article presentation "Welfare Stare" Esping Andersen

1. GØSTA ESPING-ANDERSEN
September 24th, 2014
THE THREE WORLDS
OF WELFARE
CAPITALISM

2. Terminology
Welfare State
• The Narrower view
• The Broader view
De-commodification
Social Rights
Laissez-faire liberal
Social Stratification
Post-Industrial Economies

3. The relationship between Capitalism and Welfare
Liberal political economists
 State intervention creates class, monopolies, protectionism, and inefficiency.
 market can potentially undo class society. It was the means for inequality and privilege
abolition.
 road to equality and prosperity should be paved with maximum of free markets and
minimum of state interference.
 Democracy would usurp or destroy the market.
Social Democracy Model
 The balance of class power is fundamentally altered when workers enjoy social rights,
for the social wage lessen the worker’s dependence on the market and employers and
thus turns into a potential power resource
 Parliamentary reformism, based on 2 argument:
• Workers require social resources.
• Social policy is not only emancipatory, but is also a precondition for economic efficiency.
 Social policies result in the mobilization of power: Eradicating poverty, unemployment,
and complete wage dependency, the welfare state increases political capacities and
diminishes the social divisions that are barriers to political unity among workers.

4. The Political Economy of the Welfare
The difference between Political Economy Classic and
Contemporary:
 Contemporary defines itself as a positive science and shies away from
normative prescription
 Classical political economy had little interest in historical variability (leading
towards a system of universal laws-absolute truth), but contemporary
political economy use the historical method that today underpins almost all
good political economy is one that reveals variation and permeability)

5. Welfare State Approach
The Systems/ Structuralist Approach
 Logic of industrialism perspective
• Welfare will emerge as the modern industrial economy destroys traditional social
institution (Flora and Alber, 1981; Pryor, 1969)
• Industrialization makes policy necessary and possible (welfare state is a means for
managing collective goods, center of power, promote its own growth)
 New Structuralist Marxism
• Welfare state is an inevitable product of capitalist mode of production.
• Power is structural
• State is relatively autonomous from class directives
The Institutional Approach
• Any effort to isolate the economy from social and political institutions will destroy
human society. the economy must be embedded in social communities in order for it
to survive. as one necessary precondition for the reintegration of the social economy.
• democracy is an institution that cannot resist majority demands (social wage,
protection etc.)

6. Social Class as a Political Agent
Why The Welfare State itself is a power resource?
 wage earners in the market are inherently atomized and stratified – compelled
to compete, insecure, and dependent on decisions and forces beyond their
control. This limit their capacity for collective solidarity and mobilization.
What is the condition for power mobilization?
 Power depends on the resources that flow from electoral numbers and from
collective bargaining.
 But the power of one agent will depend on the resources of contending forces,
on historical durability of its mobilization and on patterns of power alliances.
Objections to the class-mobilization thesis:
 Locus of decision-making and power may shift from parliaments to neo-
corporatist institutions of interest intermediation.
 The capacity of labor parties to influence the welfare state development is
circumscribed by the structure of right wing party power.
 The model’s linear view of power – A numerical increase in votes not always
translate into more welfare-statism.
We have to think in terms of social relations, not just social categories.

7. What is Welfare State
• Therbon (1983): conception of state structure: What are the criteria
with which we should judge whether a state is a welfare state?
1. Historical transformation of state activities: Welfare state’s daily routine
activities must be devoted to servicing the welfare needs of households.
2. Content of the welfare: The state assumes responsibility for the entire
population, is universalistic and embodies an institutionalized
commitment to all area of distribution vital for societal welfare. Richard
Titmuss’s (1958).
3. Criteria to judge types of welfare states

8. Re-Specification of The Welfare
 T. H. Marshall (1950) social citizenship constitutes the core idea of a welfare
state.
• It must involve social rights and social stratification, social rights and social stratification
are granted on the basis of citizenship rather than performance, they will entail de-
commodification of the status of individual vis-à-vis (face to face) the market.
 Main Principles that need to be fleshed out prior to any theoretical
specification of the welfare state (Rights and de-commodification)
• Social assistance may not bring significant de-commodification if the do not substantially
emancipate the individuals from market dependence.
De-commodification occurs when a service is rendered as a matter of right, and when a person can maintain a
livelihood without reliance on the market. De-commodification strengthens the worker and weakens the
absolute authority of the employer.
• State social insurance with fairly strong entitlements.
• Beveridge-type citizens’ benefit. It offer a basic, equal benefit to all, irrespective of prior
earnings contribution or performance.
 De-commodifying welfare states, minimal definition must entail that citizens
can freely and without potential loss of job, income, or general welfare, opt
out of work when they themselves consider it necessary

9. The Welfare State as a System Stratification
The welfare state, stratification system in its own right (social policy
address problems of stratification but also produce it)
The social-insurance model promoted by conservative reformer was also
explicitly a form of class politic, it sought to achieve:
 1st it is set to consolidate division among wage-earners by legislating distinct
programs for different class and status groups, each with its own unique set of
rights and privileges.
 2nd was to tie the loyalties of individual’s to monarchy or central state authority
 The state-corporatist model was the establishment of particularly
privileged welfare provisions for civil services (rewarding loyalty to the
state) and it was a way of demarcating this group’s exalted social status
 The universalistic system promotes equality of status. All citizens are
endowed with similar rights, irrespective of class or market. It also turns
a dualism: The poor rely on the state and the reminder on the market.

10. Welfare-State Regimes
Liberal Welfare State
 Means-tested assistance, modest universal transfers, modest social-insurance plans
predominate. Benefits caters mainly to a clientle of low-income, usually working-class,
state dependents.
 Minimize de-commodification effect
 Effectively contains the realm of social rights
 United States, Canada, and Australia
Corporatist (Christian Democracy)
 The granting of social rights was hardly ever a seriously contested issue.
 The preservation of status differentials was predominated
 Rights were attached to class and status.
 Corporatism was subsumed under a state edifice perfectly ready to displace the market
as a provider welfare
 Typically shaped by the Church, committed to the preservation of traditional family-
hood.
 The principles of subsidiarity serves to emphasize that the state interfere when family’s
capacity to service its members is exhausted.
 Austria, France, Germany and Italy

11. Welfare-State Regimes
Social Democratic
 The social democrats pursued a welfare state that would promote an
equality of the highest standards, not an equality of minimal needs as was
pursued elsewhere.
 Mix de-commodifying and universalistic programs that are tailored to
differentiated expectations.
 This model crowds out the market, and consequently constructs an
essentially universal solidarity in favor of the welfare state
 All benefit, all are dependent and all will presumably feel obliged to pay.
 The principle is not to wait until the family’s capacity to aid is exhausted,
but to preemptively socialize the costs of family-hood. Not only to service
family needs but also to allow women to choose work rather than the
household.
 Fusion of welfare and work
 Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden

12. The cause of Welfare-State Regimes
The nature of class mobilization
Class-political coalition structures (political majorities forces to
look for allies, political alliance of the new middle classes)
The historical legacy of regime institutionalization (Adenauer’s
great pension-reform in 1957 was designed to resurrect middle-class
loyalties)

13. Conclusion
• Study the welfare-state with a set of criteria that define their role in
society.
• Framework for comparing welfare states that takes into
consideration the principles for which the historical actors have
willingly united and struggled.
• We discover distinct regime-clusters, not merely variations of
‘more’ or ‘less’ around common denominator.
• The historical