The idea of the welfare state is commonly grounded in the principles of social rights, universality and solidarity. Over the past twenty years, welfare reforms have challenged the salience of this conceptualisation. This article argues that changes such as austerity measures, pension reform, administrative decentralisation and efforts to revive the obligation of citizenship have fostered a more discursive conception of social rights. When rights are discursive, the relative power of various clientele interests plays a greater role in the distribution of benefits than objective conditions of need. Also, such notions as universality and solidarity are giving way to selectivity and individual responsibility as the paramount principles of the welfare state.

A study of elite opinion on the nature and future of the welfare state in six European countries, conducted during 1994, found that most of the traditional differences of opinion between left and right were still valid. Public opinion studies have consistently found strong support for state welfare. Yet during the past decade or so, governments in Europe have been pursuing policies that are largely similar in the sense that they are leading towards the containment and retrenchment of state welfare. The pressures of economic globalisation and of national structural factors have led to the replacement of the dominant social democratic expansionist model of welfare with the neo-liberal contractionist model. The result is that in the same way that governments of the right pursued expansionist policies of welfare during the reign of the social democratic model in the 1960s and early 1970s, governments of the left have in the past few years pursued policies of containment and contraction and they are likely to continue do to so in the foreseeable future.

This paper reviews the Reagan administration's attack on the US welfare system during the 1980s. The paper considers the origins, provisions and impact of Reagan's three major pieces of retrenchment legislation: the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, the Social Security Amendments of 1983, and the Family Support Act of 1988. It is argued that Reagan's record in retrenching welfare was limited in budgetary terms, but was successful in making welfare programmes more restrictive. Reagan's welfare legacy is assessed in terms of his attempts at restructuring social provision and shifting the welfare debate to the right. The paper concludes by asserting that Reagan's critique of, and attack on, social provision was accepted by his presidential successors, George Bush and Bill Clinton.

The reforms of the welfare system under the 1945 Labour government are usually regarded as fundamental in creating the post-war welfare state. Yet, measured by their financial implications, and viewed in comparison with either pre-war Britain or other Western European countries in the same period, these reforms appear strikingly limited. Far from bringing a ‘New Jerusalem’, the 1940s reforms seem to have brought into being an austere, minimalist structure of welfare provision. The reasons for this are examined, especially the forces shaping the new social security system. It is argued that the combination of the Labour government's economic priorities, its acceptance of the Beveridge legacy and the Treasury pressure to limit the Exchequer's financial contribution to the new system, led to this austerity.

This article explores whether human service organisations in the voluntary sector possess characteristics which might assure them of possible comparative advantages over the for-profit and public sectors with respect to certain sorts of users. We argue that there are inherent structural characteristics of organisations in each sector (for example, ownership, stakeholders and resources) which predispose them to respond more or less sensitively to different states of ‘disadvantage’ experienced by their users. These states are defined as financial, personal, societal and community disadvantage. We suggest that voluntary organisations have a comparative advantage over other sector agencies in areas where their distinctive ambiguous and hybrid structures enable them to overcome problems of principal–agent gap, median voter reluctance, weak messages from politicians to staff and lack of market interest.

By taking ideas of comparative advantage into account, a coherent case can be developed regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the expanded role of voluntary agencies in welfare provision. In essence, the article contends that a diminution in stakeholder ambiguity, resulting from organisational growth, lowers the comparative advantage of voluntary agencies.

Contents

1 Social security and income maintenance

2 Health care

3 Education

4 Housing and environment

5 Personal social services

6 Law and the treatment of the offender

7 Unemployment and the labour market

8 Race relations

9 The voluntary sector

10 Local government

11 Gender

12 Demography