Labour and Citizenship: The Development of Welfare State Regimes

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the political determinants of the significantly different rates of welfare expenditure which characterise advanced capitalist countries. The research concentrates on the connections between the organization and mobilization of a key political actor pursing social wage benefits – the labour movement – and different levels across nations of welfare provision, including expenditure on health, social security consumption expenditure and social security transfers. The paper uses disaggregated, pooled time series data on welfare provision in 15 OECD countries, 1974–1988, to test the association between more comprehensive welfare state regimes and state structures that facilitate the intervention of organized labour movements in the policy process.

Trade union density and social expenditure: a longitudinal analysis of policy feedback effects in OECD countries, 1980–2010

“…Research has shown that alternative factors such as economic development and institutional arrangements can be equally important predictors of social spending (Huber and Stephens 2001;Kittel and Obinger 2003). Despite the credibility of alternate causes, the capacity of trade unions to influence social policy has been demonstrated in a number of cross-national studies (Boreham, Hall and Leet 1996;Bradley et al 2003;Pontusson 2013).…”

“…In those political economies where non-market forces play a role in economic coordination, a positive relation between trade union strength and social policy can be explained by an institutional equilibrium. On the one hand, trade unions can have an effect on governmental policy (Boreham, Hall and Leet 1996), but one can just as well assume that trade unions will be able to consolidate their position if they are involved in economic coordination. A typical example would be their involvement in the administration of redistributive policies, as is a typical feature of the Ghent system that occurs only in coordinated market economies (Ebbinghaus, Gobel & Koos 2011).…”

Globalization, Social Welfare Reform and Democratic Identity in Russia and other Post-communist Countries

“…Some states have more effective, or more comprehensive, social welfare mechanisms than others. For example, one approach holds that strong labour unions and left-of-centre political parties were influential in spurring the development of welfare states in postwar western Europe (Boreham, Hall and Leet, 1996); other scholars point to the scale of 20th-century social changes such as urbanization and secularization as creating new pressures for the state to regulate society (Andrew, 1984); still others argue that citizens themselves, and social movements, were key in demanding redistributive policies that provided a social safety net (Skocpol, 1992). Although some approaches emphasize the importance of policy design and leadership in developing effective social welfare models, what tended to be neglected, until relatively recently, was an assessment of the role of international influences in social welfare reform.…”