly during periods of Republican administrations particularly in the 1970s and 2000s under presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. Indeed, the period in which the biggest difference between levels of social expenditure between the EU 21 and the United States can be seen is between the mid-1970s and early 1980s. During this time social spending continued to grow in the EU21 while in the United States it actually decreased under President Jimmy Carter.

The above statistics and data from the OECD show that measured as a share of economic output the United States invests a similar amount to other developed countries in social spending. They also show how since the 1960s and throughout most of the postwar period the trajectory of American public social expenditure has not been markedly different from other developed economies. Instead, the difference between the United States and other countries has been the presence of nonpublic entities. One of the key findings by political scientist Jacob Hacker in his 2002 The Divided Welfare State was that in the United States a large portion of social spending and the make-up of the American welfare state is nonpublic. 69 Looking at the history of the American welfare state, there was no Beveridge report or equivalent starting point for a complete overhaul and introduction of a welfare model. The closest the United States came to this was during the New Deal era and World War II. Some have indeed argued that U.S. policy planners during the latter stages of the New Deal (and particularly during the course of WWII) were intent on moving America toward a Beveridge-style full-employment welfare state. 70

The War on Poverty and the Great Society illustrate the development of the postwar American welfare state. The Community Action Program specifically offers an instructive historical example of the ways in which the modern American welfare state—the provision of public services through nonprofits—gradually and paradoxically developed over decades out of what was and has been widely regarded as a prime example of a failed social policy. Mirroring the broader organization of the American political system, with a relatively weak center of power and delegated authority and decision-making in fifty states, the welfare model has developed and grown over decades. Policies such as Community Action viewed in one era as unmitigated failures have instead over time evolved and become part of the fabric of the welfare state.

Discussion of the Literature

There is no distinct unitary historiography of all themes covered in this article, that is, Great Society liberalism, President Johnson, the War on Poverty, Community Action, and the American welfare state. Instead, broadly speaking, scholars have focused on various aspects within these topics, which, while although often overlapping, are often best viewed and understood as coming from discrete research silos. For example, studying the American welfare state has often been the purview of social scientists. Perspectives have ranged from the quantitative to sociological to political institutional to a more traditional history narrative. 71 Looking at the Great Society, the Johnson administration, and the War on Poverty programs, this literature can roughly be divided into two categories: that which looks specifically at, say, the War on Poverty (or specific programs or components of the War on Poverty including Community Action, Legal Services, etc.), and that which looks at either of these within the context of bigger themes like the 1960s, Great Society liberalism, the Johnson presidency, or the evolution of the American welfare state. Since the 1970s more has been published on the latter than the former; consequently, books on these broader themes make up the larger and more well-established literature. They include textbook accounts and more traditional sweeping narratives, including biographies. Because Community Action and the War on Poverty never lived up to their political or policy expectations—neither vanquished poverty or revolutionized the way federal, state, and local anti-poverty efforts were coordinated—much of the general historiography about the two tends to emphasize failure—failure to fight poverty, failure to adequately plan programs, failure to foresee the conflict that the War on Poverty programs (in particular Community Action) are viewed as invariably leading to. There is also a strong tendency to view Community Action and the War on Poverty as targeting black poverty. These ideas are as common in specialist studies as in general surveys of American history and the 1960s. Examples where one or more of these perceptions are prominent include William Chafe’s The Unfinished Journey , Walter Trattner’s From Poor Law to Welfare State , Irving Bernstein’s Guns or Butter , and Judith Russell’s Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race: How Keynesians Misguided the War on Poverty . There are a few exceptions to this negativism, including Robert F. Clark’s 2002 The War on Poverty: History, Selected Programs and Ongoing Impact , Michael Katz’s The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare , and John E. Schwarz’s America’s Hidden Success: A Reassessment of Public Policy from Kennedy to Reagan . However, these have had a relatively limited influence on public or academic perceptions of the poverty programs.

Recently, a new generation of scholars have been examining the War on Poverty and local programs, often from a grass-roots perspective. Examples of these include Kent B. Germany’s 2007 New Orleans after the Promises , Robert Bauman’s 2007 Journal of Urban History article “The Black Power and Chicano Movements in the Poverty Wars in Los Angeles,” Noel Cazenave’s 2007 Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community Action Programs , Susan Youngblood Ashmore’s 2008 Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama , and Guian McKee’s 2008 The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia . 72 These studies are all of real importance, as they form part of a new historiography that in many respects challenges established perceptions about the War on Poverty. They provide an often detailed and rich account of a particular local anti-poverty effort and real insight into the local politics of a program. While many of these studies still focus on urban areas, there has also emerged a new sub-field in the study of anti-poverty programs that examines its rural component. 73 Just as with their urban counterparts these studies are adding nuance and much needed detail to the War on Poverty scholarship. They are showing how rural anti-poverty efforts functioned and were part of wider historical processes that were changing the complexion of American society, in particular the advance of civil rights in the South and Southwest.

Primary Sources

The National Archives, College Park, Maryland, and Lyndon Johnson presidential library in Austin, Texas, house the most important primary sources with regard to the federal and presidential aspects of the War on Poverty, Johnson administration, and Community Action Program. For the Community Action Program the most relevant archival records and record groups are: National Archives, College Park, Maryland, Records of the Community Services Administration, Record Group 381, Headquarters Records of the Office of Economic Opportunity 1963–1981 . For the War on Poverty and administration of the OEO the most relevant files in the Johnson library archives are organized around the President’s key staffers. 74 The Johnson Library also houses a number of important oral history interviews of the key figures in the War on Poverty. The Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Scripps Library and Multimedia Archive, houses a significant collection of oral history interviews and tape recordings from a number of postwar presidencies including the Johnson administration. 75 Significantly, these collections are digital and housed in an online library accessible to all anywhere in the world.

How the Welfare-State Regime Shapes the Gap in Subjective Well-Being Between People With and Without Disabilities

Wie wohlfahrtsstaatsregimes den unterschied im subjektiven wohlbefinden zwischen menschen mit und ohne behinderungen prägen, andreas hadjar.

Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, University of Fribourg, STA 01, bu. 2.102, Rte Bonnesfontaines 11, CH-1700 Fribourg, Switzerland

This paper focuses on disability, an under-researched area of inequality, and subjective well-being. According to social production function theory, people with a disability do not have the same opportunities as people without disabilities to obtain resources, instrumental goals, and ultimately subjective well-being. Social participation and employment seem to be crucial mechanisms behind such disparities. The social system of a country (macro level) also shapes the gap in subjective well-being between both groups. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the gap in subjective well-being between people with and without disabilities. How is this gap linked to social participation and labour market integration, and how does the welfare-state regime shape the gap in subjective well-being between people with and without disabilities? The core of this research are multilevel analyses of cumulative European Social Survey data from 31 European countries. The results reveal that people with disabilities show significantly lower subjective well-being than people without disabilities. Welfare-state regimes have an effect on this gap, with social-democratic (and family-oriented) Nordic countries performing best in providing equal living conditions for people with and without disabilities.

Der vorliegende Beitrag nimmt Behinderung, eine wenig beleuchtete Ungleichheitsachse, und subjektives Wohlbefinden in den Blick. Aufbauend auf die Theorie der sozialen Produktionsfunktionen wird der allgemeinen Annahme gefolgt, dass Menschen mit Behinderungen nicht die gleichen Möglichkeiten wie Menschen ohne Behinderungen haben, Ressourcen, instrumentelle Ziele und letztlich Wohlbefinden zu erlangen. Soziale Teilhabe und Arbeitsmarktintegration scheinen bedeutsame Mechanismen hinter den angesprochenen Disparitäten zu sein. Das Sozialsystem eines Landes auf der Makroebene prägt ebenso Unterschiede im subjektiven Wohlbefinden zwischen Gruppen. Die Hauptziele dieses Beitrags bestehen entsprechend darin, den Unterschied im subjektiven Wohlbefinden zwischen Menschen mit und ohne Behinderungen zu analysieren. Inwieweit lässt sich dieser Unterschied durch Unterschiede in sozialer Teilhabe und Arbeitsmarktintegration erklären, und wie prägt das Wohlfahrtsstaatsregime den Unterschied in subjektivem Wohlbefinden zwischen Menschen mit und ohne Behinderungen? Im Kern der Forschung stehen Mehrebenenanalysen von kumulierten Daten des European Social Survey aus 31 europäischen Ländern. Die Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass Menschen mit Behinderungen ein signifikant geringeres subjektives Wohlbefinden zeigen als Menschen ohne Behinderungen. Wohlfahrtsstaatsregimes moderieren diesen Unterschied, wobei die Performanz der skandinavischen sozialdemokratischen (und familienorientierten) Länder hinsichtlich der Bereitstellung gleicher Lebensbedingungen für Menschen mit und ohne Behinderungen offenbar im Vergleich am stärksten erscheint.

Introduction

In Europe and beyond, people with disabilities are disabled in the literal meaning of the word in their daily activities, and ultimately also in their ability to achieve well-being, which—according to social production function theory (Lindenberg and Frey 1993 ; Ormel et al. 1999 )—is the highest goal that humans can achieve via first-order instrumental goals including stimulation (doing interesting and enjoyable things), comfort (fulfilment of material needs), status (prestige), behavioural confirmation (compliance of attitudes and behaviours with one’s own norms and expectations, as well as the norms and expectations of others) and affection (emotional relationships with others, networks). People with disabilities do not have the same access to these goals, particularly to the labour market, to stimulating activities or to comfort. They are less integrated in the education system, are more often unemployed and show a higher risk of falling into poverty (Academic Network of European Disability Experts/ANED 2018 ; Bültmann and Siegrist 2020 ). The extent to which people with disabilities are disabled may vary by country, as countries provide different living conditions and opportunity structures in order to produce subjective well-being (SWB). The general assumption behind this research, therefore, is that the welfare state regime may alter the relationship between disability status and subjective well-being.

In the sociology of inequalities, disability deserves more scientific attention, although there is already a profound body of sociological enquiries into disability (e.g. Thomas 2007 ). In his classic definition of meritocracy, Young ( 1958 ) considers ability one of the legitimate key criteria for an unequal distribution of goods and positions, but (dis)ability appears to be an axis of inequality from a sociological inequality perspective. This applies in particular for definitions of inequality that emphasise inequalities as systematic variations in educational attainment, status attainment and other aspects of life along certain axes of inequality (Hadjar and Gross 2016 ) or conditions that systematically limit the life chances of certain groups and individuals (Kreckel 2004 ). A group of American sociologists (Mauldin et al. 2020 ) recently—in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic—suggested that disability should be included more often in sociological enquiries, treating it as an axis of inequality, similar to other axes of inequality, such as social origin, immigrant background and gender.

This study follows up on two previous studies. Van Campen and van Santvoort ( 2013 ) indicated country differences in the gap between people with and without disabilities, and identified a research gap with regard to the question of what is behind the cross-cultural variation. Penner ( 2012 ) studied the systematic influence of welfare states based on the 2008 data of the International Social Survey Programme. Using a sample of 14 countries and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, she revealed significantly smaller gaps in happiness between people with and without disabilities in social democratic countries. In this study, we attempt to contribute to filling this research gap by employing a multilevel approach to systematically studying cross-cultural variation, based on a larger country sample that is sufficient to carry out complex multilevel analyses. The main objective is to analyse inequalities along the axis of disability in SWB, and how these are shaped by the institutional setting of the welfare-state regime. An additional novelty of the research involves considering participation in social activities and in the labour market as social mechanisms behind the gap in subjective well-being. This research is highly relevant not only with regard to the outlined individual consequences of disability but also vis-à-vis the United Nations’ (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations 2006 ), which requires the promotion, protection and provision of the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for this group.

“Disability” is a highly debated term in public and scientific discourses, and requires a clear definition as a condition. Disability definitions range from biological accounts, linking disability only to biological impairments, to social science accounts linking disability to social exclusion and oppression mechanisms (Barnes 2012 ; Wasserman et al. 2016 ). We employ an empirical definition of our main database—the European Social Survey (ESS)—which is based on the perceptions of people who feel hampered in their daily activities by disability, illness, infirmity or mental problems. This shares some of the scope of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO 2001 ) definition of disability, which emphasises three dimensions: impairment in a person’s body and/or mental structure or function, limitations to activity and restrictions to participation in normal daily activities. It also includes what the United Nations defines as persons with disabilities relating to “long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others” (United Nations 2006 , p. 1). Although this includes both congenital and acquired disorders, as well as longstanding illness, the common denominator is that the condition is perceived as hampering everyday life and, thus, as a disability. The WHO and UN definitions seem to focus on biological interpretations, but the perception of being hampered also includes the social dimension of disability, for example, that certain conditions may exclude people with impairments and even increase their perception of being disabled.

The comparative perspective adopted in this study, based on data from 31 European countries, will allow (to a certain extent) the identification of countries that care more or less for the integration of this group into their societies. At the macro level, we focus on welfare-state regimes as an important country characteristic that determines equal living conditions for all—balancing inequality, and including inequalities that are caused by social structures according to the social model of disability (Barnes 2012 ).

In the next sections, we theorise the link between disability and SWB (2) and how macro factors affect this association (3). The data and operationalisations employed in the analyses are outlined in the method section (4). Results are presented in the following section (5), including country-specific descriptive results regarding the SWB gap between people with and without disabilities, and complex multilevel models. In a final section (6), we summarise and discuss the findings and draw conclusions.

Disability and Subjective Well-Being

Concepts and drivers of subjective well-being.

Theorising how the link between disability and SWB varies between welfare-state regimes, SWB appears to be a major goal of human actions as outlined in social production function theory (Lindenberg and Frey 1993 ; Ormel et al. 1999 ). Although this conceptualization relates to the hedonic approach to SWB with the attainment of pleasure and the absence of pain as major goals (Feldman 2010 ), there is another SWB concept arising from the eudaimonic approach that “focuses on meaning and self-realization and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning” (Ryan and Deci 2001 , p. 141). We define SWB in terms of a perceived need for satisfaction as the (temporal) condition of being more pleased than displeased about specific issues and/or life as a whole. More precisely, SWB relates to an evaluation of individual lives—particularly objective well-being in terms of objective physical and economic conditions (Gasper 2005 )—regarding a specific moment or longer periods, which comprises both a cognitive component based on a (rational) consideration of past, present and future conditions, and an affective component based on emotions and feelings (Diener 1994 ; Diener et al. 1999 ).

Well-analysed individual-level drivers of SWB include age, income, status, employment, living in a committed relationship, a network of friends and relatives (social capital), and health (e.g. Frey and Stutzer 2005 ; Hadjar and Backes 2013 ; Jones and Wass 2012 ; Ervasti and Venetoklis 2010 ). Macro level factors that have an effect on SWB at the individual level include economic prosperity, inequality and the welfare-state regime (Bonini 2008 ; Böhnke 2008 ; Hadjar and Backes 2013 ; Samuel and Hadjar 2016 ).

Health is often studied as a factor that depends on SWB—as higher SWB levels are consistent with a less stressful life and fewer mental and physical health problems (Cross et al. 2018 )—for this study, conceptual approaches and research that treats SWB as an outcome variable are of importance.

According to the social production function theory (Lindenberg and Frey 1993 ; Ormel et al. 1999 ), disability hampers the production of goods needed to achieve first-order instrumental goals and the super goal of SWB. The most obvious disadvantages that disabled people face relate to pain, tiredness and physical limitations. This not only means a lack of comfort but also affects all other first-order instrumental goals such as affection, status, stimulation and behavioural confirmation. Disability can mean fewer personal contacts, reduced prospects in the labour market (or even exclusion), limitations regarding stimulating activities (like visiting the theatre) and, less obviously, a lesser chance of achieving the things one expects from oneself in terms of behavioural confirmation.

Furthermore, applying the integration concept defined by Esser ( 2000 ), low levels of SWB among people with disabilities may relate to a lack of integration and participation, similar to people with an immigrant background (Hadjar and Backes 2013 ). People with disabilities may face limitations relating to the ability to acquire the knowledge and skills to interact successfully within society (acculturation/socialisation); to attain a position in the economic system of that society, which is linked to capital resources (placement); to form relationships and networks (interaction); to fully identify with a social system and, most importantly, to feel a part of that system (identification). The conceptual social production function (SPF) framework has not been applied to disability before, but the similar capability concept described by Nussbaum ( 2006 ) explicitly addresses quality of life and disability. According to this concept, a “good life” and an apparently high subjective well-being would require the fulfilment of certain capabilities such as a normal life span, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses, imagination and thought, emotions, affiliation (including relationships, integration and equality), and control over one’s environment. Reducing an SWB gap between people with and without disabilities would mean compensating for certain disadvantages in the first group regarding these capabilities, which are closely linked to aspects of limited accessibility in many areas of life (e.g. mobility).

The Roles of Labour Market Integration and Social Participation

The implicit core of the concepts outlined above (SPF, Ormel et al. 1999 ; integration, Esser 2000 ; capability approach, Nussbaum 2006 ) is the question of participation in all areas of society. Paid work in terms of labour market integration and social activities in terms of social participation are key to achieving certain goals, such as social approval (prestige, acknowledgement), affection (social networks, emotional ties), stimulation (interesting and fulfilling activities) or comfort related to economic resources, which are needed to finally achieve subjective well-being. People with disabilities face limitations regarding both forms of participation. The same argument is also voiced by Edwards and Imrie ( 2008 ), who emphasise the importance of community inclusion, economic participation and social integration as major drivers of SWB, and people with disabilities may be disabled in acquiring these functions owing to social, economic and medical problems. People with a disability may be more likely to be hampered in participating socially in their environment, and may suffer limitations in the labour market, as indicated by lower employment rates for disabled people (Scharle and Csillag 2016 ).

These conceptual arguments are backed by empirical evidence. Van Campen und van Santvoort ( 2013 ) show for European countries, on the basis of ESS data, that people being hampered by disability exhibit a lower SWB than people without disabilities. According to this study, a key mechanism relates to social resources (e.g., social relationships) rather than to the degree of disability or socio-economic position, although presumably the former and the latter may be strongly linked. The connection between disability and health has been empirically demonstrated by Foubert et al. ( 2014 ), who show, with data from the World Health Survey that controls for individual level determinants and macro level determinants (such as the welfare-state regime), that self-rated health is lower among people with disabilities. Another study by Foubert et al. ( 2017 ), based on the European Quality of Life Survey, indicates that economic and social participation play an important role, as the negative link between disability and SWB appears to be stronger for unemployed people and those who do not engage in voluntary work.

The impact of societal conditions is dealt with in the following section, but we postulate the following hypotheses regarding the individual level:

H 1

People with disabilities show a lower SWB.

H 2

The gap in SWB between people with and people without disabilities is a result of the lower employment and lower participation in social activities by people with disabilities.

Welfare-State Regimes and the Gap in Subjective Well-Being Between People With and Without Disabilities

The degree of disability is not only an individual phenomenon but it also depends on higher-level factors. Societal conditions in terms of context define limitations for people with disabilities on an individual level (Jones and Wass 2012 ). A study by van Campen and van Santvoort ( 2013 ), based on ESS data, revealed that the gap in SWB between people with disabilities and people without disabilities varies between European countries, and that the gap between both groups is smallest in northern countries and largest in eastern European countries. Although these studies provide some indication of country differences, we systematically focus on welfare-state regimes to study macro–micro connections. Our main argument regarding the role of the welfare-state regime as a macro-level factor is that the welfare-state regimes differ in guaranteeing equal living conditions to all people. This may also apply to differences in living conditions between people with and people without disabilities, as welfare-state regimes may also be characterised by different accessibility levels. Furthermore, social participation is a major aim of social policies (Huster 2018 ). Welfare-state regimes may also differ in their provisions for labour market integration and social participation, as social policies are also aimed at combating unemployment, and may contribute (although not explicitly) to the cohesion of society and (social) participation opportunities (Ellison 2006 ).

As the dominant argument regarding differences between welfare-state regimes regarding people with disabilities from an inequality perspective relates to the question of how a welfare-state regime deals with stratification, and in particular, whether in a welfare-state regime the aim is to reduce inequalities, we will structure our arguments and the classification of systems following the approach by Esping-Andersen ( 1990 ) and its later modification (Esping-Andersen 1999 ) on the general foundation of the welfare state. There is an important debate relating to the issue of the adequacy of typologies vis-à-vis the metric or continuous characteristics, but we believe that such typologies are meaningful as they can be understood in terms of ideal-type observations in the sense of Max Weber (Ebbinghaus 2012 , p. 2). Although welfare-state regimes are also subject to temporal change—for example with regard to the redesigning of labour market programmes (e.g. Halvorsen and Jensen 2004 )—they tend to keep the ideal-type cores of their policies. Esping-Andersen’s ( 1990 , 1999 ) general concept of welfare-state regimes relates to the degree of decommodification (whether individuals can have an acceptable living standard even if they do not participate in the market), and the degree of social stratification (whether, and to what extent, the welfare-state regime fosters or reduces inequalities). Esping-Andersen ( 1990 ) started out from a typology including three distinctive welfare-state regime types—a liberal, social-democratic and conservative type—and he later (Esping-Andersen 1999 ) added a family-oriented type when responding to feminist criticism (in the neglect of family relations) and included (de)familialisation as another core theme for comparison. As post-socialist transition countries often follow mixed policies, and are thus characterised by structures that go beyond the mention of (ideal) welfare-state regime types, the category of post-socialist welfare-state regime has also been added (Deacon 1993 ; Blossfeld and Drobnič 2001 ).

We also discuss the situation of people with disabilities in the different welfare-state regime types. Disability and welfare-state regimes are linked, as shown by conceptual considerations and empirical studies (Maschke 2008 ; O’Brien 2015 ; Penner 2012 ; Tschanz and Staub 2017 ). Welfare is of high importance for the living conditions of people who experience disabilities (Tschanz and Staub 2017 ; Foubert et al. 2014 , 2017 ). People with disabilities may benefit from welfare policies, as these will secure their needs and guarantee equality for all societal groups, and accessibility for people with disabilities in particular, but welfare-state regimes can also decrease SWB by affecting a recipient’s self-esteem. As Foubert et al. ( 2014 ) explain, giving people with disabilities a low-status label in order to identify them as being eligible for certain welfare provisions may contribute to low self-esteem, to self-stigmatisation and discrimination, and finally to a lower SWB. The meaning of being disabled and the extent to which citizens with disabilities are socially included or excluded is shaped by welfare-state regimes (O’Brien 2015 ). For example, labour market activation measures may worsen the situation of disabled people owing to labelling mechanisms (Alanko and Outinen 2016 ). The question of exclusion from the labour market is a major issue, as paid work is highly important for the living conditions of people with and without disabilities (Foubert et al. 2017 ). Penner ( 2012 ) in particular investigated the effect of welfare states on the gap in happiness between disabled and non-disabled people. Her main background assumption is that welfare-state regimes shape what disability means, and that the particular stigmatisation of people with disabilities leads to depression and low happiness. The related empirical study, based on a small country sample and only involving OLS regression (rather than a multilevel model), indicates a significantly smaller subjective well-being gap between people with and those without disabilities in social-democratic countries. In addition to the systematic association between welfare states and SWB gaps, Penner ( 2012 ) reveals differences within the welfare-state regime groups.

The following elaboration on different welfare-state regime types relates both to the concept by Esping-Andersen ( 1990 ) and to analyses that explicitly deal with disabilities and welfare (Maschke 2008 ; O’Brien 2015 ; Tschanz and Staub 2017 ). The three types of disability policy, differentiated by Maschke ( 2008 ), are derived from an analysis of data from the European Community Household Panel regarding the functions of disability policies and actual living conditions. The types include a compensatory type with policies directed at financial compensation for a lack of labour-force participation, a rehabilitation-oriented type with policies aimed at the regeneration of skills and abilities to re-integrate on the labour market, and a participatory type with policies aiming at equal participation. The four-cluster typology of Tschanz and Staub ( 2017 ), differentiating the cluster along the question of how favourable living conditions are for people with disabilities, is centred on an index based on survey results from a sample of disabled people regarding their perceptions about the degree to which they are discriminated against in their country, and the difficulties they face in accessing public transport, entering buildings and participating in political processes. It needs to be noted that the welfare-state regime typology does not overlap entirely with disabilities regime typologies such as that of Maschke ( 2008 ), or that of Tschanz and Staub ( 2017 ). Furthermore, disability regimes are also subject to temporal change and certain convergence tendencies. As Prinz ( 2003 ) concluded from their study of 11 European countries, after an expansion phase regarding the welfare regimes in general, and also regarding welfare for people with disabilities, including an increase in benefit amounts and the lowering of eligibility barriers during the second half of the twentieth century, many countries started reforms in the late 1980s to make their social welfare systems more sustainable vis-à-vis demographic developments, and benefit policies became more restrictive again, with increased barriers and reduced benefits.

Description of Four Welfare-State Regime Types

The social-democratic welfare-state regime type (Nordic countries such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland) is characterised by the highest welfare expenditure and the strongest measures to reduce inequalities. The connection between welfare measures and labour market integration is weaker than in other regime types. Although measures apply to all groups of citizens, the social-democratic countries “promote an equality of the highest standards, not an equality of minimal needs” (Esping-Andersen 1990 , p. 27). The main goal is to foster an individual’s maximal independence from the market and the family with regard to welfare. This also involves “relatively low eligibility barriers and generous cash benefits that are permanent or near-permanent” (O’Brien 2015 , p. 2). In line with this, the (empirical) typology of Tschanz and Staub ( 2017 ) situates the social-democratic countries (together with Germany) in the cluster that is characterised by high civil rights scores, and is most in favour of the integration of disabled people into society—showing strong social protection and integration and a high disability social rights score. Situating the ideal-type disability regimes of Maschke ( 2008 ) within the framework of Esping-Andersen ( 1990 ), the social-democratic regime type does fit the participatory disability regime type best, as the policies in the Nordic countries promote equal opportunities, rights and duties and participation in society for people with and without disabilities (Fietkau 2017 ).

The market orientation of conservative welfare-state regimes (e.g. Austria, France, Germany, Luxembourg) is stronger than in social-democratic systems, but at the same time social security guaranteed by the state is still a major goal. As welfare measures relate to one’s position in the labour market and in the societal hierarchy—and family resources are important units for the estimation of the provision of welfare to the individual—inequality and positions of status are reproduced to a greater extent in these regimes. Conservative regimes are characterised by strong social stratification. Another feature is subsidiarity—welfare is only provided for an individual if family resources are exhausted. Disability benefits appear to be less generous (although more generous than in the liberal systems), and are more restrictive regarding regulations and eligibility criteria (O’Brien 2015 ). Within the framework of Maschke ( 2008 ), the rehabilitation-oriented disability regime type seems to be closest to the conservative welfare-state regime, with strong benefits integrated into the social security system and strong attempts to rehabilitate and re-integrate into the labour market (Fietkau 2017 ).

Liberal welfare states (e.g. UK, US, Switzerland 1 ) show a strong market orientation, and welfare expenditures, and thus decommodifying measures, are the lowest. Minimal welfare is only provided if welfare is really needed—if all resources (including family resources) are exhausted. Individuals who receive welfare from the state tend to be stigmatised. The state plays a minimal role in providing decent and equal living conditions, and individual risks are highest. Liberal systems provide only limited disability benefits. Programmes are more restrictive, with barriers to eligibility, and are characterised by shorter durations for the provision of benefits (O’Brien 2015 ). The liberal welfare-state regime type is closely connected to the compensatory disability regime type described by Maschke ( 2008 ), as it provides limited (compensatory) benefits for people with disabilities, but also lacks strong support for re-integration into the labour market and equal participation opportunities (Fietkau 2017 ).

Family-oriented welfare-state regimes (e.g. Greece, Portugal) follow the idea that “households must carry the principal responsibility for their members’ welfare” (Esping-Andersen 1999 , p. 51). The family is the key unit of welfare, and the duty to provide financial welfare or care is assigned to the family. State or market institutions fill some of the functions of the family in other welfare-state regimes—such as providing financial welfare, childcare and care for the elderly—but families have to fulfil these functions in family-oriented systems. Inequality and stratification are pronounced, as clientelism and patronage are common (Ferrera 1996 ). O’Brien ( 2015 ) stresses that disability benefit schemes are less well developed and less generous.

The category of post-socialist welfare states (e.g. Estonia, Poland) relates to a very heterogeneous group of countries and policies, although there may be tendencies to converge towards the ideal type of Western welfare state (Deacon 1993 ). The Estonian system includes features of the social-democratic and liberal welfare-state regime types, but contemporary Hungary follows a more inequality-prone path, with stratification and the reproduction of social and ethnic inequality at its core. A common feature of post-socialist countries is transition experiences after the changes of power that lead to insecurities and widening gaps between rich and poor, and thus, high levels of social stratification (Böhnke 2008 ; Bonini 2008 ). Inglot ( 2008 ) characterises post-socialist welfare-state regimes as “emergency welfare state[s]” that are still under construction. The situation of people with disabilities is therefore often precarious in these countries for reasons that relate to former state-socialist rules and neoliberal developments after the transition, along with a stigmatisation of disability and a low level of organisations to support people with disabilities (Mladenov 2017 ). This is also backed by the cluster analysis by Tschanz and Staub ( 2017 ), who empirically assign the post-socialist countries (but also Belgium) to the least favourable cluster—with low social protection, low social integration and low civil rights scores.

Reflecting on these different welfare-state regime types and their general character regarding welfare provision and inequalities following the general concept of Esping-Andersen ( 1990 ), it would be reasonable to expect that the smallest difference in SWB between people with disabilities and people without such conditions would be found in social-democratic welfare-state type regimes, and that by comparison, inequality-prone post-socialist countries would be characterised by the largest gap in SWB. A similar assumption could be derived from Tschanz and Staub ( 2017 ), which indicates high civil rights scores for countries with social-democratic (Sweden, Denmark) or conservative welfare-state regimes (Germany, Luxembourg), and low scores for post-socialist countries (Slovakia, Hungary).

Based on the general assumption that the link between disability and SWB differs between different welfare-state regime types, we postulate the following hypothesis:

H 3

The SWB gap between people with and people without disabilities is smaller in social-democratic welfare states than in other welfare-state regime types.

As outlined, a major mechanism behind the welfare-state regime effect is the differential provision of equal opportunities in the different welfare-state regimes (Esping-Andersen 1990 ). This also links to the question of equal labour-market integration and equal social participation. Both are achieved via a high degree of accessibility, that is to say, a strong segment of workplaces that cater especially for people with disabilities, and policy measures that allow people to participate socially (e.g. in facilitating spatial mobility and communication). The labour market integration of people with disabilities may be driven not only by policy measures such as benefit-funded workplaces or disability benefit and pension schemes but also by the characteristics of labour markets, particularly a heterogeneity regarding skill demands (Maschke 2008 ). Parallel to the factors of labour market integration and social participation discussed regarding the individual level, we introduce two macro level factors that relate to the ratio between people with and without disabilities regarding labour market integration and social participation. Although the previous arguments implicitly suggest that welfare-state regimes might differ in both factors, we leave it to the empirical results to determine whether or not labour market integration and social participation are connected to welfare-state regimes, or if Hypotheses 5 and 6 are alternative/independent explanations.

H 4

The more equal the labour market integration between people with and without disabilities in a country, the smaller the SWB gap between people with and people without disabilities.

H 5

The more equal the social participation between people with and those without disabilities in a country, the smaller the SWB gap between people with and people without disabilities.

The ESS is a suitable dataset for analysing the gap in SWB between people with disabilities and people without such conditions in different welfare-state regimes, but sufficient information regarding the variables of interest in this study is not available in all countries. To include a maximum number of cases at the individual and country level—and in order to reduce the small sample bias at the macro level as well as gaining a more precise estimate at both the individual and the macro level—we use a cumulative dataset consisting of eight ESS waves (2002–2016). We reduced our sample to people between the ages of 25 and 64, because workforce participation is a major issue affecting SWB for people with disabilities, but the age reduction allows for a reduction of possible sample selection biases regarding very old people. As immigrants who were not born in the country where the data were collected are likely to have had a different socialisation experience (see Hadjar and Backes 2013 ), we controlled for these conditions. Although the initial data set comprised N  = 243,854 cases, missing values on the variables that were included in the complex models led to the exclusion of 26.4% of the sample (“listwise deletion”) so that our final models include 179,355 individual cases in 31 countries. Deleting all missing values potentially causes bias. However, a comparison of the initial and our reduced data set reveals no severe bias regarding all model variables. To reduce further bias, we employ the ESS design weight (for country-specific analyses) and a combination of the ESS design and the ESS population size weight for analyses of the multi-country data set. We also control for the major drivers of SWB, that are at the same time potential causes of bias, in the models.

Operationalizations

Table 1 lists all explanatory and control variables used in the different models, with their distributional characteristics. We present descriptive statistics for the groups of people with and without disabilities for the key concepts.

Descriptive statistics of research and control variables

Data source: ESS 2002–2016, N  = 179,355

ESS European Social Survey, ISCED International Standard Classification of Education, ISEI International Socio-Economic Index, SD standard deviation, SWB subjective well-being

a Weighted (population size weight, design weight)

The dependent variable SWB is a mean score for the affective (happiness) and the cognitive dimension (life satisfaction). The former is measured in response to the question, “Taking all things together, how happy would you say you are?” The latter relates to the question, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays?” Both scales range from “0” for “extremely unhappy/dissatisfied” to “10” for “extremely happy/satisfied”. Cronbach’s α for this two-item scale is 0.83.

The key independent variable is disability. We created a binary variable employing the ESS item based on the question of whether the respondent is hampered by illness, disability, infirmity or mental problems in their daily activities. The response categories, “yes, a lot” and “yes, to some extent”, have been transferred into the “1” category of the binary variable, and the “no” category serves as a reference category only. The ESS data enable at least three groups to be distinguished, but we need to retain this dichotomy as the case number of the severely disabled people in the third category is low (below 5%), and, according to the methodological logics of comparison, different countries have varying perceptions of degrees of disability.

We analyse participation in the labour market (employment) and social participation as the major mechanisms behind the role of disability in SWB. Employment in terms of integration into the labour market was operationalized using the ESS questions asking whether respondents had been “in paid work” during the last seven days. The reference category relates to all other people who were not in paid employment. It is not possible to divide this group into more categories owing to small sample sizes. This simplified classification is also meaningful vis-à-vis the comparative method employed, because the countries differ with regard to unemployment and non-employment categories, as labour market measures for people with disabilities differ (e.g. “medical” or “disability leave” in Germany, or disability pension, e.g. in Norway). The social participation variables relate to an interval-scaled ESS variable (rating scale, five steps). Respondents were asked about the extent to which they take part in social activities in comparison with others and indicated “much less than others” or “much more than others” in their responses.

The macro factors of welfare-state regimes relate to the typologies by Esping-Andersen ( 1990 , 1999 ) and Blossfeld et al. ( 2008 ), including the following types of welfare state: social-democratic, conservative, family-oriented, liberal and post-socialist.

We introduce two indices—generated from the cumulated ESS data set—with regard to specific macro characteristics related to disability that may potentially explain differences between welfare-state regimes: the labour market integration index relates to the gap in employment (“paid work”) between people with disabilities and people without disabilities, and the social participation index relates to the gap in social participation between the two groups. The higher the values, the better integrated people with disabilities are than people without disabilities; that is to say, the smaller the gap in integration between the groups. Interestingly, both indices seem to correspond to each other in many countries (Fig. 1 ). The Nordic countries seem to be characterised by reasonably high integration scores, but Italy as a family-oriented country outperforms even these countries regarding equality in labour market integration and social participation between people with and those without disabilities.

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Disability indices (ratio of people with and people without disabilities) by country. (Country-specific ratio between people with disabilities and people without disabilities. Data source: ESS 2002–2016 ; N  = 243,854; weight: design weight, no controls)

Control variables on the individual level include well-studied drivers of SWB such as occupational status —measured through the International Socio-Economic Index (ISEI) by Ganzeboom et al. ( 1992 ); education —which, if the effect of status is modelled simultaneously, expresses the role of cognitive capabilities to satisfy one’s needs (Samuel and Hadjar 2016 ); and gender . We introduce age group dummies to account for the non-linear relationship of age with SWB. We also control for period effects, as we pool data from different ESS research waves, and so estimates may be driven by factors that were a characteristic of that particular time.

On the macro level, we introduce the country-specific SWB as a control. This factor relates both to economic prosperity (being strongly linked to GDP) and cultural aspects such as the societal climate in the perception of living conditions. For our analyses, we calculated a country-specific mean score for the cumulative ESS dataset used in our empirical study.

A brief inspection of the differences between people with and those without disabilities shows that people with disabilities clearly score lower regarding SWB, labour market integration and social participation, whereas other differences appear to be less pronounced.

Analytical Strategy

We employ multilevel models with individuals who reside within countries on the micro level and 31 countries that represent different welfare-state regime types on the macro level to analyse the hypotheses postulated in the conceptual sections. We estimate random intercept models using robust standard errors.

The null model indicates the amount of variance in SWB on Level 2 (country level), and Model 1 indicates the role of the disability condition in SWB, controlled only for a period to account for the cumulated data set. Our stepwise inclusion of variables—first at the macro level and for cross-level interactions, later at the individual level—is because our research question centres on societal factors in the first place. Accordingly, we evaluate cross-level interaction and thus the macro level effects of the welfare-state regime (Model 2) and disability indices (Model 3) separately, and simultaneously in Model 4, always controlling for the country-average of SWB to account for cultural differences and factors related to SWB such as economic prosperity. In a next step, we add the micro level effects of employment and participation in social activities to evaluate the role of these micro-level factors (Model 5) before evaluating the net effect of disability, net of all other macro and micro factors (Model 6).

In a first step, we seek to evaluate the SWB levels of people with and without disabilities in the different countries (Fig. 2 ). SWB differs significantly in all countries according to the degree of disability, with people without disabilities showing higher SWB levels. Interestingly, the largest gaps—and the strongest inequalities and disadvantages for highly disabled people—were revealed for Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland as post-socialist countries, and the smallest gaps were revealed for the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland and Norway, the conservative system of the Netherlands and for the family-oriented country of Italy.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is 11577_2021_805_Fig2_HTML.jpg

Average SWB of people with and without disabilities by country. (Data source: ESS 2002–2016 ; N  = 179,355; weight: design weight, no controls)

However, Fig. 2 only allows for a (limited) visual inspection. Complex multilevel models controlling for major drivers of SWB at the individual and societal levels need to be estimated to create an adequate picture of the difference in SWB (Tab. 2 ).

Macro- and micro-level effects on SWB, multilevel models with random intercepts, robust standard errors

Null model: variance components − SD constant (country level) = 0.82 (0.09); SD residual (individual level) = 1.86 (0.05)

Data source: ESS 2002–2018; N individuals = 179,355, N countries = 31; weight: dweight (design weight) * pweight (population size weight)

SWB subjective well-being, ISEI International Socio-Economic Index, ESS European Social Survey, SD standard deviation, LL log likelihood

Significance levels: *** p  ≤ 0.001, ** p  ≤ 0.01; * p  ≤ 0.05; † p  ≤ 0.10

Evaluating the null model (see table notes; Tab. 2 ) first reveals that some 31% of the variation in SWB relates to the country level and 69% to the individual level. Model 1 indicates a strong negative association between the disability condition and SWB. An evaluation of the association between welfare-state regime type and the disability–SWB link reveals significant negative cross-level interaction effects in Model 2, indicating that the negative distinction—and thus the gap—of people with disabilities in SWB is significantly more pronounced in conservative, liberal and post-socialist welfare states than in social-democratic countries. Model 3 evaluates the role of disability indices and shows a significant cross-level interaction effect between the disability social participation index and disability: the lower the gap in social participation between people with and without disabilities, the lower the gap in SWB between both groups. On the other hand, the gap in labour market integration does not seem to play a role in the SWB gap. In the complex Model 4, involving all macro variables, both the cross-level interactions of welfare-state regime type and disability and of the disability social participation index and disability appear to be quite persistent. This suggests that both factors might function rather independently of each other, and there is also a very marginal indication (slightly lower coefficients) that part of the variance of the welfare-state regime effects may relate to the gap in social participation. Model 5 additionally includes the two individual-level effects relating to participation in the labour force and in social activities. After including both variables, the effect of disability is reduced compared with the previous model (although not significantly, as the standard errors reveal), but remains significant. This indicates that the lower SWB of people with disabilities is only partly linked to their lower participation in the labour market and in social activities. The strong negative link between disability and SWB persists in the complex Model 6, now controlling for individual-level factors such as education, social status, immigrant background, gender, whether one is living with a partner, and age, as well as for period. This also applies to the cross-level interactions between welfare-state regimes and disability. In Models 5 and 6, the cross-level interaction effect of the disability social participation index is no longer significant, which relates to the introduction of the participation variables at the micro level. As the welfare-state regime effects appear to be persistent, the background drivers of this link may go beyond labour market integration and social participation, or factors connected to the other macro- and micro-level factors in the models.

Conclusions

The main objective of this study was to evaluate how welfare-state regimes shape inequalities in SWB related to disability. Before discussing our findings, we will briefly evaluate our hypotheses regarding the micro level and the macro level in light of the results. In the micro level hypotheses, the results supported Hypothesis 1, that people with disabilities show a lower SWB. As unemployment negatively influenced SWB and social participation positively influenced SWB, Hypothesis 2 received only some support. The gap in SWB between people with and people without disabilities is only partly linked to lower employment and a lower participation in social activities, in that although the effect size of disability decreased, the effect remained significant after the inclusion of unemployment and social participation. In contrast to our macro-level assumption that the gap between people with and people without disabilities in social-democratic welfare states would be smaller than in other welfare-state regime types (Hypothesis 3), our results indicate that the family-oriented welfare-state regimes do not differ significantly from the Nordic social-democratic countries. Both regime types seem to be beneficial for the SWB of people with disabilities. Thus, this hypothesis only received some support. However, welfare-state regime types appear to play a role in the country differences regarding the links between disability and SWB. Hypothesis 4 was not supported in our results, as the ratio of labour market integration between people with and without disabilities (disability labour market integration index) did not show any significant association with the SWB gap between the two groups. However, there is some indication that lower differences in social participation between people with and without disabilities (disability social participation index) relate to a lower SWB gap between the two groups, as postulated in Hypothesis 5.

These results illustrate the importance of disability as an axis of inequality that deserves more attention. Welfare-state provisions—even in the often criticised categorical operationalisation by Esping-Andersen ( 1990 , 1999 )—seem to not only affect inequalities with regard to class, status and migration background, but also with regard to disability. Welfare-state categories may still make sense (Ebbinghaus 2012 ) and can function as heuristic tools (Samuel and Hadjar 2016 ), even with regard to “new” issues; however, although the social-democratic Nordic welfare states performed well in the reduction of inequalities and the provision of reasonable life conditions for all, these countries did not appear to be distinct from the family-oriented welfare states with regard to inequalities along the axis of disability. Presumably, integration into societal structures and the family in family-oriented systems seems to function in a similar manner to the integration mechanisms in the social-democratic countries that relate to strong welfare-state provisions, communities and families. Families seem to be equivalent to the strong welfare-state policies in the Nordic countries, and produce some level of inclusion for people with disabilities. This argument is somehow backed by the significant effect of the disability social participation index regarding the disability SWB link. Family-oriented countries, particularly Italy, show a relatively low gap between the social participation of people with and without disabilities.

The finding that social participation and labour market integration on the micro level are associated with an increased SWB, and partly account for the disability effect, indicates the importance of these issues for well-being. However, considering how macro-level factors link to the SWB gap between people with and without disabilities, only equality in social participation, and not equality in labour market integration in a country seemed to play a role in the SWB gap, and the effects of the welfare-state regime were not strongly affected by these factors. This may be because welfare measures and labour market integration are not necessarily closely linked (as in the case of Nordic countries, Esping-Andersen 1990 ). Furthermore, people labelled as “paid workers” may also work in precarious job conditions, and people with disabilities make up a certain share of the “working poor” (Zagorsky 1999 ). However, welfare-state regimes not only differ with regard to inequalities but also with regard to how they provide (and encourage) opportunities for participation, as they also show distinct levels of social capital (Kääriäinen and Lehtonen 2006 ). Inclusion into society and its sub-fields, rather than segregation and exclusion, as also indicated by other disability researchers (see Oliver and Barnes 2010 ), seems to be the best way to increase SWB for people with disabilities. As Powell ( 2003 ) emphasises with regard to the education system, having definitions that differ between countries matters. “Labelled and categorical boundaries drawn around dis/ability” (Powell 2003 , p. 57) in terms of exclusion alter individual trajectories and produce inequality. Early inclusion measures may therefore also be beneficial, as—owing to path dependency—these will affect inclusion and well-being throughout one’s life.

The main limitations of the research relate to the measurement of disability, which only relates to the respondent’s own perceptions of whether or not they feel hampered in their daily activities. Such subjective perceptions may vary between countries and cultures. Differentiating only between two groups—people perceiving themselves as greatly or to some extent disabled versus people who do not perceive themselves to have any disability—appears to be somewhat simplified (see reasons provided in the Methods section); however, the advantage of comparing these two groups is that this is a rather conservative test of our hypotheses, as the gaps in SWB between people without disabilities and the category of severely disabled people would be stronger than shown in our analysis, where both medium and severely disabled people are collapsed into one category. Disability and ill health are also subsumed under one category here, whereas disability research always strives to disentangle the two conditions (Oliver and Barnes 2010 ). As the employed measures disabling conditions, however, including physical and mental health problems, it may make sense heuristically to subsume these aspects under the term “disability”. In general, future research needs to differentiate between different forms of disability, as conditions and how they are perceived may differ between groups (e.g. people suffering from mental problems, visually impaired people, or people who are suffering from paraplegia). Another methodological limitation relates to the number of countries at the macro level. Although the number is sufficient for multilevel analyses that require a minimum of 20 countries, the relatively small number of countries ( N  = 31) does not allow for the coverage of more factors or controls at the macro level. Bias due to omitted variables may thus affect some of the findings.

Welfare-state regime types do matter with regard to disparities in SWB along the axis of disability. The Nordic social-democratic model is the most promising in providing equal living conditions for people with and without disabilities, as required under the United Nations convention (2006). We can also conclude from our results that the role of welfare-state regimes is not explained by better social participation or better labour market integration of people with disabilities, but goes far beyond. Future research involving more detailed analyses of welfare measures, and based on new categorisations such as the disability regime classification developed by Tschanz and Staub ( 2017 ), may provide even deeper insights.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, editors, and Christina Haas and Christoph Tschanz for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Biographies

1974, is a Full Professor in Sociology, Social Policy and Social Research at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), which he joined in 2021. He has been conducting projects at the University of Luxembourg as a Professor of Sociology of Education (since 2010). He studied at Leipzig University (Germany) and Glasgow University (Scotland), MA in 1998. He worked as a research scientist in the Sociology Department, Chemnitz University of Technology (Germany) and gained his PhD in 2003. He was a lecturer in the Sociology of Education Department, University of Berne (Switzerland) from 2004 to 2010, venia legend (habilitation) in 2008. His main research interests include sociology of education, social structure analysis, subjective well-being, political sociology (especially identities, social values, attitudes), gender, migration and methods of empirical research.

Edith Kotitschke

1982, is currently taking a sabbatical. She studied sociology at the University of Bielefeld, receiving her diploma degree in 2010. She was a PhD candidate at the University of Bern (Switzerland), before receiving her PhD degree in 2014. Thereafter, she worked at the District Council of Göttingen (Germany), at the Swiss Distance University of Applied Sciences (Fernfachhochschule Schweiz—FFHS), Brig (Switzerland) and at the Hochschule Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences (Germany). Her research interests include sociology of families, sociology of education and disability.

1 Trampusch ( 2010 ) notes that the Swiss welfare system also includes conservative features.

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The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development

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29 The Welfare State

Christopher Howard is Pamela C. Harriman Professor of Government and Public Policy at The College of William and Mary.

Published: 01 July 2014
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The American welfare state has a long and complicated history. Political institutions, organized groups, ideas, and values have worked singly and in myriad combinations to shape US social policy; no single factor stands out as the most important influence. The end result, however, is increasingly clear. Built over many decades and shaped by so many different hands, the American welfare state has emerged as a large, jerry-rigged contraption capable of helping some groups of citizens far more than others. While citizens, pundits, and policymakers alike may lament the lack of rational design, a historical perspective helps us understand why the contemporary American welfare state fails to deliver on some of its promises.

The three core questions in the social sciences are: What happened? Why? and Who cares? This chapter will summarize how scholars versed in American political development (APD)—primarily political scientists, sociologists, and historians—have answered those questions with respect to the American welfare state. The “what” question leads us to consider the composition of the welfare state, when social programs were created, and when they grew or contracted. Although description often takes a back seat to explanation among social scientists, some of the most interesting work on US social policy in recent decades has focused on categorization and periodization. The “why” question is about power: figuring out which parts of the American political system have been responsible for shaping the welfare state, and how. The “who cares” or “so what” question routinely bridges empirical and normative concerns. Many of these studies are animated by concerns over how well the United States cares for its citizens, now and in the past. As scholars have examined the historical development of the American welfare state, they have shed light on contemporary debates over social policy. At the same time, APD scholars have deepened our understanding of American politics more generally.

The overall picture that emerges has complicated our understanding of what happened and why, while clarifying the larger significance of the American welfare state. It now appears that the United States is more than a pale imitation of its European siblings—more than a welfare state “laggard.” The US government has been making social policy for a long time, perhaps well before the New Deal, and has been using a remarkably wide variety of policy tools. Some of these tools, such as social insurance, are well known but others (e.g., tax expenditures, loan guarantees) are not. The American welfare state has grown when the economy was weak or strong, and when the president has been a Democrat or Republican. Political institutions, organized groups, ideas, and values have worked singly and in myriad combinations to shape the welfare state; no single factor stands out as the most important influence. The end result, however, is increasingly clear. Built over many decades, and shaped by so many different hands, the American welfare state has emerged as a large, jerry-rigged contraption capable of helping some groups of citizens far more than others. While citizens, pundits, and policymakers alike may lament the lack of rational design, a historical perspective helps us understand why the contemporary American welfare state fails to deliver on some of its promises.

What Happened and When

The classic developmental stages of the American welfare state are birth, growth, and retrenchment. The conventional wisdom is that the American welfare state was “born” on August 14, 1935—the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law (e.g., Jansson 2012 ; Orloff 1988 ; Skocpol 1995 , ch. 4). This moment came decades later than in several European nations. For the first time, the US government created social insurance programs for the elderly and the unemployed. For the first time, the US government helped fund cash assistance programs for the poor elderly, poor blind, and poor single-mother families. Today we know these programs as Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)—all key parts of the modern welfare state. The Act also helped establish the basic two-tiered structure of the American welfare state. The upper tier of social insurance programs, anchored by Social Security, would soon enjoy several advantages, politically and programmatically, over the lower tier of public assistance programs. Benefits would be larger and grow faster; eligibility rules would be more uniform around the country; and there would be little if any stigma associated with receiving benefits in the upper tier ( Brown 1999 ; Gordon 1994 ; Skocpol 1988 ).

The growth phase occurred between the mid-1930s and mid-1970s. Some of this growth reflected expansions of existing programs. Social Security added benefits for surviving spouses and dependent children in 1939, extended coverage to millions more workers in the 1950s, and increased the value of benefits substantially in the late 1960s and early 1970s ( Derthick 1979 ). Yet much of the growth came in the form of new social programs. Not long after the Social Security Act, the Housing Act of 1937 initiated public housing for low-income renters. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 created a nationwide minimum wage in many industries. Subsidized school lunches emerged right after World War II, and Disability Insurance was enacted in 1956. The best-known burst of expansion happened in the mid-1960s during the Great Society. The advent of Medicare and Medicaid (1965) was a milestone in health policy, and the creation of additional anti-poverty programs (e.g., Food Stamps, Head Start, job training) filled major gaps in the social safety net ( Brauer 1982 ; Derthick 1979 ; Howard 2007 ).

All this expansion coincided with a historic drop in poverty. Between 1959 and 1974, the US poverty rate fell by half. The sheer number of people in poverty declined from almost 40 million to fewer than 24 million, even as the total US population was growing ( DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith 2012 ). Indeed, studies demonstrated that most of this decline was due to greater spending on social programs ( Campbell 2003 ; Englehardt and Gruber 2004 ; Schwarz 1983 ). The combination of policy innovation and real-world impact made the middle decades of the twentieth century a golden era in the history of US social policy.

Many scholars believe that the trajectory of welfare states, including the US version, changed sharply in the 1970s (e.g., Béland 2010 ; Hacker 2002 ; Pierson 1996 ). Pressured by slower economic growth, aging populations, spiraling medical costs, and stronger right-wing parties, governments found it increasingly difficult to expand their welfare states. Retrenchment became the order of the day. During the Ford and Carter administrations, the fiscal health of the Social Security trust fund deteriorated rapidly. Elected officials in the early 1980s responded by making a number of changes to Social Security, including the first-ever increase in the retirement age and taxation of benefits ( Light 1985 ). Republican President Reagan succeeded in cutting many programs for the poor in his first budget. The most dramatic episode happened in the mid-1990s as officials transformed Aid to Families with Dependent Children into TANF. The new program became a block grant, not a budgetary entitlement, which meant that spending would not rise automatically if demand grew. Eligible parents faced tougher work requirements and new time limits. The whole point was to discourage poor people from relying on government assistance ( Weaver 2000 ). Other attempts at retrenchment may have failed, such as President George W. Bush’s plan to partially privatize Social Security, but the fact that they were even seriously considered signified a real change in official discourse ( Teles and Derthick 2009 ).

Likewise, the performance of the American welfare state took a turn for the worse. Poverty rates stopped dropping; since the mid-1970s, they have fluctuated between 11 and 15 percent, thus erasing some of the earlier gains. By virtually every measure, economic inequality has grown in recent decades ( DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith 2012 ; McCall and Percheski 2010 ). In short, it appears that the exciting youth of the American welfare state has given way to a doleful middle age.

Recent scholarship has offered a number of friendly amendments and more serious challenges to the standard narrative of growth, expansion, and retrenchment outlined above. Some of the most thought-provoking work concerns US social policy prior to the New Deal. From historians such as Michael Katz (1986) , Roy Lubove (1986 [1968]) , and Walter Trattner (1999 [1974]) , we have long known that state and local governments cared for needy citizens in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notable examples include local poorhouses and statewide mothers’ pensions laws. The usual story is to chart the evolution of social provision up from the local (nineteenth century) to the state (Progressive era) to the national level (New Deal). A number of scholars, however, have argued that the US government was actively engaged in making social policy during the nineteenth century, well before the Social Security Act of 1935.

The first tax expenditures for social welfare appeared in the 1910s and 1920s. Some of the largest tax breaks today—for home mortgage interest, company-based pensions, and charitable contributions—originated before the New Deal ( Howard 1997 ). Admittedly, these programs started out small, but that is true for many social programs.

During this same era, the national government extended aid to women and children. In Muller v. Oregon (1908), the Supreme Court unanimously upheld that state’s maximum hours law for women. Such laws, the Court believed, would safeguard the health of mothers and thus benefit their children and the nation as a whole. The Sheppard-Towner Infancy and Maternity Protection Act of 1921 provided grants to states so they could take steps to lower infant and maternal mortality. Sheppard-Towner was particularly important in small towns and rural areas that had limited medical care ( Skocpol 1992 ).

Civil War pensions touched many, many lives. What started as a fairly limited benefit for disabled veterans and for the widows and orphans of soldiers grew to become one of the largest parts of the national budget by the turn of the twentieth century. Elected officials deliberately loosened the eligibility rules so that practically anyone who had served in the Union Army could benefit, even if they had not been injured during combat. Civil War pensions became, according to Theda Skocpol (1992) , a de facto disability and retirement program by the end of the nineteenth century. True, these pensions did not reach all of the elderly, but neither did conventional retirement pensions being offered in Europe at the time, and nor did Social Security in its early years. Moreover, the average Civil War pension was larger than the average pension offered in Germany or Britain in the early twentieth century. 1

We are accustomed to thinking about social policy as income transfers or in-kind services. In theory, the government could also reward certain kinds of behavior by distributing assets to select groups of individuals. In the nineteenth century, the US government distributed large tracts of land, some to military veterans and some to civilians. The Homestead Act of 1862 may be the best-known example. “In essence, Congress created and disbursed particular entitlements in order to recruit people to do the Government’s bidding, whether that was fighting foreign enemies, exterminating Native Americans, settling upon southern or western lands, or establishing certain forms of economic development on the frontier” ( Jensen 2003 : 12; see also Balogh 2009 ).

By highlighting examples such as these, scholars are implicitly challenging prevailing conceptions of “the welfare state.” Those who date the origin of the American welfare state to the New Deal believe that social insurance is a defining feature of the welfare state. And they believe that the welfare state represents a particular set of responses to problems associated with industrialization (e.g., prolonged unemployment, workplace accidents). This is entirely consistent with the way European welfare states have been treated in the literature. By contrast, those who believe the American welfare state started before the New Deal feel that involvement by the national government is more important than any particular policy tool. After all, unemployed workers and the elderly did not take to the streets demanding new programs funded by payroll taxes, with benefits tied to past wages, and administered through a special trust fund—all hallmarks of social insurance. They just wanted the national government to help them escape poverty, get a job, and lead a decent life. These same scholars see paid employment as one of several possible avenues by which individuals can legitimately claim government aid. Military service is another avenue, along with territorial expansion and motherhood ( Jensen 2003 ; Skocpol 1992 ).

Although I have been one of those scholars trying to push back the origins of the American welfare state, I recognize some problems with this view. One of the more vexing is where to draw the line: is there anything government could do for individuals or groups that would not count as the welfare state? One option would be to define the welfare state as any policy that affects poverty and inequality; Civil War pensions would certainly qualify there. Another option would be to define the welfare state as everything government does “to protect the public from the impact of unregulated market forces” ( Noble 1997 , 7). In that case, food safety regulations and zoning laws may qualify as parts of the welfare state; ultimately, the welfare state could be just a synonym for the domestic side of government. In my experience, APD scholars (myself included) have not fully engaged with the conceptual implications of their forays into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The more common strategy has been to sidestep the issue by referring to activities before the New Deal as “social policy” and to programs emerging from the 1930s on as either “social policy” or “the welfare state.”

A broader conception of the welfare state has also prompted a re-examination of the mid-twentieth century. In effect, a number of scholars believe that the extent of growth during this period has been understated. Hacker (2002) , Howard ( 1997 , 2007 ), Klein (2003) , and others have drawn attention to the remarkable expansion of company-based pensions and health insurance during this era. In 1940, for instance, only about one American in ten had private health insurance. By 1960, almost two-thirds were insured. It is misleading to think of these benefits as “private” because the US government has long been subsidizing them through the tax code. Companies that provided health insurance or retirement pensions can deduct the cost from their taxable income; they are favored over firms that do not offer such benefits to their workers. By the 1970s, the annual cost of these tax expenditures had escalated from the millions to the tens of billions of dollars. Thus, both direct and indirect forms of social spending grew during that era.

Although their cost cannot be measured the same way as Social Security or Medicaid, government loans and loan guarantees clearly expanded during the middle third of the twentieth century. To promote homeownership, especially among low- and moderate-income Americans, the national government created Federal Housing Administration loan guarantees during the New Deal. The GI Bill (1944) made it possible for millions of World War II veterans to get loans for housing and higher education, and it is widely credited with helping to broaden the middle class ( Mettler 2005 ). The American welfare state was even more vibrant in these decades than we thought.

Making sense of contemporary trends has exposed more fundamental differences of opinion. Evidence of retrenchment has been discussed already, and no one would deny that parts of the American welfare state have been cut back. Yet, at the same time, other parts of the welfare state have continued to expand ( Erkulwater 2006 ; Howard 2007 ; Jacobs and Skocpol 2010 ; Morgan and Campbell 2011 ). Court rulings and legislation fostered growth in programs for the disabled during the 1980s and 1990s. Legislated expansions to the Earned Income Tax Credit (in 1986, 1990, and 1993) and creation of a Child Tax Credit (1997) substantially enlarged cash assistance to families with children. The Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) enabled workers in large businesses to take parental leave without losing their jobs. The addition of a prescription drug benefit (2003) filled a major gap in Medicare. Indeed, Medicare and Medicaid have been two of the fastest-growing parts of the national budget for many years. The major tax expenditures for health insurance, retirement pensions, and housing combined now cost the Treasury over $300 billion in foregone revenues each year. Last but surely not least, the Affordable Care Act (2010) promises to be the single most important expansion of the American welfare state since the Great Society.

In light of these developments, one might try to amend the conventional wisdom. Perhaps programs for the poor have experienced an era of retrenchment, while programs for the elderly and for families have continued to expand. The differences between the upper and lower tiers of the American welfare state have therefore grown bigger with time. One problem with this amendment is that the two largest programs for the poor, Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit, have experienced significant growth ( Howard 2007 ).

Alternatively, one might claim that the American welfare state never really went through an era of retrenchment. Cutbacks have been few in number and too small to alter the basic trend of more and bigger social programs. The era of growth continues. This, too, strikes me as problematic. For one, recent trends in poverty and inequality discussed earlier do not seem consistent with an era of growth. In a similar vein, Jacob Hacker (2004) notes that overt retrenchment of social programs is not the only way in which welfare states respond to stress. Sometimes the benefits of social programs erode gradually over time without any policy change. Company-based health insurance is a classic example. Even though the tax expenditure attached to health insurance costs more, the percentage of workers with insurance has steadily declined while those who have insurance face higher and higher out-of-pocket costs. And, Hacker points out, welfare states sometimes fail to adapt to new social needs. Here one might cite the continued absence of paid parental leave in the United States, or the limited support for long-term care. The growing numbers of two-earner families and of senior citizens would seem to warrant more government action than we have seen. Perhaps, then, we might characterize recent decades as an era of inertia, one where most (not all) existing programs sustained their momentum, but an era without major changes in direction. 2

Leading Explanations

An earlier generation of scholars was inclined to create parsimonious explanations with broad scope. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, for example, contended that many US social programs were designed to regulate the behavior of the poor. “[R]elief arrangements are initiated or expanded during the occasional outbreaks of civil disorder produced by mass unemployment, and are then abolished or contracted when political stability is restored” (1971, xiii). After comparing old-age pensions, healthcare, and a number of other policies in North America and Europe, Anthony King was struck by how little the US government did. Embracing a national values perspective, he famously declared that “the State plays a more limited role in America than elsewhere because Americans, more than other people, want it to play a limited role” ( King 1973 , 418).

Such expansive theorizing has become less common. APD scholars usually favor analytic depth over explanatory breadth. Their appreciation for history makes them sensitive to context and contingency: they look for interactions among variables; they believe that, under certain conditions, small actions can have big effects. Their preferred research design is the case study, and by building a historical dimension into their cases, APD scholars find it easier to identify patterns of policymaking and to detect causal mechanisms. Consequently, their generalizations are typically mid-range, limited to a specific time period or subset of social programs. 3

A couple of examples may help illustrate this pattern. Sven Steinmo and Jon Watts (1995) have argued that the repeated failure of national health insurance in the United States has a simple explanation—“It’s the Institutions, Stupid!” The fragmentation of political authority (e.g., in a presidential, not parliamentary system, with powerful congressional committees) has made it possible for determined minorities to thwart the majority’s preference for national health insurance. The authors wisely did not claim that these same obstacles prevented a national system of retirement pensions (i.e., Social Security) from emerging. Their argument was limited to health insurance. In addition, one can watch individual scholars use different explanations for different parts of the welfare state. Although Jill Quadagno (2005) has attributed the failure of national health insurance to the power of doctors and insurers, she did not stress the power of business interests when analyzing anti-poverty policies. Rather, she emphasized the importance of racial conflict ( Quadagno 1994 ).

The work of Theda Skocpol deserves special attention here, partly because of the scope and quality of her research and partly because she has trained or worked with so many other APD scholars in this field. 4 Skocpol is an institutionalist, but her institutional variables routinely interact with social identities, interest groups, and political parties (e.g., Skocpol 1992 , 1995 , 1996 ). For example, she has noted that in a federal political system, interest groups organized in a federated manner—and not based solely in Washington—are well positioned to exert influence. They can pressure national, state, and local leaders to adopt or reject policy change. Her insight applies equally to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in the early decades of the twentieth century, which helped to enact mothers’ pensions in most American states, and to the National Federation of Independent Business, which helped to defeat the Clinton health plan in the 1990s.

These kinds of interactions are common among other APD scholars. While institutional variables are prominent, they often work in tandem with other factors. 5 Suzanne Mettler (1998) analyzed the early years of the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act through the lenses of federalism and gender. The interaction of policy design, federalism, and race is central to Robert Lieberman’s (1998) analysis of Social Security, unemployment insurance, and Aid to Dependent Children. For both authors, social programs that relied heavily on state and local governments were particularly vulnerable to gender stereotyping or racial prejudice. Truly national programs tended to treat people more equitably. Likewise, policy design, business, and labor play key roles in Hacker’s (2002) study of retirement pensions and healthcare.

Consider the difference between a classic and a more modern APD analysis of the same social program. Martha Derthick’s (1979) history of Social Security remained the standard for many years. Her analysis focused squarely on bureaucrats and legislators and policy design, all core elements of an institutional approach, as she chronicled the growth of the program from the 1930s to the 1970s. Other factors such as labor unions and public opinion played minor supporting roles. The more recent history of Social Security by Daniel Béland (2005) pays close attention to institutions, but also to policy ideas, gender, and to a lesser degree race. Part of the difference between the two studies simply reflects different time periods. In the years after Derthick’s book was published, the bureaucrats at the Social Security Administration lost power in Washington and, as Béland shows, a variety of state and societal actors took their place. Nevertheless, even when Béland is analyzing Social Security between the 1930s and the 1970s, he pays close attention to ideas about who should benefit and how much help the government should give them.

These interactions are clearly evident in the work of scholars who investigate “policy feedback.” This concept has been one of the hallmarks of APD research over the last two decades. The basic claim is that policy decisions made at one point in time can alter the political landscape at some later point in time. Policies become the cause and not just the effect of political struggle. Policy feedback is inherently a historical process. Andrea Louise Campbell (2003) , for instance, shows how expansion of Social Security in the 1960s and early 1970s helped to mobilize the elderly into politics and transform them into a powerful constituency by the 1980s. Social Security enhanced the resources of the elderly, such as time and money, and their interest in politics. Mettler (2005) does something similar when analyzing the impact of the GI Bill on veterans. Both accounts combine institutional factors (i.e., the structure of government programs) with political behavior. Both accounts demonstrate how certain social programs can develop a constituency that later helps those same programs to expand or to resist cuts. The impact of policy on political behavior can extend in other directions, too. By contrasting Disability Insurance and Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Joe Soss (2000) was able to reveal how social programs shape recipients’ sense of political efficacy and their attitudes toward government.

Policy feedback can affect ideas and strategies as well. Lawrence Jacobs (1993) shows how the growing popularity of Social Security after World War II gave officials a new model for health insurance. Instead of trying to provide health insurance for all, they would target aid at the elderly and finance the program through payroll taxes. Thus Medicare was born. Hacker (2002) , examining the same era, has argued that the failure of national health insurance under Truman prompted labor unions to switch their focus to private health insurance, and later to push for a public program that would help retired union workers who could not afford private insurance. And thus Medicare was born.

The addition of policy feedback provided a much needed source of change to institutional explanations. Had APD scholars based their institutional analysis on classic features such as constitutional checks and balances, federalism, and administrative capacity, they soon would have been marginalized within the academy. While these institutions remain relatively stable over time, social programs are constantly emerging, growing, or occasionally shrinking. One cannot get very far analytically by using a constant to explain a variable. However, if social programs themselves are institutions, and social programs help to shape interests and ideas, then scholars are better equipped to explain variations in policymaking.

By turning “social policy” from a dependent to an independent variable, APD scholars opened up all sorts of analytic possibilities. They can investigate how social programs shape interest groups, political parties, voting behavior, public opinion, elites’ conceptions of good policy, or racial and gender hierarchies. They can investigate how government programs affect comparable benefits in the private sector. Those possibilities, combined with scholars’ desire to understand the interactions among multiple factors, help explain why APD scholarship in general and policy feedback in particular have been such a growth industry. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether all this scholarly activity takes us in many directions, each potentially interesting, without generating the kind of coherence and theoretical clarity found in earlier generations of welfare state studies. Just because we see a thousand flowers blooming does not mean we have a well-tended garden. In short, we may have reached the point where thoughtful synthesis would really be helpful.

Larger Significance

The implications of these studies go beyond social policy. Collectively, APD scholars have generated a fascinating portrait of the American state. They have discovered that Social Security, the single largest domestic program and the foundation of the American welfare state, is in many ways atypical. The national government is solely responsible for financing and administering Social Security. Its role is highly visible. In many other parts of the welfare state, however, the national government shares responsibility for these tasks with some combination of state governments, employers, non-profit organizations, and individuals. Government’s role is more indirect, less visible; the lines separating public and private are consistently blurred. 6 As many of the studies cited earlier in this chapter attest, that blurring of lines has been a defining feature of American government as far back as the nineteenth century. Consequently, anyone who refers to the American state as small (e.g., King 1973 , cited above) is probably underestimating all the ways in which the US government encourages or commands others to help accomplish its objectives. APD scholars may refer to parts of the welfare state as hidden ( Howard 1997 ), shadow ( Gottschalk 2000 ), submerged ( Mettler 2011 ), or delegated ( Morgan and Campbell 2011 ), but they do not call it small.

Even with Social Security at the core, pension policy is a complicated mix of public and private. The government uses the tax code to encourage employers to offer pensions to their workers, and to encourage individuals to set up their own retirement accounts (IRAs). Those pensions are in turn managed by financial institutions like Fidelity Investments, Vanguard, and TIAA-CREF. Because homes are the main asset of the elderly, and that asset can be and often is converted to income, comparable tax breaks for housing function indirectly as a source of retirement income. Employers are subject to a bevy of regulations designed to ensure that their pensions are widely available, adequately funded, and managed responsibly. The government also insures defined-benefit pension plans in the private sector through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. That way, if companies are going bankrupt, pensioners will not suffer heavy losses ( Hacker 2002 ; Howard 2007 ; Howard and Berkowitz 2008 ).

Although the United States lacks national health insurance, the national government still plays many roles. The US government both finances and delivers healthcare to veterans as well as active duty military and their families—a small slice of Sweden in our own backyard. In its other healthcare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, the government relies on for-profit and non-profit doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, and drug companies to provide care. The US government works with state governments to finance and administer Medicaid. State-level agencies also help to certify that non-elderly Americans are severely disabled enough to qualify for Medicare. Employers all over the country use tax expenditures to help cover their cost of insuring their employees, who are covered by private insurers. Government regulations compel hospitals to provide emergency care to everyone, even those who lack health insurance. Despite all that governments and employers do, individuals still bear substantial out-of-pocket costs for medical care ( Hacker 2002 ; Howard 2007 ; Howard and Berkowitz 2008 ; Morgan and Campbell 2011 ).

The result, I argue ( Howard 2007 ), is a state that helps resolve the conflicting feelings that Americans have about government. In the abstract, most Americans want limited government. When asked about specific social programs or needy groups, Americans are much more supportive (e.g., Page and Jacobs 2009 ). They want less government and they want more. One way to reconcile those sentiments is to have a government dedicated to solving many problems—but working with and through many other actors. Power and responsibility are thus diffused broadly within the polity.

Nevertheless, such a state is not well designed to satisfy other criteria of good government such as transparency, accountability, or efficiency. When the housing sector collapsed in 2007–2008, citizens had great difficulty figuring out how much to blame government for its regulatory, tax, and loan policies, or the banks, or the financial wizards who invented mortgage-backed securities, or themselves. People are largely unaware of who benefits from the major tax expenditures, and some research indicates that their support would drop if they realized how much the rich were benefitting ( Mettler 2011 ). Indeed, the lack of debate and distinct votes on tax expenditures means that members of Congress may not understand their impact either ( Howard 1997 ). The US healthcare system is notoriously wasteful, with billions and billions of dollars spent each year on paperwork, advertising, and profits. Other nations, using government more directly, are able to provide medical care to all their citizens at a lower cost ( Howard and Berkowitz 2008 ; Reid 2009 ). At the end of the day, governing starts to resemble community theater where practically everyone in town gets to play a role, but some of them do not know their lines and only a few are credible actors.

Besides illuminating the complex and at times convoluted structure of American government, APD scholars who study the welfare state have also contributed to contemporary policy debates. The significance of their work lies partly in explaining how social programs came to be and suggesting how they might be changed in the future.

From time to time we hear calls for national health insurance in the United States, backed by a long list of potential benefits. Anyone who has read The Divided Welfare State ( Hacker 2002 ), One Nation Uninsured ( Quadagno 2005 ), or similar studies will probably have serious doubts about the political feasibility of such a move. For well over half a century, this country has been developing a system with private health insurance at the core, supplemented by public programs for the elderly, poor, and seriously disabled. Employers, labor unions, insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, the AARP, and many elected officials have worked hard to establish this public–private mix. They have a large stake in the status quo, and they are highly motivated to resist wholesale changes. Passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 would seem to bear out this diagnosis, as it expands private and public sources of health insurance. President Obama and his allies made sure that their plan could not be mistaken for Canadian-style national health insurance. On a smaller scale, Howard (2002) has described how state-level workers’ compensation programs developed a network of stakeholders that consistently resists calls for greater involvement by the national government. Technically, nationalization of health insurance and workers’ compensation would probably make these programs less wasteful and more equitable. But the accumulated weight of prior commitments—what scholars refer to as path dependence—makes systemic reform unlikely.

Most people realize that Social Security will need to be changed in order to keep it fiscally sound over the long run. One possibility is some form of privatization in which part or all of the Social Security trust fund would be transformed into private retirement accounts. Privatization has been championed by conservative think tanks and pundits, and President George W. Bush made partial privatization of Social Security a major initiative during his second term in office. That move turned out to be a political disaster, as public opinion and interest groups representing the elderly provided stiff resistance. Bush seemed surprised, but APD scholars were not. They knew that a mature pension program financed on a pay-as-you-go basis will enjoy broad support and prove very difficult to change ( Patashnik 2000 ; Pierson 1994 ).

In recent years, APD scholars have been particularly attuned to the problem of inequality. Among policymakers, the usual assumption is that economic inequality must have economic roots. Greater inequality in this country is therefore due to some combination of stiffer competition from other nations, technological change, widening gaps in the skills of workers, and the like. Nevertheless, economics cannot be the whole story. Market economies in many nations generate significant levels of inequality, but their governments’ tax and transfer policies manage to reduce the eventual level of inequality far more than the US government does. In other words, the United States chooses to do less to reduce inequality. The problem must have political as well as economic roots ( Howard 2007 ; Soss, Hacker, and Mettler 2007 ; Stiglitz 2012 ).

Ironically, some US social policies appear to perpetuate inequalities rather than reduce them. At the top of the list are the major tax expenditures for retirement pensions, healthcare, and housing. In every case, these benefits are skewed in favor of those earning over $100,000 per year. Many lower-income Americans are employed by firms that do not offer pensions or health insurance. These same individuals often cannot afford to buy a home, and they pay little in income taxes. Consequently, these tax deductions do not help them much at all. They may even hurt the less affluent: huge tax breaks may lead people to “over-consume” healthcare and housing, which drives up the price for everyone else. Simply because these tax expenditures have remained hidden from public view for most of their history does not mean their impact has been trivial ( Howard 2007 ; Mettler 2011 ).

Various forms of policy feedback can aggravate inequalities in political power, which in turn help to perpetuate economic inequalities. The structure of Social Security—inclusive, uniform, relatively generous, and tied to employment—has helped to mobilize older Americans into politics ( Campbell 2003 ). The structure of “welfare,” however, has tended to demobilize the poor ( Soss 2000 ). The decision to make extensive use of third-party providers (e.g., doctors, hospitals, banks, realtors, employers) has created powerful constituencies who see social policy as a source of employment and profit. 7 They are motivated to oppose changes that would reduce spending on themselves or their well-to-do clients ( Howard 1997 ; Morgan and Campbell 2011 ).

Of course, social policies are not the only or even the main source of political inequalities. APD scholars are well aware of broader trends in party politics, elections, and interest groups (e.g., Hacker and Pierson 2011 ; Skocpol 1996 ; Skocpol this volume; Soss, Mettler, and Hacker 2007 ). In recent decades as the Republican Party moved sharply to the right, organized labor weakened, inequalities in voter turnout widened, and money became even more pervasive in politics, the prospects for helping lower-income Americans dimmed. The odds did not reach zero—the Affordable Care Act contains a number of redistributive provisions ( Jacobs and Skocpol 2010 )—but the odds did grow longer.

Had you been studying the American welfare state c. 1980, you would have focused on the two “big bangs” of development in the 1930s and 1960s ( Leman 1977 ). You would have compared the United States to welfare states in Europe and found it lacking on almost every dimension. And you would have been given a clear choice between industrialization or national values or class struggle as the main influence on social policy.

Recent scholarship has revealed a much different welfare state. The New Deal and Great Society were indeed watershed moments, but social programs have been enacted and expanded in many other eras. It has become harder to say that the American welfare state is unusually small and easier to claim that it relies on an unusual mix of policy tools. Grand theories have given way to multifactor explanations that apply to a narrower range of policies. Change can originate from any number of sources, even social policies themselves. Both the structure and the politics of the American welfare state seem more complicated than ever.

Still, our revised portrait of the American welfare state is not entirely new. Relative to other affluent democracies, the United States endured high rates of poverty and inequality in 1980; the same is true today. Thus we have a political system that seems more open and more sclerotic, capable of responding to many demands but failing to address some of the core problems that welfare states are supposed to remedy.

One reason—but certainly not the only one—that APD scholars have moved away from grand theories has been their desire to inform current policy debates. Such debates typically focus on a single program or policy domain (e.g., healthcare, retirement pensions), making detailed knowledge more important than sweeping generalizations. Jacob Hacker and Theda Skocpol, for example, have become important voices on health reform. They have explained how choices from decades ago made national health insurance increasingly unlikely, and identified lessons from Medicare, Social Security, and other programs that might guide efforts to expand insurance coverage. Several APD scholars (discussed above) have been wrestling with the problem of growing inequality in America. To become “policy relevant” or perhaps even “public intellectuals,” these scholars have been writing more op-eds for major newspapers; more articles for general interest magazines such as The American Prospect and The Washington Monthly ; policy briefs for the emerging Scholars Strategy Network; and even the occasional blog. All the while, they have continued to publish traditional scholarship in academic journals and university presses. This trend strikes me as important and hopeful, if only because current social problems are so large and so complicated that we need every good brain we can find to deal with them.

A second trend strikes me as more worrisome. For reasons that are not clear to me, scholars seem to be losing interest in poverty. Inequality and insecurity attract more attention, but they are not the same thing as poverty. Higher taxes on the rich, for instance, would reduce inequality, but might have little effect on poverty if that money were used to buy military weapons or pay down the national debt. Although someone whose income suddenly drops from $100,000 to $50,000 is indeed insecure, he is not poor. And substantial poverty remains in this country, despite a major overhaul of anti-poverty policies in the 1990s. The overall poverty rate has been fluctuating within a fairly narrow band (12–15 percent), and child poverty has been getting worse ( DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith 2012 ). Yet, with a few exceptions (e.g., Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011 ), APD scholars have been neglecting the problem that motivated governments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to create social programs in the first place. Engaged or enterprising scholars should strongly consider bucking this trend.

For discussion of earlier military pensions, see Jensen 2003 .

Readers who are themselves middle-aged may find this characterization intuitively appealing.

Moreover, some social policies may be so distinctive that they cannot be compared readily to other social policies (e.g., Carpenter 2012).

A partial list includes Edwin Amenta, Andrea Campbell, Jacob Hacker, Lawrence Jacobs, Robert Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler, Ann Shola Orloff, Margaret Weir, and yours truly.

Although this section focuses on historical institutionalists, a blending of explanations can be found in the work of other scholars. Noble (1997) , for example, is more inclined to see politics in terms of class struggle, but his history of the American welfare state also pays close attention to institutions and to race.

This pattern is not limited to the welfare state. Think of national defense, with its vast array of contractors providing everything from battleships and missiles to laundry service on military bases.

One irony is that conservatives have often tried to minimize the role of the national government and maximize the role of state governments, businesses, and non-profits—all in the name of keeping the welfare state small and easy to retrench.

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Evaluating the Welfare State

A variety of criteria are relevant for evaluating alternative policies in democratic societies composed of persons with diverse values and perspectives. In this paper, we consider alternative criteria for evaluating the welfare state, and the data required to operationalize them. We examine sets of identifying assumptions that bound, or exactly produce, these alternative criteria given the availability of various types of data. We consider the economic questions addressed by two widely-used econometric evaluation estimators and relate them to the requirements of a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis. We present evidence on how the inference from the most commonly used econometric evaluation estimator is modified when the direct costs of a program are fully assessed, including the welfare costs of the taxes required to support the program. Finally, we present evidence of the empirical inconsistency of alternative criteria derived from evaluations based on on self-selection and attrition decisions, and on self-reported evaluations from questionnaires when applied to a prototypical job training program.

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Econometrics and Economic Theory in the 20th Century: The Ragnar Frisch Centennial, Strom, Steiner, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 241-318.

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Second, the primary outcome of inter-est has been on subjective well-being (life satisfaction, happiness). In this paper, we try to address these shortcomings to some extent. First, we extend the analysis to a wider and more diverse sample of countries. Second, we focus on a range of aspects of human well-being beyond life satisfaction.
From the Welfare State to the Welfare Society: A Shift in Paradigm
The concept of welfare society was first evoked by W.A. Robson in his landmark work, The Welfare State and Welfare Society. To him, 'the welfare state is what parliament has decreed and the government does', whereas the 'welfare society is what people do, feel and think about matters which bear on the general welfare' (ibid., p
Full article: The State of the Welfare State: Advice, Governance and
This research was (part) funded by [grant number ES/M003825/1] from the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom for the project 'An ethnography of advice: Between market, society and the declining welfare state', which we gratefully acknowledge; FP7 Ideas: European Research Council [IDEAS-ERC FP7, Project Number: 323743].
Three Worlds of Welfare State Research
Abstract. This article reviews three important clusters of recent research on the comparative politics of the welfare state. The three clusters focus on political economy, gender and social policy, and the investigation of long-term developmental processes. The article argues that in each area there has been significant progress and that there ...
Needs and Risks in the Welfare State
It illustrates how welfare state theories have treated needs and risks, and makes some suggestions as to how they can do so more systematically. The article then turns to the empirical literature to portray the major challenges facing welfare states today. The policy challenge confronting post-industrial societies arises from the coexistence of ...
[PDF] The Welfare State in Global Perspective
The Welfare State in Global Perspective. Over the last few decades of the twentieth century, the literature examining cross-national variation in the development of policies of social protection has been one of the most dynamic Welds of research in comparative politics. The sustained effort of sociologists, political scientists, and economists ...
Welfare States: How They Change and Why
Abstract. In this chapter, Fiona Dukelow and Mary Murphy sketch the landscape of research on welfare state change and set out some of the ways the impact of the economic crisis and the prospect structural change need to be informed by the lessons of previous research on how welfare states change and why. The chapter then proceeds to discuss a ...
Three Worlds of Welfare State Research
This article reviews three important clusters of recent research on the comparative politics of the welfare state. The three clusters focus on political economy, gender and social policy, and the investigation of long-term developmental processes. The article argues that in each area there has been significant progress and that there are increasing opportunities for intellectual exchange ...
America's Wars on Poverty and the Building of the Welfare State
Since President Lyndon B. Johnson left office in 1969 competition between America's two major political parties has in many ways centered on their relationship to the conflicts of the late 1960s. On most major issues, whether it is how the United States is governed, what role the federal government should play vis-à-vis the states, how minorities—ethnic or sexual—should be treated, or ...
How the Welfare-State Regime Shapes the Gap in Subjective Well-Being
Welfare-state categories may still make sense (Ebbinghaus 2012) and can function as heuristic tools (Samuel and Hadjar 2016), even with regard to "new" issues; however, although the social-democratic Nordic welfare states performed well in the reduction of inequalities and the provision of reasonable life conditions for all, these countries ...
PDF Visions for Reform
The Welfare State in Europe: Visions for Reform 3 | Chatham House Summary • For many in Europe, the values and norms that underpin the continent's social model are at the heart of what it means to be European. • Welfare states perform a number of redistributive functions and protect the vulnerable. Contrary to negative portrayals, welfare states also invest in human and social capital.
The Welfare State
The American welfare state has a long and complicated history. Political institutions, organized groups, ideas, and values have worked singly and in myriad combinations to shape US social policy; no single factor stands out as the most important influence. The end result, however, is increasingly clear. Built over many decades and shaped by so ...
Sustainable welfare: Independence between growth and welfare has to go
The sustainable welfare literature usually highlights that welfare states depend on growth to keep spending and public deficits in check. Especially in the short term, welfare spending is often counter-cyclical - expenditure on cash benefits and other support programmes tends to rise during times of economic crisis, just when tax revenues and social insurance contributions that finance ...
PDF The Modern Welfare State
Welfare State taxes and subsidies, 2. to help you understand why these policies are successful (or appear to ... Why doesn't the us have a european-style welfare system? Working Paper 8524, National Bureau of Economic Research skip section 3 Zingales, L. (2012). A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity.
Welfare systems without economic growth: A review of the challenges and
Turning briefly to the current expenditure patterns of welfare systems across the OECD, data from OECD, 2020 shows that health and old age pensions make up the most significant categories of social expenditure for almost all countries, often summing to more than the rest of the social expenditure combined (see Fig. 1).Further, their significance is only likely to grow as government expenditure ...
Evaluating the Welfare State
Evaluating the Welfare State. James J. Heckman & Jeffrey A. Smith. Working Paper 6542. DOI 10.3386/w6542. Issue Date May 1998. A variety of criteria are relevant for evaluating alternative policies in democratic societies composed of persons with diverse values and perspectives. In this paper, we consider alternative criteria for evaluating the ...
The Welfare State in India: From Segmented Approach to Systems Approach
The need for a social protection system is even more significant during emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has affected employment opportunities, wage rates, access to essential health services (), availability of products/services, etc., resulting in economic contraction from both aggregate-demand and aggregate-supply shocks (The World Bank, 2020).
PDF Harvard Institute of Economic Research
race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America's troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state. The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we highlight the different redistributive roles of government in the US and Europe. We also briefly address the question of
The Possibility of Kantian Distributive Justice: Comment on Weinrib's
This paper examines the possibility of grounding distributive justice, or the institutions of the welfare state, on Kant's ideas of reciprocal independence. It is a comment on Chapter V of Ernest Weinrib's book, Reciprocal Freedom, and was originally given as a talk at University of Toronto in 2023.