Welfare State Regimes and Welfare Citizenship

Abstract

This article links together three themes in recent discussion of welfare. First, the extent to which current patterns of state welfare provision are likely to continue has been called into question. Disillusion with the traditional model derives in part from government response to economic pressures, in part from the likelihood that changes in demography, employment and popular expectations will increase demands on the state, and in part from the tendency of theorists to advocate pluralist, decentralized, mixed economy and civil society-based solutions to problems. Secondly, traditional notions of welfare citizenship have been challenged because they fail to take into account the wide variety of paths which different systems have pursued in their development and because they fail to include the impact of state policy on the private sphere of home and family in their analysis. Thirdly, vigorous controversy about the categorization of welfare states surrounds the work of Esping-Andersen (1990). The claim that state welfare cannot be sustained is found to be unconvincing. However, the arguments do focus attention on issues of social care and the impact of policy on women. This has strong implications for the way in which theories of welfare citizenship discuss the relation between state policy and the public and private spheres of social life. Esping-Andersen's model uses the extent of decommodification in relation to formal wage-labour to distinguish the ideal types of liberal, social democratic and conservative/corporatist regimes. State intervention is limited in the liberal model, extensive in the social democratic model and substantial but directed at maintaining the stratification order of the market in the conservative model. An analysis that includes both uncommodified care work in the home and the position of women in the formal labour market implies that different struggles will develop in the various regime types in response to current pressures on the welfare state. In liberal regimes, equal opportunities have been pursued through law rather than direct state intervention: the result is that gender conflicts become increasingly subsumed to the class conflicts of the market. In social democracy a substantial state sector provides both opportunities for women's advancement in employment and socialized care facilities that help to make this possible; pressure on spending leads to conflicts between public and private sector workers (who see the former as parasitic) which increasingly involve gender conflicts. Under conservative/corporatism, where women's opportunities to enter paid employment have been relatively limited, gender conflicts increasingly concern access to paid work. These predictions offer opportunities for the empirical testing of the model.