Identifying the Skeleton of the Social Investment State

Abstract

In this chapter the possibilities and limitations of using expenditure data to measure ‘social investment’ are discussed. The analysis of expenditure data is an obvious choice for attempts to identify to what extent governments have adopted the agenda of an ‘activating ‘ and ‘enabling’ welfare state as well as to operationalize policies that can potentially account for cross-national differences in poverty trends. The chapter explores the possibilities and limits of operationalizing social investment policies on the basis of social expenditure data. It is shown that the use of expenditure data to map the skeleton of the social investment state is fraught with conceptual and methodological problems. The chapter comments on the spending data related to old and new social risks that are reported in the Appendix to the book.

Which Roads (if any) to Social Investment? The Recalibration of EU Welfare States at the Crisis Crossroads (2000–2014)

“…To frame it as De Deken (2014) did, this article maps ‘the skeleton of the social investment welfare state’ in public budgets 3 . Previous research highlighted the usefulness of disaggregating total welfare expenditure into separate functions, which were found to be determined by different politico-institutional factors and in turn associated with different socio-economic outcomes (Castles, 2009; Van Vliet and Wang, 2015).…”

“…The expenditure-based approach has pros and cons (a critical review is provided by De Deken, 2014), and some limitations are unavoidable. A first limitation regards the general question of how to measure welfare state change (Clasen and Siegel, 2007).…”

“…A second limitation is specific to the operationalisation of social investment through social expenditure. The distinction between ‘social investment’ and ‘social protection’ spending items is often blurred; many policies in fact serve both aims (De Deken, 2014; Nolan, 2013). 4 The uncertain categorisation of social programmes largely derives from the same conceptual ambiguity of social investment: a strong point for policy-makers who use it as a political platform (Jenson, 2017: 4), but a hurdle for researchers interested in using it as analytical framework (Nolan, 2013).…”

“…Previous studies have mostly categorised spending items based on the rationale of different policies. However, policies can follow multiple rationales (De Deken, 2014; see note 4): this leads to ample margins of discretion when allocating items to welfare dimensions. Hence, we differentiate between SP and SI by looking at the way in which different programmes are provided: cash benefits are considered as SP, benefits in kind (services) as SI.…”

Social Investment and Youth Labor Market Participation

“…For these reasons, any attempt to examine the development of social investment across regions and countries often fails. Even if alternative approaches are available (De Deken ), because of data limitation, researchers largely end up with two categories, one for compensatory (i.e., the old risk categories) and another for social‐investment policies (i.e., the new risk categories).…”