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Welfare Policies and Welfare States: Generalization in the Comparative Study of Policy History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2009

Margitta Mätzke
Margitta Mätzke*
Affiliation:
Georg August University Göttingen
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Abstract

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Type
Critical Perspectives
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , July 2009 , pp. 308 - 329
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

NOTES

1. Hacker, Jacob, “Bringing the Welfare State Back In: The Promise (and Perils) of the New Social Welfare History,” Journal of Policy History 17 (2005): 25f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Zelizer, Julian E., “History and Political Science: Together Again?” Journal of Policy History 16, no. 2 (2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990).Google Scholar

4. Hall, Peter A. and Soskice, David, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Lijphart, Arend, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, 1999).Google Scholar

6. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds, and Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy, provide quantitative measures for their generalized types. Other examples of quantitative regime-reasoning can be found in Garrett, Geoffrey, Partisan Politics in the Global Economy (Cambridge, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Huber, Evelyne and Stephens, John D., Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Politics in Global Markets (Chicago, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Katzenstein, Peter, “Conclusion: Semisovereignty in United Germany,” in Governance in Contemporay Germany: The Semisovereign State Revisited, ed. Green, Simon and Paterson, William E. (Cambridge, 2005), 285.Google Scholar

8. Zelizer, “History and Political Science,” 127.

9. Jonas Pontusson, for instance, has lamented tendencies in comparative politics toward narrow research questions and warned against becoming too similar to public policy researchers. Pontusson, Jonas, “From Comparative Public Policy to Political Economy: Putting Institutions in Their Place and Taking Interests Seriously,” Comparative Political Studies 28, no. 1 (1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Hacker, “Bringing the Welfare State Back In,” 127.

11. Katzenstein, Peter, Policy and Politics in West Germany: The Growth of a Semisovereign State (Philadelphia, 1987), 6.Google Scholar

12. Baldwin, Peter, “Beyond Weak and Strong: Rethinking the State in Comparative Policy History,” Journal of Policy History 17, no. 1 (2005): 13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Ragin, Charles, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), 6.Google Scholar

14. Thelen, Kathleen and Steinmo, Sven, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, ed. Steinmo, Sven, Thelen, Kathleen, and Longstreth, Frank (Cambridge, 1992), 2Google Scholar. The two authors describe how Historical Institutionalism emerged as a “more mid-level Weberian project that explored diversity within classes of the same phenomena” (6) and an alternative to the overly general “grand theories” that had dominated social science’s theoretical ambitions during the 1950s and 1960s.

15. Bannink, Duco and Hoogenboom, Marcel, “Hidden Change: Disaggregation of Welfare State Regimes for Greater Insight into Welfare State Change,” Journal of European Social Policy 17, no. 1 (2007): 19f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16. See Hall, Peter A., “Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Research,” in Comparative-Historical Analysis: Innovations in Theory and Method, ed. Mahoney, James and Rueschemeyer, Dietrich (Cambridge, 2003).Google Scholar Here he demonstrates how convictions that comparativists hold about the nature of the phenomena they study and the methods used to learn something about these phenomena evolve not independently of one another, but that “aligning methodology and ontology” takes conscious efforts on the part of practitioners of comparative methods.

17. Jacob Hacker expresses this view very clearly when he says that “the American welfare regime represents the accumulation of myriad historical episodes, political actors, and policy changes.” Hacker, Jacob, The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (Cambridge, 2002), 278.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Such as the ones identified in Streeck, Wolfgang and Thelen, Kathleen, “Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies,” in Beyond Continuity: Explorations in the Dynamics of Advanced Political Economies, ed. Streeck, Wolfgang and Thelen, Kathleen (Oxford, 2005).Google Scholar

19. See Hacker, Jacob, “Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 2 (2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. The equivalency premise of power resource approaches, as Peter Swenson calls it. See Swenson, Peter, Capitalists Against Markets: The Making of Labor Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden (Oxford, 2002), 7–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. For instance, in Baldwin, Peter, The Politics of Social Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875–1975 (Cambridge, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets.

22. Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets.

23. Sartori, Giovanni, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review 64, no. 4 (1970): 1041.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. Power resource arguments usually subscribe to versions of that assumption.

25. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State; Hacker, “Privatizing Risk.”

26. Katzenstein, The Growth of a Semisovereign State, 6f.

27. Nullmeier, Frank and Rüb, Friedbert, Die Transformation der Sozialpolitik: Vom Sozialstaat zum Sicherungsstaat (Frankfurt am Main, 1993).Google Scholar

28. Thelen, Kathleen, Union of Parts: Labor Politics in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, 1991).Google Scholar

29. Zelizer, Julian E., “Clio’s Lost Tribe: Public Policy History Since 1978,” Journal of Policy History 12, no. 3 (2000): 381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. Immergut, Ellen, “The Rules of the Game: The Logic of Health Policy-Making in France, Switzerland, and Sweden,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, ed. Steinmo, Sven, Thelen, Kathleen, and Longstreth, Frank (Cambridge, 1992).Google Scholar

31. Katzenstein, The Growth of a Semisovereign State, 350.

32. Mayntz, Renate, “Corporate Actors in Public Policy,” in Soziale Dynamik und politische Steuerung: Theoretische und methodologische Überlegungen, ed. Mayntz, Renate (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), 175.Google Scholar

33. Huber and Stephens, Development and Crisis, 36.

34. Note how Katzenstein turns to metaphor when addressing this issue: “The six areas examined here in depth,” he writes, “are like the different windows of a house. Each window provides us with a different glimpse of the inside. Those who argue that the logic of the problem is more important that the political logic of the country would expect the furnishings in each room to differ drastically in shape and color; after all, the living room serves a different purpose than the dining room or the bedroom. Those who argue that the political logic of the country is more important than the political logic of the problem, on the other hand, would expect a uniform style throughout the house, because the same people live, eat, and sleep in the different rooms. Some, finally, might agree with my position. Even though the political logic of the country is more compelling than the political logic of the problem, that country logic does not explain all policy cases equally well; deviations and exceptions that do exist must, however, be systematically accounted for. Although each house has a distinctive style, it also has a couple of rooms with odd pieces and comfortable junk. Needless to say, these are not the first rooms shown to the guests when they arrive” (362).

35. Collier, Ruth Berins and Collier, David, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton, 1991).Google Scholar

36. To name just two examples: Peter Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets (the formation of welfare states and labor market regulation in Sweden and the United States); Lynch, Julia, Age in the Welfare State: The Origins of Social Spending on Pensioners, Workers, and Children (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar (explicitly distinguishing a first and a second “great divide” of welfare state development). These are examples of studies in which in-depth case studies of formative events play a crucial role, but they are always positioned in relation to long-term development, albeit most of the time implicitly.

37. Peter Swenson points toward such a pattern of continued significance of the explanation he developed in the case of the 1930s legislation when he says: “The American and Swedish welfare states continued to evolve through these decades in ways that suited, or at least not negatively impinge on, employers’ labor market regimes.” See Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets, 304.

38. Pierson, Paul, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Political Analysis (Princeton, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. His work on path dependence is strongly influenced by the social policy contexts in which he studied institutional stability. Welfare states over time create their own clienteles with vested interests in social policy programs, which also contributes to the persistence of policies created by formative decisions. See Pierson, Paul, Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; similarly Lynch, Age in the Welfare State. Some welfare state institutions, such as pay-as-you-go pension systems, are especially prone to positive feedback effects. See Myles, John and Pierson, Paul, “The Comparative Political Economy of Pension Reform,” in The New Politics of the Welfare State, ed. Pierson, Paul (Oxford, 2001).Google Scholar

39. Thelen, Kathleen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan (Cambridge, 2004), 288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. Pierson, Paul, “The Study of Policy Development,” Journal of Policy History 17, no. 1 (2005): 41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Hacker, Jacob and Pierson, Paul, “Business Power and Social Policy: Employers and the Formation of the American Welfare State,” Politics and Society 30, no. 2 (2002): 284ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42. Hacker, “Bringing the Welfare State Back In,” 133; Thelen, How Institutions Evolve, 288.

43. Pierson, Politics in Time, 104; Thelen, How Institutions Evolve, 293–94.

44. Hacker, The Divided Welfare State, 278.

45. For example, the theme of Hacker’s study is essentially about the interaction between private and public forms of welfare benefits and the gradual erosion of the public forms. The unifying theme in Thelen, How Institutions Evolve, regarding the German case, is the evolution of the nonmarket organization of vocational training. One could also see Döhler, Marian and Manow, Philip, Strukturbildung von Politikfeldern: Das Besipiel bundesdeutscher Gesundheitspolitik seit den fünfziger Jahren (Opladen, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as an early example of this approach, the unified theme here being the development of corporatist regulation in the German health system. This list could be extended. The point is that beyond the mere presentation of sequences of events, these accounts all present a coherent image and an explanation of a phenomenon that is salient throughout the historical developments described. The national model-trajectory, in other words, is thematically specified.

46. Thelen, How Institutions Evolve, 289.

47. For example, “the story of America’s public-private welfare regime.” Hacker, The Divided Welfare State, 7, see also endnote 45.

48. Ibid., 66.

49. Lowi, Theodore J., “Four Systems of Policy, Politics, and Choice,” Public Administration Review 32, no. 4 (1972): 299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50. Lowi, Theodore J., “American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies, and Political Theory,” World Politics 16 (1964): 686.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

51. Hacker, “Bringing the Welfare State Back In,” 127.

52. Lowi, “American Business,” 688f.

53. Lowi, “Four Systems,” 299.

54. Pierson, “Policy Development,” 37–39.

55. It is important that the decisive unit shaping the politics of reform is the reform proposal. Policy researchers working in the Lowi tradition have noticed that policies can change their character, and interpretation by actors, over the course of the policy process. See Kellow, Aynsley, “Promoting Elegance in Policy Theory: Simplifying Lowi’s Arenas of Power,” Policy Studies Journal 16, no. 4 (1988): 715CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And, in fact, purposeful issue-redefinition plays a central role in politics. In that sense it is not so much policies, but expectations about policies, that shape actors’ behavior.

56. See ibid., 716. To a certain extent, they also shape the arena in which a welfare reform decision will primarily be made, such as parliamentary decision making, corporatist interest intermediation, upper-house politics, or intrapartisan factionalism.

57. Mares, Isabela, The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (Cambridge, 2003), 11.Google Scholar

58. The extent to which the reform would redistribute risks among different types of employers and the way in which the reform would allocate control over the program.

59. Katzenstein, The Growth of a Semisovereign State, 6f.

60. George, Alexander L. and Bennett, Andrew, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 234.Google Scholar

61. Ibid., 6–11.

62. Nowotny, Helga, “The Use of Typological Procedures in Qualitative Macrosociological Studies,” Quality and Quantity 5, no. 1 (1971): 34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63. Stinchcombe, Arthur L., Constructing Social Theories (New York, 1968), 43.Google Scholar

64. George and Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development, 235; Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories, 45.

65. Elman, Colin, “Explanatory Typologies in Qualitative Studies of International Politics,” International Organization 59 (2005): 298.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66. To remain in Paul Pierson’s metaphor, the main challenge, to my mind, is not to move from the snapshot to the moving picture, but to recognize (contextual influence and political choice) sound track and video as two separate parts of a contemporary DVD. Together they make up the movie; together they tell the story, but they have different characteristics, different causal logics, and should be kept analytically distinct for systematic analysis and comparison.