Political Theories of the
Welfare State
John Myles
University of Toronto
Jill Quadagno
Florida State University
We review the main theoretical conclusions from a quarter century of comparative studies
of welfare states in the affluent democracies. We contrast early debates over the relative
importance of industrialization, economic growth, and social classes for explaining welfare
state differences with contemporary claims about the role of globalization, postindustrialism, and gender relations in shaping their futures. We evaluate the claims against recent
empirical evidence with the aim of highlighting both important lessons from the past and
promising directions for future analysis.
Contemporary studies of the modern welfare state came of age in the
1970s. Historians, political scientists, and other social scientists had of
course long since documented the origins and development of particular national social policies. The comparative focus of this new body of
research was prefigured by a number of seminal studies written during
the postwar decades (Wilensky and Lebeaux 1958; Kerr et al. 1960; Pryor
1968; Rimlinger 1971; Heclo 1974). And during the 1970s, several classic
theoretical statements (Polanyi 1944; Marshall [1949] 1964) were rediscovered. But it was only in the mid-1970s, following more than 2
decades of accelerated expansion, that both the sheer scale of, and
striking diversity among, the welfare states of the industrialized nations
made them the focus of concentrated attention as a defining feature
of so-called modernity. In 1960, average expenditures on social transfers
were 7.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the affluent deSocial Service Review (March 2002).
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0037-7961/2002/7601-0003$10.00
Theories of the Welfare State
35
mocracies, only slightly more than the 6 percent being spent by the
United States.1 By 1980, average expenditures on social transfers had
doubled to 14 percent of GDP, and the diversity among countries was
much more in evidence. Swedish expenditures had risen from 7 percent
to over 17 percent while the United States was spending 9.75 percent.
How had this happened? Although the institutional foundations had
often been established decades earlier, it was the wave of reforms from
the late 1950s through the early 1970s that account for the dramatic
increases in spending over the period. Like the United States, many
countries established new social insurance schemes and national social
service programs in health and welfare virtually ex nihilo. If one adds
the rapid expansion of education and health care to the brew, the
change that had occurred in both the scale and scope of public provision
in such a brief time span was heady stuff indeed.
From the outset, two questions were central to the research agenda:
How to explain these developments? And what were their consequences?
As we show below, we know a great deal more today about both issues.
Our review of a quarter century of welfare state scholarship, however,
is not primarily intended as a piece of intellectual historiography but
rather to shed light on the present. The new politics of welfare, it is
claimed, are different (Pierson 1994, 1996). Unlike the golden age of
expansion, the social policy agenda of the late twentieth century has
been shaped by the “politics of austerity.” The forces of globalization
and postindustrialism, the revolution in family forms and gender relations, and an extended period of modest economic growth have created
a very different social and political climate from that in which contemporary welfare states came to maturity between the 1950s and the 1970s.
We do not dispute all this. There are, however, striking parallels between
the old and the new scholarship on welfare states that are worth highlighting. Lessons learned from the first generation of welfare state studies, we will argue, can shed considerable light on the present.
From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s welfare state research concentrated on the long slow growth of the social programs associated with
Bismarck’s Germany in the 1880s to the postwar boom in welfare state
expansion (the period of high industrialism) that came to maturity (and
to an end) in the mid-1970s. The puzzle to be solved was less about
why welfare states developed than with why they had developed in such
different ways and apparently reached their apogee at such strikingly
different levels of spending. This body of scholarship can usefully be
bracketed by two highly influential works: Harold Wilensky’s (1975) The
Welfare State and Equality, emphasizing the determining role of impersonal economic forces, and Gosta Esping-Andersen’s (1990) The Three
Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, where politics and political institutions play
the leading role.2
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Welfare State Politics in Industrial Societies: The Political
Regulation of Large Economic Forces
The first generation of welfare state studies typically turned to theories
of industrialism to account for the common trajectory of rising welfare
state expenditures throughout the developed world (Wilensky and Lebeaux 1958; Kerr et al. 1960; Pryor 1968; Rimlinger 1971; Wilensky
1975). The main themes are well known. Industrialization creates new
demands for public spending as systems of social support based on
kinship and the patrimonial traditions of agrarian societies are eroded
(Kerr et al. 1960). Growing dependence on wage labor creates new
vulnerabilities among those with little or no labor to sell, such as the
old, the sick, and the young (Pampel and Weiss 1983). The result, as
Clark Kerr and colleagues (1960, pp. 22, 152) observe, is a new and
expanded role for the state to maintain the labor force and achieve
coordination and consensus in a complex, urban society, themes that
were echoed, albeit in different language, in early marxist accounts
(Offe 1972; O’Connor 1973) discussed below.
Wilensky’s 1975 study became central to future developments not only
because it was among the first to test empirically alternative theories of
welfare state expansion but, more important, because of the bold conclusions advanced in the early chapters of the work. The root cause of
the welfare state, Wilensky concluded, was economic growth mediated
by demographic change, which resulted in rising life expectancy and
population aging: “If there is one source of welfare spending that is
most powerful—a single proximate cause, it is the proportion of old
people in the population” (Wilensky 1975, p. 47). This prescient statement would foreshadow trends underlying welfare state restructuring.
It is helpful to distinguish between weaker and stronger versions of
the theory. The weak version of the theory, that industrialism and its
correlates (economic growth, population aging) are necessary to account for the common trend line in welfare state expansion, is rarely
questioned. It is difficult, moreover, to imagine the welfare state boom
of the 1960s in the absence of the long economic expansion of the
post–World War II golden age. Rapidly rising incomes generated revenue windfalls for governments. Strong wage growth meant new taxes
could be levied while still leaving workers with a larger pay package
each year. Rising productivity and changing labor force practices led to
the spread of retirement, a development that generated enormous demand for the expansion of public pensions. These correlates of a mature
industrial order clearly matter, and measures of GDP per capita and
percentage of elderly are now standard control variables in all empirical
models of welfare state spending
The contested (strong) version of the theory concerned its capacity
to explain variations around the trend line. The implicit claim of the
Theories of the Welfare State
37
strong version is that nations with comparable levels of economic development would converge at similar levels of welfare state development
as well. The claim is contentious since it rests on the assumption that
public policy is the product of large, impersonal, economic forces. Politics, if it matters at all, does not matter very much. Faced with comparable political demands (e.g., a growing number of old people) and
a similar resource base (economic development), social programs develop independently of party politics, the preferences of political leaders, or the balance of power among the political forces they represent.
Political Parties and Institutions
Where industrialization theorists emphasized the determining role of
the changing forces of production (the logic of industrialism), early
neomarxist accounts (Offe 1972; O’Connor 1973) emphasized changing
relations of production (the logic of capitalism). Welfare state expansion, James O’Connor (1973) argued, was driven by the dual, if contradictory, imperatives imposed on the capitalist state to create conditions for capital accumulation, on the one hand, and the social
legitimation of this mode of production, on the other. While differing
in content, both theories shared a similar functionalist logic (Giddens
1976, pp. 716–22; Gough 1979, pp. 8–9, 50 ff.). Welfare states are the
inevitable product of large economic forces beyond the control of policy
makers and publics that compel a common response.
By the end of the 1970s, however, class-analytical accounts (e.g., Stephens 1979; Korpi 1980, 1983) took a different turn, focused around
the claim that “politics matters” in explaining welfare state diversity.
What came to be known as “power resource theory” was based on a
theory of distribution in capitalist democracies in which both terms of
the couplet—capitalism and democracy—figure prominently. In his
magisterial Power and Privilege (1966), Gerhardt Lenski argued that democratic polities created the possibility for the “many” to combine against
the “few” (the elites) and use the state to claim a larger share of the
social surplus. However, the institution of private property biases this
struggle in favor of the propertied simply because electoral constituencies are large and elections costly. For those of modest means (workers), the only compensating power resource is their numbers, but this
requires mass organization in unions and parties to be effective. The
key claim is that the formal institutions of parliamentary democracy,
including universal suffrage and free and competitive elections, are necessary but not sufficient conditions to generate significant redistribution.
As Christopher Hewitt (1977, p. 451) argued, the key issue is what the
mass electorate does with the franchise. Only if the lower classes use
their votes to elect explicitly class-based (i.e., labor) parties to represent
their interests will democracy result in more equality.
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Walter Korpi formalized these general claims into what he identified
as “power resource theory,” and power resource theory quickly achieved
the status of the dominant paradigm (Orloff 1993) in the field, providing
the benchmark models against which other theories would be tested.
More important, Korpi and others initiated a program of both quantitative and historical-comparative research to test the thesis empirically
(Cameron 1978; Stephens 1979; Castles 1982; Hicks and Swank 1984;
Myles 1984; Esping-Andersen 1985).3 These and a plethora of later studies in this tradition (Korpi 1989; Palme 1990; Kangas 1991; among many
others) supported the conclusion that major differences in welfare state
spending and entitlements among the capitalist democracies could be
explained by the relative success of left parties, particularly Social Democratic parties, aligned with strong trade unions in shaping the democratic class struggle.4
Careful cross-national research (e.g., Huber, Ragin, and Stephens
1993; Hicks 1999) continues to document the importance of workingclass mobilization (in unions and parties) as a condition for early (e.g.,
by 1920) welfare state consolidation and for explaining national differences in their subsequent expansion. More recent research also highlights the distinctive role of social Catholicism and Christian Democratic
parties (see below) in generating high levels of social spending, particularly when faced with intense competition from left parties and unions
for the allegiance of working-class voters (Van Kersbergen 1995). Theories of political democracy that emphasize the intensity of electoral
competition among parties and voter turnout also find support in the
literature (Hicks and Swank 1992). As Frances Fox Piven and Richard
Cloward (1994, pp. 428–33) highlight, high voter turnout typically
changes the class content of elections, shifting the political center of
gravity to the left, since increases in turnout tend to reflect increases
in participation by previously excluded lower status groups (Iversen
2001).
During the 1980s, Theda Skocpol and her colleagues (Weir, Orloff,
and Skocpol 1988; Skocpol 1992; Amenta 1998) took the “politics matters” perspective in a different direction, aimed in part at accounting
for the distinctive development of U.S. welfare institutions. In contrast
to so-called society-centered approaches that emphasize the role of elections and parties aggregating interests from below, they elaborated a
polity-centered or institutionalist approach emphasizing the organization and structure of state institutions.5 In their account, for example,
it is not just the balance of class forces that determines electoral and
policy outcomes but also the institutional features of government and
the rules of electoral competition. In the United States the diffusion of
government authority—to a degree unmatched in Europe—has placed
limits on what political leaders can accomplish (Lipset 1996; Lipset and
Marks 1999). The multiplicity of “veto points” in a system characterized
Theories of the Welfare State
39
by a division of power between the executive, the legislative branch, and
the courts, coupled with a weak party system and an emphasis on state
autonomy, makes radical legislative innovation difficult and political
gridlock common. For example, the diffusion of veto points made it
possible for Southern politicians to make the racial divide an overdetermining factor in shaping American social policy legislation from Reconstruction to the 1960s (Quadagno 1988).
The polity-centered perspective has also influenced comparative research of the welfare state. Ellen Immergut’s (1992) study of health insurance in Sweden, France, and Switzerland shows the importance of
centralization and the insulation of the executive from parliamentary and
electoral pressures as a precondition for reform. Antonia Maioni’s (1998)
comparison of Canada and the United States shows how the Canadian
parliamentary system with its strong party discipline diminished the ability
of medical lobbies in their efforts to oppose health-care reform. Evelyne
Huber and colleagues (1993) show a strong independent effect of constitutional structures that concentrate state authority with pooled timeseries models for 18 capitalist democracies. The ability of working-class
organizations to shape policy outcomes has been unambiguously shown
to be mediated by their success in institutionalizing corporatist decisionmaking structures, that is, peak bargaining institutions of labor and business that concentrate and monopolize the representation of their constituencies and engage in state-sponsored negotiations over wages, jobs,
and other key economic transactions (Hicks 1999).
Fred Pampel’s (1994) analysis of social spending on the old and the
young illustrates the utility of this approach. He asks whether the growing political power of the aged has skewed social spending in favor of
the elderly and against the young. He demonstrates that, in general,
the answer is no: countries that are generous to old people are also
generous to children. Nevertheless, where systems of corporatist representation (and strong labor parties) are absent, as in the United States,
the trade-off between old and young does appear.
Welfare Regimes
Perhaps the most persuasive evidence that industrialization is not destiny—that politics and political institutions matter for welfare
states—came from Esping-Andersen’s highly influential The Three Worlds
of Welfare Capitalism (1990). Taking stock of the welfare states of the 18
or so rich capitalist democracies in the early 1980s, Esping-Andersen
demonstrated that they could be distinguished not only in terms of
relative generosity and spending but, more fundamentally, by their institutional logic for assigning welfare functions to the state, the market,
and the family. He identifies three distinct welfare state regimes: liberal
(or market-oriented) welfare states characteristic of the Anglo-American
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democracies, the conservative regime characteristic of continental Europe, and the Nordic social democratic policy model.
In liberal welfare states, citizens are constituted primarily as individual market actors. There is a reluctance to replace market relations
with social rights, and citizens are encouraged to seek their welfare
in the market, for example, through subsidies for private welfare benefits. Basic security schemes are more likely to be means-tested and
social insurance benefits modest. The main exemplars are the AngloAmerican democracies.
The second regime type goes under a variety of labels—conservative,
corporatist, and more recently, Christian Democratic—depending on the
characteristics emphasized. It is conservative in the classic European sense
of the term, highlighting its precapitalist origins in the dynastic elites of
continental Europe (Kerr et al. 1960). It was decidedly antiliberal in
origin, concerned not at all with market efficiency but deeply concerned
with maintaining an organic-hierarchical social order inherited from the
past. Social rights are extensive, and there is only a marginal role for
private welfare arrangements (the market). It is corporatist in the sense
that, in their origins at least, these rights and privileges were differentiated
on the basis of class and status, and redistribution was marginal. These
states were also strongly influenced by Christian Democratic (i.e., Catholic) doctrines rejecting the primacy of the market, on the one hand,
but insisting on principles of subsidiarity and, hence, the primacy of the
family as the locus of social welfare on the other. While social spending
in these nations is considerably higher than in the liberal welfare states,
the emphasis is on income transfers sufficient to cover the income needs
of the male breadwinner. Social services that both facilitate women’s employment (child care) and provide jobs for women are modest. The main
exemplars are found among the continental European countries.
Social democratic welfare states (found mainly in Scandinavia) represent a model of society characterized by extensive social rights and a
marginal role for private welfare provision (as in continental Europe).
But rights are universalistic rather than corporativistic, emphasizing
equality of citizenship rather than preservation of status differences (as
represented by occupational groups). Hence, unlike the Continental
model, there is considerable emphasis on redistribution and providing
all with high levels of income security. Women’s place is in the labor
market so that the welfare state is service intensive as well as transfer
intensive. Social services provide both employment for women and the
child care and other services required to allow women or parents to
participate in the labor market (Huber and Stephens 2000). Both social
democratic and conservative welfare states tend to spend a lot on social
protection but do so in fundamentally different ways.
Finally, welfare state regimes differ not only with respect to the ways
in which they respond to inequalities generated by the market but also
Theories of the Welfare State
41
in the ways they condition and regulate the primary distribution of
income (wages) and job insecurities that the market is allowed to generate. Both the Nordic and continental European nations have created
bargaining structures that limit wage dispersion and regulatory institutions that limit the rights of employers to hire and fire at will.
Although Esping-Andersen’s typology has been subject to considerable criticism for ignoring and oversimplifying complexities within regime types (Castles and Mitchell 1992; Leibfried 1992) and for overlooking aspects of the gendered logic of welfare regimes (Ostner and
Lewis 1995; Sainsbury 1996; O’Connor, Orloff, and Shaver 1999), the
key insight that the welfare states that came to maturity by the 1970s
differ fundamentally in the allocation of welfare functions among states,
markets, and families has proven to be remarkably robust (Orloff 1996).
Yet at the very moment when political theories of the welfare state
seem to have relegated the “logic of industrialism” thesis with its emphasis on the overdetermining role of large impersonal economic forces
to the critical list, the theory was revived in new form. Economic globalization and postindustrialism (along with its demographic correlates)
are the new forces thought to be reshaping welfare states. However
important political parties and institutions were in accounting for the
development of welfare states, these same parties and institutions, it is
now argued, are comparatively helpless in preventing the welfare state’s
demise or, at least, its dramatic restructuring.
The New Politics of Welfare: Globalization,
Postindustrialism, and Gender
Contemporary welfare states grew up, as it were, during the quarter
century following the Second World War, and by the mid-1970s the
major contours of the national social institutions familiar to us today
were in place. Almost immediately, however, observers from both the
left (O’Connor 1973) and the right (Huntington 1975) began to announce their impending demise. For some, such as Daniel Bell (1978),
welfare states had created a revolution of rising expectations that could
not be satisfied without destroying the conditions that allow markets to
function (Geiger and Geiger 1978). This pessimism was reinforced by
slow economic growth, rising unemployment of the 1970s and 1980s,
and by the impending threat of population aging. Has this dire prediction been realized?
Unlike the heady years of expansion, the period since the end of the
1970s can broadly be characterized in Paul Pierson’s (2001) apt phrase
as one of accommodation to austerity. Governments everywhere grappled with slower economic growth, higher levels of unemployment, rising deficits, and growing awareness of the fiscal implications for pension
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and health-care budgets that result from population aging. Rollbacks
have been commonplace for the past 2 decades (Stephens, Huber, and
Ray 1999; Huber and Stephens 2000). But their consequences require
careful scrutiny before the welfare state’s demise is announced for two
reasons. First, many changes that at first glance might be construed as
welfare state retrenchment turn out on closer inspection to be program
restructuring, reforms aimed to accommodate changing social
needs—most notably, those associated with changing family forms and
the rise in women’s labor force participation (Quadagno 1999). Second,
despite mounting economic, fiscal, and demographic pressures, the
main result of recent research on the “new politics of welfare” highlights
the remarkable resiliency of welfare states.
The Resiliency of Welfare States
Average levels of social spending in the affluent democracies continued
to rise in the 1980s, albeit at slower rates than in earlier decades, and
then leveled off in the 1990s (Hicks 1999, pp. 195–200). Large, ideologically driven spending cuts were confined to a handful of countries,
notably Britain, New Zealand, and, to a lesser degree, the United States.
Few of the changes could be counted as regime shifting, that is, as efforts
to dismantle or fundamentally change to a different kind of welfare
state.6 As Pierson (1994, 1996) has argued, barring truly dramatic exogenous shocks, such as the political and economic collapse in Eastern
Europe, radical transformation of existing welfare institutions is unlikely
for a variety of reasons. The political unpopularity of cutbacks to programs that benefit large sectors of the population (pensions, health
care, housing, sickness, and unemployment benefits) imposes high political costs on incumbent governments.7 Consequently, governments
tend to spread the blame for reform by reaching negotiated settlements
that typically involve opposition parties, organized labor, and business
associations, or even (via national referenda) the people in general
(Myles and Pierson 2001).
Because of the consensus-building process associated with bipartisan
agreements (as with the Social Security reforms of 1983) or corporatist
“social pacts,” dramatic change is unlikely. Equally salient, cutbacks must
often be accompanied by new entitlements (e.g., child- and elder-care
provisions) to win support for reform. Nevertheless, it is clear that the
new politics of welfare (Pierson 1996) is different in fundamental ways
from that of the period of expansion. The challenge is to determine
why and how it differs.
We focus on three key features of the contemporary situation that
have received considerable theoretical and empirical attention during
the 1990s—globalization, postindustrialism, and the gender revolution.
A fourth important feature of the current policy environment, popu-
Theories of the Welfare State
43
lation aging, requires extensive discussion of its own, which we have
taken up elsewhere (Myles and Quadagno 1997; Myles and Pierson
2001). We touch on it here only as a background condition to be kept
in mind when considering other changes and pressures on welfare states.
Globalization
Economic globalization is one of the leading suspects often invoked to
account for the changing character of welfare state politics since the
1970s. Led by the United States in 1974, all states have largely abandoned
the system of capital controls put in place by the postwar Bretton Woods
agreement (Simmons 1999). During the 1950s and 1960s, cross-border
capital flows averaged roughly 5 percent of GDP in the developed capital
democracies; by the mid-1990s the figure exceeded 50 percent (Swank
1998, forthcoming). Since governments everywhere depend on the owners of capital to invest to create jobs and income, a common conclusion
is that, irrespective of political preferences, governments everywhere are
compelled to compete with policies that stimulate business confidence
(Cerny 1994; Strange 1996). As a result, it is argued, policies that detract
from a sound investment climate—high taxes, generous social insurance—will be avoided. The failed efforts of the Mitterand government
to pursue a reflationary fiscal policy in 1981 (Keynesianism in “one
country”) is often held out as the exemplar of this so-called diminished
democracy. As Ramesh Mishra (1999, p. 6) explains, “By providing capital with an ‘exit’ option, globalization has strengthened the bargaining
power of capital very considerably against government as well as labour.”
The victims, willy-nilly, are national welfare states that provide more
generous provisions than their neighbors and competitors. If industrialism and its correlates did not lead to “convergence” in the era of
expansion, globalization will, but now in the form of a “race to the
bottom.”
Despite the plausibility of such claims, finding a causal chain from
increased globalization to diminished welfare states in the rich democracies has proven difficult, and, where the casual link has been found,
the effect is often not the one expected. The first generation of welfare
state studies discussed earlier had frequently noted a positive association
between small, open (i.e., export-oriented) economies such as Sweden
and Austria and larger welfare states (Cameron 1978; Stephens 1979).
In its simplest terms, the argument states that economic openness increases the insecurity of workers in the large exposed sectors of the
economy, and bigger welfare states were specifically designed to cushion
the impacts of growing international competition. More recent econometric studies by Geoffrey Garret (1998) and Dani Rodrik (1997) provide additional evidence that trade openness leads to compensatory
social spending.8 Both authors conclude, moreover, that the positive
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effect of social democratic corporatism on public sector spending and
income transfers is undiminished by trade and capital openness. Duanne
Swank (1998, forthcoming) shows both econometrically and in his case
studies that the effects of capital mobility on welfare effort are conditioned by the political institutions that mediate those impacts. Roughly
speaking, the more market-oriented liberal welfare states (Canada, the
United States, and, to a lesser extent, Australia, and the United Kingdom) have been subjected to downward pressures by international capital mobility while in the Continental and Nordic democracies, the effects of capital mobility are either absent or positive.
Thus far, then, there is little evidence for a global race to the bottom.
The reason, as Swank highlights, is that the same class and political
institutions that mediated and shaped welfare states in the age of expansion are now shaping domestic responses to internationalization. As
Swank (1998, p. 44) concludes, “Where institutions of collective interest
representation—social corporatism and inclusive electoral institutions—are strong, where authority is concentrated, and where the welfare state is based on the principle of universalism, the effects of international capital mobility are absent, or they are positive in the sense
that they suggest economic and political interests opposed to neoliberal
reforms . . . have been successful in defending the welfare state.” In
contrast, where political institutions fragment both interest representation and political authority, as in the Anglo-American democracies,
capital mobility tends to put downward pressure on social provision.
The claim is not that globalization is irrelevant but rather that the
pressures of globalization are refracted through both very different political institutions and very different models for organizing relationships
among economic actors (Kitschelt et al. 1999). Deeply embedded differences in the forms of organizing linkages between industrial and
financial capital, between companies and firms, and between employers
and employees (“production regimes”) create a diversity of incentive
structures and objective possibilities for choosing among alternative responses (Soskice 1999). National economies gain comparative advantages from these differences, including welfare state differences (Manow
2001), and face strong resistance to efforts to shift to alternative models.
The neoliberal response to globalization that is aimed at weakening
labor institutions, deregulating markets, and reducing (rather than restructuring) the social wage has thus far made little headway in the
coordinated market economies of continental and Northern Europe
(Kitschelt et al. 1999).
Postindustrialism
If globalization has not been the main source of pressure on welfare
states over the past several decades, what is? There is broad consensus
Theories of the Welfare State
45
that slower productivity growth and the rising unemployment that followed the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 are the proximate causes of fiscal
pressures from both the supply (revenue) and the demand (beneficiaries) side. While the link between globalization and slower productivity
growth is tenuous, there is broader consensus that the massive shift of
employment from manufacturing to services (postindustrialism) made
a significant contribution to this decline. The point of departure for
much of the postindustrialism literature is William Baumol’s (1967)
“cost-disease” thesis. Baumol observed that, on average, labor-intensive
service industries were unlikely to match the productivity increases of
the manufacturing sector since in many services (child care, hairdressing) it is labor itself, not goods, that we wish to consume.9 The shift to
services is largely an endogenous development, the result of productivity
gains in goods production.
The result is not convergence but rather a limited set of unpleasant
trade-offs (Iversen and Wren 1998; Esping-Andersen 1999; Pierson 2000).
As Esping-Andersen (1999, pp. 56–57) observes, in the Continental welfare states where social benefits are high and the wage structure relatively
egalitarian, high wage costs drive up the price of services. Hence, demand
for services is comparatively low. The result is slower employment growth
and higher levels of unemployment compared to nations like the United
States where low wages reduce the price of labor-intensive services, thereby
raising demand but at the cost of rising inequality. Alternatively, governments can underwrite high wage employment in public services (health,
education, and welfare) as in Scandinavia but at the price of ever-increasing fiscal pressure. The result is Torben Iversen and Anne Wren’s service
economy “trilemma” in which postindustrialism means that countries
must sacrifice full employment, fiscal balance, or equality. Policy makers
can pursue two of these objectives but not all three simultaneously (Iversen and Wren 1998, p. 515).
The postindustrial thesis has garnered wide appeal in the literature
since it captures in broad outline so much of the observed differences
in welfare state and labor market trajectories from the mid-1970s to the
mid-1990s and does so in a way that maps onto Esping-Andersen’s three
worlds of welfare. The United States exemplifies the neoliberal strategy
where fiscal rectitude and high employment have been won at the price
of higher wage inequality. Within this context, the recent trajectory of
U.S. social policy represents a coherent, if not necessarily benign, strategy for enhancing labor market flexibility in a low wage economy (Myles
and Quadagno 2000). While the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 eliminated federal responsibility
for the nonworking poor, wage subsidies for the working poor—the
Earned Income Tax Credit—have been raised under virtually every administration since the 1970s. The emergent pattern is a restructured
variant of the traditional liberal design that provides little for those not
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in the workforce but supports those who work for low wages (Myles and
Pierson 1997).
Is postindustrialism the new iron cage for welfare states? Or do the
theories generated thus far simply describe the long, difficult transition
period from the 1970s to the 1990s, a period of sluggish growth and
mounting government deficits? As Iversen and Wren observe (1998, p.
546), the severity of the trilemma hinges critically on the inability of
the service sector to generate increases in productivity, gains that were
difficult to detect until recently despite the current technological revolution. It is perhaps too soon to conclude that the strong productivity
gains of the latter half of the 1990s is a portent of a new golden age.
But it is clear that the “politics of the surplus,” along with falling unemployment, has dramatically altered the character of public debate
not only in the United States but internationally as well. As the 2000
presidential election illustrates, albeit wanly, renewed growth and government surpluses quickly bring issues of political choice—for example,
lower taxes versus more spending—to the forefront again.
As in the age of industrialism, the evidence thus far indicates that
cross-national differences in the institutions of interest representation
will continue to shape the direction of these choices, producing multiple
postindustrial equilibria rather than a single variant. Postindustrialism,
however, has generated a new element that radically alters the content
of the political equation that will generate policy outputs in the twentyfirst century. It is to this issue that we turn next.
Gender
Research concerned with the postwar growth of welfare states concentrated on what welfare states did for the average (male) production
worker and the male-breadwinner family. These studies carried forward
central theoretical debates of the 1950s and 1960s concerning the changing character of class relations (Bell 1960; Lipset 1960) in the affluent
democracies—whether and to what extent the class divisions and inequalities generated by capitalism could be undone, or significantly
muted, by parliamentary democracy. Building on Karl Polanyi’s (1944)
analysis of the commodification of labor as the defining feature of market society, for example, Esping-Andersen (1990) poses the counterfactual: whether and to what extent welfare states decommodify labor by
providing basic services and a modicum of economic security as rights
of citizenship rather than market capacity (Marshall [1949] 1964).
Feminist critics challenge this view for ignoring the role of gender
relations in shaping policy outcomes and for neglecting the genderspecific effects of these policies.10 They highlight the male bias inherent
in taking the so-called average industrial worker and the male-breadwinner family model as the empirical point of departure (Lewis 1992;
Theories of the Welfare State
47
Orloff 1993; O’Connor et al. 1999; Sainsbury 1996). For feminist theorists the question is not only one of how welfare states transform class
relations but also whether and to what extent welfare states reproduce,
alter, or transform gender relations. To use Helga Hernes’s (1987) formulation, can welfare states be women-friendly?
As we highlight below, the emergent literature on women and the
welfare state during the 1980s and 1990s expanded the boundaries of
traditional welfare state research by drawing attention to a broader range
of welfare state features and opening up new and significant research
hypotheses for investigation. Our main contention, however, is that the
contemporary resurgence of interest in gender and caregiving issues
reflects more than a broadening of traditional analytical and normative
perspectives on welfare states to include women. As Ann Orloff (2000,
p. 3) concludes, issues of gender and caregiving have become central
in the contemporary period not only for reasons of gender equality but
also because of their broader implications for the economy and the
reproduction of the population.
As Julia O’Connor (1996, pp. 6–7) points out, early formulations of
“gender and the welfare state” problematics (e.g., McIntosh 1978) were
often pitched at a high level of abstraction, ignored significant crossnational differences in the way women influenced and were influenced
by social policy institutions, and emphasized the role of the welfare state
in reproducing the traditional patriarchal family.11 These early formulations, however, were influential in stimulating a subsequent round of
more nuanced historical and comparative case studies (Jenson 1986;
Skocpol 1992; Pedersen 1993) that highlight both the dramatically different ways in which welfare states are gendered and in the role of
women in influencing these outcomes.12
Just as the logic of industrialism and neomarxist theories came to be
challenged by comparative historical studies that emphasized the agency
of trade unions and parties, so feminist debates about social policy were
informed by studies focusing on the role of women’s organizations and
highlighted women’s agency. A key question in these debates is whether
women’s participation matters for the kind of programs that are developed (Skocpol 1992; Pedersen 1993; Hobson and Lindholm 1997;
O’Connor 1996; Mahon 1997). As Theda Skocpol (1992, p. 30) explains,
traditional theories often failed to “notice the contributions of femaledominated modes of politics, some of which are not dependent on
action through parties, elections, trade unions or official bureaucracies.”
Skocpol’s analysis shows how women’s organizations were especially influential in shaping forms of social provision in the United States prior
to the New Deal, the results of which profoundly affected the subsequent
design of New Deal legislation (Gordon 1994). Dana Hill and Lean
Tigges (1995) compare women’s public pension quality across 20
nations and find that women’s equality with men is affected not only
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by higher levels of working class mobilization but also by women’s participation in these movements.
Research on this issue, however, suggests that the effect of women’s
mobilization (or its absence) on policy outcomes is complex and not
always consistent with the view that the political mobilization of women
leads to women-friendly outcomes. Susan Pedersen (1993, p. 20), for
example, concludes that despite the presence of a women’s movement
with a well-articulated feminist vision of welfare, Britain developed comparatively inegalitarian policies that discouraged women’s employment.
In France, by contrast, conservative, pronatalist employers supported
policies aimed at assisting women to combine welfare and work. As Seth
Koven and Sonya Michel (1993) point out, political institutions are
critical for understanding gender as well as class-related outcomes. While
women were often more highly mobilized in so-called weak states (the
United States and the United Kingdom), the enactment and financing
of legislation aimed at protecting women was more readily achieved in
strong states such as France and Germany. Thus, outcomes need to be
separated from intent. Social programs supported by employers, trade
unions, or political parties may have beneficial effects for women workers, even though they were not designed for that result (Ruggie 1984).
That national differences in the “gender contract” implicit in welfare
state reforms through the postwar decades were often as not the byproduct of struggles over the social wage for male breadwinners is hardly
surprising. The single-wage-earner family form was at the center of the
risk structure of postwar industrial economies, threatening catastrophe
when the male breadwinner lost his job as a result of illness, unemployment, or old age. Postindustrialism and its major demographic correlates—the revolution in women’s labor force participation and related
changes in family structure—changes all this.
In postindustrial societies, gender and families move to center stage
for the simple reason that postindustrialism—the shift of employment
from goods to services—is empirically inseparable from the revolution in
female employment levels (Clement and Myles 1994; Esping-Andersen
1999). High female employment transforms the demand side of the welfare state by creating new structures of social risk (new needs), especially
those related to the distribution of caring work both for children and
the elderly. Women workers and dual-earner families face a different set
of risks and demand a different array of benefits—child and elder care,
parental leave provisions—than the ideal typical male industrial worker
of an earlier period. Rising female employment is both cause (Huber and
Stephens 2000) and effect of the expansion of family-related social services
that simultaneously provide employment for women and facilitate
women’s entry to the labor market. The rise of the dual-earner household
as the modal family unit also raises the odds against single-earner households and creates a need for services for single mothers. The result, as
Theories of the Welfare State
49
we noted earlier, is that the pattern of welfare state reform since the 1980s
has not just been a story of retrenchment but also one of significant
restructuring. At the same moment that traditional benefits have been
scaled down, new entitlements are being created, often as part of the
same reform package. Thus, for example, new pension credits for periods
of child rearing and elder care have become a standard part of otherwise
cost-cutting pension reform packages in the 1990s (Myles and Pierson
2001).
Rising female employment alters the supply as well as the demand
side of the welfare state: the financial viability of welfare states in the
twenty-first century depends critically on the revenues generated by high
levels of women’s labor force participation, on the one hand, and their
willingness to reproduce the next generation, on the other. Against a
background of population aging and declining employment among
older men, maintaining the high levels of employment necessary to
finance the welfare state means maximizing women’s employment. Consequently, national responses to Iversen and Wren’s postindustrial trilemma are for the most part a story of women’s employment. The Nordic
countries have raised women’s employment (and wages) largely through
high levels of employment in the public sector (health, education, and
social services). The combination of high women’s employment, modest
wage inequality both among and between women and men, and a wide
array of public services and benefits (including extensive parental leave)
results in what Korpi (2000) calls the dual-earner gender policy model.13
The downside is that maintaining a large public service sector requires
high levels of taxation and spending, which threaten fiscal balance.
With the exception of France, the continental European nations typically provide modest family support services but generous cash benefits
to families, the general family support model in Korpi’s terms. High
wages and generous social benefits make child (and female) poverty a
comparatively rare event but within the context of the traditional malebreadwinner family model. Since high wages and generous social benefits also mute demand for low-wage, private sector, services, female
employment is comparatively low.
In the market-oriented Anglo-Saxon nations, including the United
States, where wage inequality is high and cash benefits that equalize
incomes are modest, demand for private sector services is high and, as
a result, so too is women’s employment. However, the emergence of a
postpatriarchal family (Castells 1997; Mahon 2000) in the United States
depends critically on a labor market that, unlike Germany, does little
to “decommodify” labor and a welfare state that, unlike Sweden, does
little to “de-familize” caring work through provision of public services.
The male-female earnings gap is comparatively large in the United States
(Blau and Kahn 1995), and female and child poverty are high by European standards (Orloff 2000).
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Gender relations and family forms, then, have become central to
welfare state restructuring in the contemporary period in ways that they
were not during the age of expansion from the 1950s to the 1970s. As
Wilensky (1975) emphasized, in this earlier period population aging
was the single most powerful source of welfare state expansion. It was
not, however, simply greater longevity that was at work. Rather, it was
the rapid spread of retirement (for men) as a method for managing
the postwar labor force that made pension reform the most pressing
issue for policy makers. In a similar fashion, the revolution in women’s
employment—the major demographic correlate of postindustrialism—is
arguably the source of the most pressing demands in the contemporary
period. The symptoms, however, differ significantly cross-nationally:
high levels of child and female poverty in the United States, and a fertility
crisis that threatens population decline in much of Europe. Although
a sustained period of strong economic growth will provide the resources
(government revenues) to meet the demands created by the integration
of women into the labor force, how these resources are deployed will
depend on the forms of mobilization, political representation, and decision making that mediate these demands.
Conclusion: The Old and New Politics of the Welfare State
In the introduction to this article, we suggested that earlier debates
regarding cross-national differences in the development of the welfare
state are useful for understanding current developments in the restructuring of the welfare state. Let us now highlight some of the parallels
between research on welfare state development from the 1950s to the
mid-1970s and research on welfare state trends in the more recent period and suggest likely directions of future trends.
Economic Growth
Wilensky’s insight that rates of economic growth profoundly affect the
development of social policy remains as central today as in the past.
Unlike the decades following the Second World War, policy elites from
the 1970s to the 1990s faced an environment of relative economic stagnation. The inflationary side of 1970s “stagflation” (a combination of
high inflation and high unemployment) was conquered by harsh monetary policies in the early 1980s but at the price of the highest unemployment rates since the 1930s. However, unemployment was slow to
decline during the subsequent recovery, and where it did (as in the
United States), it came at the price of rising inequality. The new politics
of the welfare state—theories that attempt to account for welfare state
politics since the mid-1970s—have in large measure been concerned
with social policy formation in an age of austerity. Slow growth provided
Theories of the Welfare State
51
a favorable environment for ideologically driven movements critical of
the expanded role of public provision and a harsh environment for
pro–welfare state constituencies.
We highlight postindustrial theory as providing what is arguably the
most adequate historical account of the past quarter century of welfare
state politics. Its utility for anticipating future developments, however,
is open to question, hinging critically on the Baumol thesis that slow
productivity growth is an endemic, rather than a transitory, feature of
postindustrial economies. Both the recent and long-term history of capitalist development suggest caution in accepting this conclusion.
The “Demographic” Correlates of Economic Change
Rising affluence brought increased longevity that industrialization theorists correctly identified as a key change on the demand side (“new
needs”) of the welfare state. The change was as much economic and
social as demographic, however. Demographic aging became the pressing problem of the postwar decades because of the institutionalization
of retirement as a normal part of the economic life course under conditions when both public and private pension systems were poorly developed. Now, the demographic aging of populations poses problems
of a different sort for welfare states that we only briefly allude to here.
But demographic aging is intimately associated with the major demographic correlate of postindustrialism, namely, the dramatic increase in
women’s labor force participation and, in most nations, the decline in
fertility levels below replacement levels.14 Countries such as the United
States where fertility has declined less face higher levels of female and
child poverty.
Politics, Political Institutions, and “Refracted Divergence”
Large scale economic and social changes throw up a common set of
pressures for political elites. In the postwar decades, the rising affluence
of the working age population and widespread impoverishment of seniors resulted in dramatic development of income security schemes for
seniors in all affluent democracies. However, the political response to
this universal problem varied enormously, reflecting both the balance
of power between contending political forces and the political institutions through which these forces were filtered. Cross-national differences in class-based organizations and parties as well as the electoral
and administrative institutions that structure and mediate the democratic class struggle were especially crucial. For the period of expansion—from the 1950s through the 1970s—these results are hardly in
dispute.
What of the more recent period? Have the forces of globalization and
postindustrialism placed the affluent democracies on a similar path?
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Some observers (e.g., Kitschelt 1994) are decidedly gloomy, concluding
that nations now face little choice but to adapt to the new economic
liberalism with lower taxation and less public spending. Thus far, however, the empirical literature suggests considerable skepticism about the
possibility of a new era of welfare state convergence and a race to the
bottom. When filtered through very different political systems, similar
economic forces produce very different outcomes in the same way that
an electrical charge produces a different effect in a refrigerator and a
stove.
There is, however, one striking difference between political explanations of welfare state divergence during the age of expansion and the
more recent period. Political accounts of the earlier period of postwar
expansion—the claim that politics matters—emphasized the role of political actors (political parties, labor unions, social movements). In contrast, explanations of refracted divergence during the past quarter
century—the variety of responses to globalization and postindustrialism—have instead emphasized the decisive role of political institutions
(Hicks 1999; Stephens et al. 1999; Swank, forthcoming): thus the partisan (left-right) composition of government matters less than the presence of corporatist decision-making institutions. This shift of emphasis
reflects not just theoretical preference but also historical (i.e., empirical)
differences in the two periods that are still not well understood (Kitschelt
et al. 1999). Changes in class structure from the age of high industrialism
to the present have altered the scope and character of traditional working-class organizations even where the labor movement remains comparatively strong. New social movements (women’s organizations, Green
parties) have had an impact but not yet at the scale of the labor movements of the 1950s and 1960s. As Hanspeter Kriesi (1999) highlights,
the “losers” in Europe’s postindustrial transition have provided a fertile
recruitment pool for parties of the radical right rather than parties of
the left. One only has to compare the social upheaval of the 1960s in
both Europe and North America with the more recent period to be
sensitized to the differences.
Impersonal economic forces, we think, have a great deal to do with
this shift. Welfare politics in an age of austerity are very different from
welfare politics in a period of strong economic growth. There are fewer
resources available to compensate the losers that emerge in any period
of economic change or to absorb the transition costs associated with
redesigning social programs to meet new and emergent needs. Slow
growth, high unemployment, and hence stagnant or falling state revenues create a harsh climate for welfare state innovation but a favorable
environment for the critics of social programs. Within this context, the
political institutions that structure interest representation and decision
making play a decisive role by defining the political opportunity structure, restricting the menu of options available to political leaders and
Theories of the Welfare State
53
their supporters irrespective of political preference. As the neoinstitutionalist literature emphasizes (Pierson 1994, 1996), past policy choices
also impose a major restraint on the policy choices available in the
present because of the high transition costs (“double funding”) typically
associated with moving from one program design to another. But a
sustained period of strong economic growth quickly makes some of
those transition costs more affordable and, hence, the political preferences of policy elites and popular movements more salient. Much
hinges then on whether or not the brief period of high, and unanticipated, growth of the latter half of the 1990s is a harbinger of the future
or a brief blip in the development of the western economies.
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Theories of the Welfare State
57
Notes
Special thanks to Alex Hicks, Frances Fox Piven, and Duane Swank for critical comments
on a previous version of this article.
1. Social Expenditure data are from OECD (1994).
2. Our review touches only indirectly on the implications of this comparative literature
for understanding the distinctiveness of American social politics, a task ably accomplished
by Piven and Cloward (1994, chap. 12).
3. Research in this tradition is also sometimes labeled as the “social democratic” perspective since in the tradition of Bernstein and against Lenin, these class theorists allowed
for the possibility of transforming class relations within the context of parliamentary
democracy.
4. An important, if usually unnoticed (but see Gough 1979, p. 9), shift in focus takes
place in this and related literatures described below. Whereas earlier functionalist accounts
were typically concerned with explaining the common trend line (similarity) as societies
shifted from an agrarian to an industrial base or from early (“competitive”) to advanced
(“monopoly”) capitalism, later studies focused attention primarily on variations around
the trend line, on early vs. late adopters, on high vs. low spenders, on variations in the
form of spending, and on variations in responses to common economic (e.g., globalization)
and demographic (e.g., population aging) developments. This emphasis on difference has
tended to deflect attention from the careful study of processes of institutional diffusion
among nations associated, for example, with the work of John Meyer and his colleagues
(Meyer, Boli-Bennett, and Chase-Dunn 1975).
5. The emphasis on the structure of state institutions in shaping interest aggregation
and policy outcomes has, of course, a long history in American political science. For an
early and still informative application that builds from a combination of neoinstitutionalist
and class-based perspectives to account for the distinctiveness of American social politics,
see Martin (1973).
6. If, however, one regards the commitment to full employment as a keystone of postwar
welfare policy, the return of high unemployment levels in a number of European countries
might lead one to less benign conclusions.
7. Needless to say, programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)
that are highly targeted on the poor and from which pivotal voters gain little are relatively
immune to this constraint.
8. For a contrary view, see Iversen (2001).
9. As Iversen and Wren (1998, p. 511) observe, teachers can serve more students and
nurses more patients, but this is not easily achieved without a decline in the quality of
service.
10. For reviews of this literature, see O’Connor (1996) and Orloff (1996). For a broad
overview of cross-national differences in the way public policies influence gender equality,
see Orloff (2000).
11. In this respect, early feminist analyses paralleled early marxist formulations that
emphasized the role of welfare states in stabilizing capitalist social relations.
12. As Jane Lewis and Gertrude Astrom (1992) observe, these theoretical differences
often reflect actual policy differences in the author’s country of origin.
13. Though he does not address the issue, Korpi’s (2000) gendered typology of welfare
states maps almost perfectly onto Esping-Andersen’s class-based typology.
14. Swedish fertility rates remained relatively high through the early 1990s but have
subsequently declined to 1.5.