Emergency welfare states in action: Social policy adaptations to COVID‐19 in the Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia

Abstract

This article analyses the developments of the welfare state's reaction to the pandemic in Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia during 2020–2022, asking whether the changes in social policy represent only temporary responses to the challenges of the pandemic, or if the changes will likely lead to long‐run transformative changes in social policies. All three countries applied emergency adaptive changes to some extent except for job protection, as the short‐time work schemes represent a permanent change in Czechia and Slovakia. Furthermore, the absorption capacity of the welfare state was relatively good, which enabled the countries to avoid the negative social impacts of the crisis in terms of increased unemployment, poverty, and social exclusion. We argue the governments did not introduce permanent third‐order change because they already introduced such changes during the transition to the market economy in which they introduced a low‐expenditure welfare state trajectory. During the pandemic, this trajectory limited their fiscal space for introducing reforms that could radically expand the welfare state. Policy learning and political constellations also had some influence.

Crisis? What crisis? Social policy when crises are and are not crises in Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia

“…According to Moreira and Hick (2021: 262), policies remain path dependent during times of uncertainty, because policymakers stick to what they know best, so governments avoid unknown policy alternatives. Previous studies of COVID policies in Europe conclude that path dependency was strong and governments in social democratic countries mostly introduced incremental, short-term changes (e.g., Greve et al, 2021), as did the Central-European post-communist countries (Aidukante, et al, 2021;Sirovátka, Saxonberg & Csudai, 2023). However, liberal countries introduced additional measures besides increasing the generosity of the existing ones (Béland, Cantillon, et al, 2021;Béland, Dinan, et al, 2021;Hick & Murphy, 2021).…”

“…Labour market policies are also important for immigrants, as Centre-right coalition they can help integrate immigrants into the labour force (Sainsbury, 2006;Schmitt & Teney, 2019), but welfare chauvinists could also use such policies to try to exclude immigrants from the labour force and exclude them from benefits when they are unemployed. Finally, we would expect the pandemic to have the greatest impact on healthcare policies, since large numbers of people become ill. At the same time, we would also expect it to have great impact on family policies, as parents must take care of children who are ill or staying at home doing lockdowns, while labour market policies are also important to prevent the lockdowns and other restrictions from leading to mass unemployment (Moreira et al, 2021;Sirovátka, Saxonberg & Csudai, 2023). Since we argue that despite differences in types of crises the general outcome was the same-continued path dependency with minor, incremental changes-the choice of different types of crises strengthens our findings even more.…”