Public Welfare

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Welfare programs represent an effort on behalf of nation-states and international organizations to provide assistance to people who are otherwise unable to take advantage of market (primarily capitalist) relations. Welfare programs emerged as a public (meaning government-funded) phenomenon following historical periods of industrialization in Western nation-states during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in Asian, Latin American, and African states in the twentieth century, following the decline of colonialism.

Prior to industrialization, explanations for poverty and other forms of political marginalization abounded, most of which emphasized the failings of poor individuals themselves rather than market-based, state-centered, or international explanations. Preindustrial explanations for the existence of the poor fall into two categories. The first category follows the logic of retribution. Poor individuals have committed sins or other values-based transgressions for which the penalty was poverty. In response to such explanations, programs developed first by private individuals and religious organizations were geared toward treating the poor as criminals in fact if not by law.

The second set, paternalistic explanations, evolved from two primary origins: (1) a response to the recognition of the harsh conditions industrialization brought to urban centers, which were increasingly teeming with rural poor who had migrated in search of work; and (2) a justification for the economic exploitation of indigenous populations in colonial contexts around the world. In response to the first origin, labor laws emerged in Great Britain, France, and later the United States first to protect children, who were the first to be seen as “innocent” victims of market fluctuations. Later, through the social movements of labor unions and the rise of Marxist ideology as a challenge to capitalism, women and, last, adult males found increased economic protection through widows’ pensions, unemployment insurance, and better protected labor negotiations.

In response to the second origin, the logic of paternalism dictated an attention to the supposed “natural and primitive” state of the indigenous poor, who then must be “developed” or otherwise socialized into market-based civilization. A different set of programs arose that focused on the mollification of indigenous resistance to the economic exploitation of colonialism and, later in the postcolonial context, the enforced economic independence of new states with limited reparations from colonial conquerors who had benefited economically from previous arrangements. In response to the needs of newly independent states, an international development movement emerged to plug some of the holes required for economic integration into world markets and increased political stability. Many international development programs were premised on this prior paternalistic logic.

Both explanations of poverty remained salient during the rise of progressive movements in industrialized liberal democracies such as Great Britain and the United States. However, a third explanation emerged following the Industrial Revolution as part of reformist, progressive activism that emphasized the role of economic institutions that were either dependent upon or responsible for the creation of vast swaths of poverty. In Western nations, the emergence of socialism as an alternative to liberalism produced hybrid political-economic models such as social democracy, which emphasizes a balance between free markets and economic equality. Northern nations such as Sweden have emerged as the archetypical models of social democracy, where public welfare includes guarantees of financial assistance, generous child care and family leave policies, housing assistance, employment protections, and disability and old age insurance. More recent scholarship has emphasized four ideal types for public-welfare provision comparisons: social democratic, liberal democratic, conservative, and post-Communist regimes.

While social democracies are attractive in terms of the safety net for the economically disadvantaged, individual citizens carry a much heavier tax burden to cover such programs than they do in liberal democracies such as the United States, where programs are not nearly as comprehensive—financially or programmatically. This fact may help to explain why there is not a direct linear relationship between the level of public-welfare provision and general citizen support for such provision. The relationship is instead curvilinear, suggesting that citizens in high-spending, social democratic Scandinavian countries level off in support, while citizens in lower-spending liberal southern European nations continue to support such public-welfare expenditures. This trade-off is one that continues to be contested within each country, with welfare program popularity also based significantly on perceptions of program recipients.

Both liberal democracies and social democracies among Western nations, however, share a comparative advantage in terms of long-term political stability, gross domestic product, and other economic resources that enable nation-states to remain relatively independent of international organizations in terms of social safety-net provision. Newer democracies—many of which emerged in a postcolonial context of limited political stability, low gross domestic product, and low availability of cash-producing resources—face ongoing struggles to provide a social safety net of cash assistance, agricultural subsidies, child care and family leave policies, housing assistance, employment protection, or disability and old age insurance. In these contexts, international organizations, such as the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, have significant influence upon nation-states’ ability to provide public welfare for their citizens.

For example, structural adjustment programs prescribed for what are called “developing” nations often require fiscal policies that substantially limit domestic public-welfare capabilities. For example, liberalizing a national economy often includes allowing significant amounts of foreign investment to enhance the economy. However, with such investments comes the provision of corporate incentives that can limit labor protections for workers—including less onerous minimum wage laws, worker safety regulations, and labor union protections. The trade-offs between public-welfare programs and economic stability for new nation-states is an ongoing challenge. However, a new framework promises to question some of these trade-offs and the paternalistic premises that undergird international development programs. The “empowerment” literature changes the social construction of public-welfare recipients—from either domestic or international programs—into one that focuses on the existing capabilities of the poor and more democratically includes them in program design and funding decisions. Still new, empowerment logic is widespread in the area of microlending, which encourages market integration one small business owner at a time.

In “developed” nations public-welfare programs are more commonly defined as protections against the vagaries of the market—cash assistance for those who do not work, whether because of unemployment, disability, or old age. The security of these programs is based on more domestic considerations than those of developing nations. In countries such as the United States, Great Britain, and France, public policy debates surrounding the shrinking of public-welfare programs boils down to debates that focus again on the people who might benefit—whether they are deserving of assistance or not. As one might expect, those who are deemed deserving of assistance—those, for example, who have “paid into a system” through decades of taxes on their wages—are less likely to have benefits cut than those who are presumed to receive “something for nothing.” To the degree recipients are perceived as deserving, programs are more popular. When recipients are perceived as undeserving, programs are less popular. Such explanations continue to shed light upon the size and limits of welfare state disbursements to the poor and to debates surrounding the boundary lines between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.”

SEE ALSO Developing Countries; International Monetary Fund; Poverty; Public Health; Public Interest; Social Welfare System; Stability, Political; Structural Adjustment; United Nations; Welfare; Welfare State; World Bank, The; World Health Organization; World War II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Feldman, Stanley, and John Zaller. 1992. The Political Culture of Ambivalence: Ideological Responses to the Welfare State. American Journal of Political Science 36 (1): 268–307.

Friedmann, John. 1992. Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Girvetz, Harry K. 1968. Welfare State. In International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, ed. David Sills, vol. 16, 512–520. New York: Macmillan/Free Press.

Hacker, Jacob. 2006. Inequality, American Democracy, and American Political Science: The Need for Cumulative Research. PS: Political Science and Politics 39: 47–49.

Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2004. The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the “Welfare Queen”. New York: New York University Press.

Jaeger, Mads Meier. 2006. Welfare Regimes and Attitudes towards Redistribution: The Regime Hypothesis Revisited. European Sociological Review 22 (2): 157–170.

Katznelson, Ira. 2005. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America. New York: Norton.

Lieberman, Robert. 2005. Shaping Race Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Quadagno, Jill. 1994. The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. New York: Oxford University Press.

Skocpol, Theda. 1995. Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Vreeland, James Raymond. 2003. The IMF and Economic Development. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Ange-Marie Hancock