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What We Talk about When We Talk about Poverty: Culture and Welfare State Development in Britain, Denmark and France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2021

Cathie Martin Open the ORCID record for Cathie Martin [Opens in a new window]  and
Tom Chevalier
Cathie Martin*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
Tom Chevalier
Affiliation:
Arènes, CNRS, Rennes, France
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: cjmartin@bu.edu
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Abstract

Why did historical anti-poverty programs in Britain, Denmark and France differ so dramatically in their goals, beneficiaries and agents for addressing poverty? Different cultural views of poverty contributed to how policy makers envisioned anti-poverty reforms. Danish elites articulated social investments in peasants as necessary to economic growth, political stability and societal strength. British elites viewed the lower classes as a challenge to these goals. The French perceived the poor as an opportunity for Christian charity. Fiction writers are overlooked political agents who engage in policy struggles. Collectively, writers contribute to a country's distinctive ‘cultural constraint’, or symbols and narratives, which appears in the national-level aggregation of literature. To assess cross-national variations in cultural depictions of poverty, this article uses historical case studies and quantitative textual analyses of 562 British, 521 Danish and 498 French fictional works from 1770 to 1920.

Keywords

culture and politicswelfare state developmentcomparative politicsthe study of ideascomparative political economyliteratureNordic studieshistorical institutionalism
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , April 2022 , pp. 805 - 828
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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