Post‐War Welfare State Development

Oxford Handbooks Online

Post‐ War Welfare State Development

Frank Nullmeier and Franz‐Xaver Kaufmann
The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State
Edited by Francis G. Castles, Stephan Leibfried, Jane Lewis, Herbert Obinger, and Christopher Pierson

Print Publication Date: Jul 2010 Subject: Political Science, European Union, Comparative Politics
Online Publication Date: Sep DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199579396.003.0006
2010

Abstract and Keywords

This article examines the validity of the dominant approaches to periodization in several respects and shows their
shortcomings. It then offers a systematic discussion of measurement concepts used in comparative welfare state
research and explores how the use of periodization criteria gleaned from this literature has influenced the
understanding of welfare state development since 1945. Six different types of periodization, each based on a
specific set of criteria, may be distinguished: the macro level of context factors; social expenditure trends; the
internal structure of social programmes; the distribution of welfare production between state, market, family, and
civil society, and governance types of social policy; the outcome of social policy interventions; and the public
legitimation of social policy and the welfare state. The global financial crisis of 2008/9 might have a huge impact on
welfare state development and may yet usher in a new period. Based on a theoretical approach that highlights
economic context factors, this expectation seems particularly plausible, given that the crisis represents no less
than the most severe recession of the post-war era.

Keywords: welfare state development, post-war era, periodization, global financial crisis, context factors, social expenditure, social programmes,
public legitimation, social policy

Introduction

MOSTcomparative research on welfare states relates to national differences and similarities, i.e. to the spatial
perspective. This chapter instead focuses on the question of how one may generalize about changes in the
temporal trajectories of welfare states.

The bulk of the welfare state literature divides the post‐war era into two periods: a phase of expansion and one of
retrenchment. In this view, a period characterized by the formidable growth of social security systems—in which
the welfare state firmly established itself as a core institution of Western societies—has been followed by a phase
of expenditure cuts and deteriorating social benefits. This two‐phase periodization of post‐war developments—with
an expansion period from 1945 to the oil crisis of 1973 and a subsequent retrenchment phase that has already
endured more than three decades—is largely uncontroversial today. No alternative to this periodization has gained
comparable academic recognition. And while a number of related terms—such as restructuring, recalibration,
phase of permanent austerity, and structural adjustment—have been put forward, the term ‘retrenchment’ has
prevailed in the literature.

(p. 82) The same periodization is captured in the expression ‘Golden Age of the welfare state’ (C. Pierson 1991;
Esping‐Andersen 1996 b) and—less frequently—‘Silver Age’ (Taylor‐Gooby 2002; Ferrera 2008). This terminology
does not necessarily imply the notion of a decline, as the classical usage in Hesiod's myth of origin indicates
(Works and Days, lines 109–201; Hesiod distinguishes five ages, gives the ‘bronze’ label to the third and fourth
age, and rates the fourth age as the ‘apex of civilization’). Yet the terminology of gold and silver certainly has a

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strong connotation of decline, and it suggests regret about the loss of a highly valued, harmonious past. The
terminology is thus inextricably retrospective: the present is primarily assessed in light of the past, and the whole
periodization is dominated by this retrospective orientation. There is currently no readily available equivalent to the
older terminology of progress and modernization with its openness towards the future.

Ironically, the work of Paul Pierson (1994) has greatly contributed to the popularity of that term ‘retrenchment’ and
its use as a label for the current historical period, even though Pierson himself aimed to show that the cuts
implemented by the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (1981–9 and 1979–90, respectively)
were more limited, and hence that the alleged ‘crisis’ of the welfare state in the wake of their social policy changes
was much less pronounced, than many observers at the time assumed. Pierson rather suggested that welfare
states were surprisingly resilient, flexible, and successful in adapting to sometimes drastic changes in economic
conditions. Since the mid‐1990s, however, only the extent of retrenchment has seemed controversial.

A presupposition for speaking about welfare state development in a transnational or even international perspective
is that the ‘nature of the animal’ is known. Social policy researchers have spent considerable energy on the
definition of welfare state regimes, the development of welfare state typologies and the appropriate classification of
individual countries and policies. Efforts to define and justify periods of welfare state development have, by
contrast, been few and far between. Social policy and welfare state are notions, however, whose content varies
not only from nation to nation but also from time to time. To grasp and to assess changes in welfare state
development is therefore a complex endeavour, and most attempts at periodization do not meet the nature of the
challenge.

The next section of this chapter probes the validity of the dominant approaches to periodization in several
respects and shows their shortcomings. A further section then proposes a systematic discussion of measurement
concepts used in comparative welfare state research and examines how the use of periodization criteria gleaned
from this literature influences our understanding of welfare state development since 1945.

Periodizations

Periodizations are interpretations of history that entail a number of crucial assumptions. By distinguishing and
delimiting periods or epochs, they mark the beginning (p. 83) of something new or different, the crossing of
thresholds, the discontinuities and ruptures of historical processes and developments. The proclamation of a new
period or epoch is never an ‘innocent’ act or a merely practical decision for researchers, but rather implies a
whole set of interpretive frames in which the suggested periodization is grounded while at the same time hiding or
marginalizing aspects of social and political reality on which alternative periodizations might be based. Thus
periodizations are often used for political purposes, to promote a particular perception of growth, change,
adjustment, or retrenchment.

The dominant periodization of welfare state developments is remarkable both for its widespread acceptance in the
field of social policy research itself and for its lack of congruence with periodizations developed or favoured by
historians. In the field of historiography, the terminology of a ‘long nineteenth century’ (roughly from 1770 to
1914/18) and a ‘short twentieth century’ (1914/18 to 1989/91) has come to prevail (Hobsbawm 1994). In this broad
periodization, World War II marks the end of a first and the beginning of a second sub‐period of the ‘short’ twentieth
century rather than a fundamental rupture. Unlike a calendar‐based, ‘content‐free’ approach (Osterhammel 2009:
87), this periodization highlights key events (the American and French Revolutions, World War I, the demise of
socialism) as well as the cultural, social, and political shifts indicated by those events.

Neither the years 1914/18 nor the years 1989/91 are, however, crucial dates with regard to the shifts highlighted
by the expansion and retrenchment periodization of welfare state development. And a glance at finer grained
periodizations reveals even more differences between social policy research and historians: Tony Judt's History of
Europe since 1945 (2005) also starts with the year 1945 but distinguishes four rather than two sub‐periods of the
post‐war era (1945–53, 1953–71, 1971–89, 1989–2005). Most conspicuously, the year 1989 is not viewed as a
particularly important historical juncture in social policy research with its focus on quantitative indicators of
expansion and retrenchment, and on the size and generosity of social security systems. In any case, the currently
hegemonic interpretation of welfare state development has to be anchored more strongly in comparative research
and its empirical findings, the criteria of periodization have to be better justified and the implicit framings of this

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 Post‐War Welfare State Development

periodization have to be made more transparent.

Why 1945 as the Starting Point of a New Phase?

The end of World War II is an obvious historical juncture in the context of social policy research. It coincides with
the years of economic recovery from the Great Depression and with the major social policy reforms inspired by
Lord Beveridge's (1942) universalistic reform model that were implemented in Great Britain until 1950. Thus 1945
and the early post‐war years may be characterized as the period in which the welfare state became firmly
entrenched.

Yet with a view to the institutional dimension of the welfare state and the passage of social insurance legislation,
this seems less convincing, especially for the (p. 84) Bismarckian social security systems. In fact, this
periodization does not even do justice to the history of the American and Scandinavian welfare states, which
experienced massive changes and institutional expansion in the 1930s. If the focus is on institutional innovations,
the post‐war era appears to be the end of a phase in which the core set of social insurances was established in
most continental European and Anglo‐Saxon countries—insurances related to the risks of old age and retirement,
sickness, industrial accidents, and unemployment. These insurances were usually introduced—and first
expansions were implemented—prior to 1950. On the basis of the institutional innovation criterion, then, one would
rather have to take the year 1950 as the end of a phase of institutional emergence—a phase which may itself be
divided into three sub‐periods: ‘Introductory phase’ from early German legislation until 1914; ‘phase of extension’
between the two world wars; ‘phase of completion’ in the post‐war years, followed by a ‘phase of consolidation’
and stepwise quantitative expansion of social benefits (Flora and Alber 1981: 54). However, the implied shift in the
interpretation of the early post‐war years is even more important than the question whether 1945 or 1950 is the
more appropriate cut‐off point as such: the first periodization interprets the early post‐war years as the beginning
of the welfare state's Golden Age, a long expansion phase starting in 1945, while the second highlights the end of a
previous innovation ‘cycle’ in 1950.

The post‐war era appears in yet another light if the development of social expenditures is used as the sole
indicator for the growth of the welfare state. According to Christopher Pierson (1998: 108–35), the whole period
between 1918/20 and 1973/5 may, then, be seen as a phase of growth and expansion. Based on the expenditure
criterion, the year 1945 (or 1950) does not mark a rupture or discontinuity. Even if social insurance coverage is
used as an additional indicator, the data suggest a more or less uninterrupted growth trend from roughly 1910 to
the 1970s (Flora and Alber 1981: 49, 55).

Despite these considerations and pieces of evidence, it seems appropriate to view 1945 as an important historical
juncture. The post‐war era should be understood as a phase in its own right because an understanding of social
policy and the welfare state based on the notion of social rights as key elements of universal human rights, on par
with liberal and democratic rights, only began to emerge during World War II (Kaufmann 2003 c). The
acknowledgement of social rights as universal human rights may be dated to the years between 1941 and 1948,
and it was part of allied and international efforts to design a political order for the post‐war era. Even before the
United States entered the war, talks in August 1941 between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill resulted
in the following important social policy‐related message (points 5 and 6 of the declaration that was later called the
Atlantic Charter):

Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the
object of securing, for all, improved labour standards, economic advancement and social security. Sixth,
after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all
(p. 85) nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford
assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.

The last couple of lines refer to two of the ‘four (essential human) freedoms’ outlined in Roosevelt's January 1941
State of the Union Address. The principle of universal social rights is here embedded in the notion of freedom from
want: ‘The third is freedom from want—which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings
which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world’. In the
Philadelphia Declaration (1944) of the International Labour Organization, the principle of universal social security
was further strengthened (Lee 1994) but it wasn't until the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed by the

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General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, that an explicit catalogue of universal social rights was proposed
(in Articles 23 to 28: right to work, free choice of employment, rest and leisure, a standard of living adequate for
the health and well‐being of self and family, education, and participation in cultural life). This catalogue is prefaced
by article 22, which stipulates—in a somewhat conditional form—the basic entitlement to the social rights that are
specified in the following articles: ‘Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled
to realization, through national effort and international co‐operation and in accordance with the organization and
resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free
development of his personality.’ This integration of social policy entitlements into the concept of universal rights
was mirrored in the academic sphere by T. H. Marshall's (1964b) threefold concept of liberal, political, and social
citizenship rights.

Whereas the international paradigm for social policy before World War II remained selective, especially with
respect to industrial workers and the poor, but also with respect to the risks covered, the new international
paradigm was universal, providing coverage for the entire population. It joined with the claim for equality of
everyone, irrespective of race, religion, and gender. And it extended the scope from policies of workers' protection
towards a broad concept of individual welfare. This shift is expressed by the change of leading terms from ‘social
insurance’ to ‘social security’ and from ‘social policy’ to ‘welfare state’.

This shift of paradigm in social policy was part of a much broader shift in the area of international law. Until World
War II, including the regime of the League of Nations, international law was seen exclusively as an affair of
governments, not of peoples. But in the light of the fascist consequences of the Great Depression an international
elite consensus was reached about a nexus between social order at the national level and international peace.
Therefore the vision of an international responsibility for the well‐being of nations and their people emerged:
Welfare Internationalism. The ‘Economic and Social Council’ became a main organ of the UN, and the ILO, created
under the auspices of the League of Nations, now became the instrument not only for international regulations but
also for practical initiatives and assistance for social policy development, especially in the third world.

(p. 86) Why not 1989?

The history of the welfare state is usually written without an emphasis on the epochal changes of 1989. The
standard periodization distinguishes an expansion phase from the early post‐war years to the 1970s and an
ensuing retrenchment phase. This view betrays the literature's focus on Western advanced industrial economies.
For the Eastern European countries, the political regime change of 1989 also entailed the demise of a socialist
welfare state model. This model had built on a full employment guarantee and provided—through a combination of
firm‐level and state‐level security systems—universal benefits covering the risks of sickness and old age as well as
family‐related services, all of this embedded in an economic planning system that used the education and
vocational training sector to manage the labour supply. The revolutions and political changes in the wake of 1989
not only replaced planned economies with (initially often strongly deregulated) market economies; it also replaced
communist dictatorial regimes with (semi‐)presidential and parliamentary democracies. The newly introduced
democratic regimes were immediately faced with a transitional recession, and hence with a challenging economic
situation. In short, the restructuring of social security systems after 1990 was but one element of a far‐reaching
institutional reorganization, and moreover, these restructuring efforts were undertaken in parallel with a first round
of retrenchment measures. The 1980s had already brought an economic slowdown to Eastern Europe, which was
exacerbated by the post‐1990 recession; the subsequent phase of recovery and strong economic growth came to
an abrupt end with the financial crisis of 2008, which jeopardized efforts of social policy consolidation in these
countries. Only when the stagnation phase of the 1980s is added to the picture, can their trajectories be reconciled
with the general retrenchment hypothesis and the claim that the years between 1973 and 1980 represent a critical
juncture. However, it would be much more appropriate to consider institutional changes in the demarcation of
phases of social policy development; 1989/90, then, clearly emerges as a major rupture in Eastern Europe. Since
the transition states were strongly oriented towards reform models that appeared to epitomize the retrenchment
trend in Western and Northern European countries, the demise of socialism might indeed be viewed as no more
than a somewhat belated alignment of Eastern Europe with that trend. Such an interpretation does not deny the
differences between the Western and the socialist welfare state models, but it rates the year 1989 as a less
relevant juncture in terms of social policy development. According to this interpretation, the previously socialist
welfare states, as different as they might initially have been from their Western equivalents, merely followed the

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 Post‐War Welfare State Development

path of the Western countries under the influence of imported ideas and reform concepts in the years after 1989.

However, from an ideological perspective the breakdown of the socialist regimes weakened the political status of
the Western European welfare state. Instead of representing a kind of third way between state socialism and
unrestrained capitalism, it is now the only alternative to the latter.

(p. 87) Sub‐ Periods

In order to factor in the status of 1989 as a meaningful if hardly decisive historical juncture in the context of welfare
state development, one might resort to a distinction of major phases and shorter sub‐periods. Such hierarchical
periodizations are widely used. Here we only discuss the possibility of dividing the expansion and retrenchment
phases into three sub‐periods, respectively (expansion: 1945–50, 1950–60 and 1960–73; retrenchment: 1973–9,
1980–89/90 and 1990–today).

As indicated above, British welfare state reforms stand out in interpretations of the early post‐war years (1945–50).
But far‐reaching reforms—in the context of a social insurance tradition—were also implemented in France, and
major reforms of the social security systems of Belgium, Sweden, and Switzerland deserve to be mentioned as well.
By contrast, coping with the consequences of their military defeat and the re‐establishment of their pre‐war social
security systems dominated the political agenda in the countries that had experienced fascist and national‐socialist
regimes— Italy, Japan, Austria, and Germany. Yet Christopher Pierson's (1998: 113) suggestion to characterize this
sub‐period as a phase of ‘reconstruction’ appears unconvincing, for the element of innovation was more prominent
in these years than mere reconstruction efforts: policy reforms were frequently grounded in the new understanding
of social security as a universal right, and so the extension of social security systems to the entire labour force
and/or the citizenry at large became a key objective in this period, albeit pursued to varying extents and
implemented with varying success.

The years between 1950 and 1960 have been characterized as a phase of ‘relative stagnation’ (C. Pierson 1998:
132). This assessment is based on the GDP share of social expenditures. However, against the backdrop of
massive economic growth and virtual full employment (as well as a low population share of persons over 65),
below‐average social expenditure growth has to be viewed as a weak indicator for welfare state development. The
high employment rate—which reduced the pressure to offer or rely on social benefits—combined with fundamental
old‐age security reforms, as in Sweden and Germany, are much more telling. Moreover, data on replacement rates
(Korpi and Palme 2007) indicate that levels of social policy generosity were already close to their peak values in
1960—for instance, in two out of three branches of the German social security system. There is widespread
agreement that the years between 1960 and 1973 represent the major expansion phase of the welfare state (C.
Pierson 1998), as indicated by social expenditure growth rates considerably above the long‐term average. If the
term ‘Golden Age’ makes sense at all, then it is for this period of roughly fifteen years. However, this was primarily
an expansion of benefit levels and coverage. Otherwise, the 1960s are not known as years of social policy
innovation. The inputs and demands of the new social movements, from the civil rights movement to the women's
movement, had not yet begun to impact social policy. Even important reforms such as the introduction of Medicaid
and Medicare in the United States remained limited, and they represented no more than a catch‐up with policy
developments that had been missed or blocked politically in the 1940s (Hacker 2002). Hence golden years of
social policy may well coincide (p. 88) with a dearth of policy innovations and of policy deliberation on the long‐
term stabilization of the welfare state.

Huber and Stephens (2001 a) divide the retrenchment phase into three sub‐periods: 1973–9, 1980–90, and 1990–
2000. This periodization is justified by a substantive interpretation of these periods – the 1970s as a phase of
‘fumbling’ in which new challenges emerging between the first and second oil crisis were still tackled along
conventional lines; the 1980s as a phase in which policymakers recognized that problems in the social policy field
were not merely cyclical but required structural adjustment measures; and finally, the 1990s as a phase
characterized by the opening of the Berlin Wall, the demise of state socialism, and EU market and monetary
integration. While the 1970s were dominated by piecemeal attempts to respond to the apparent slack of a post‐war
social policy model that continued to be perceived as broadly successful, political conflicts in the 1980s touched
upon the very survival of the welfare state, whose legitimacy was massively questioned by the neoconservative
governments in Great Britain and the United States. That even radical retrenchment does not necessarily hollow
out the welfare state as a whole was an insight of the 1990s – a phase of welfare state development in which the

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role of economic internationalization came to the fore. However, sub‐periodizations referring to the post‐1980
phase remain quite anaemic. Taylor‐Gooby therefore speaks of the ‘interregnum of the 1980s and 1990s’ (Taylor‐
Gooby 2002: 598), thus underlining the vague contours, ambivalent character, and overall immobility of social
policy making in those years.

Region‐ Specific Phases of Welfare State Development?

Our considerations regarding the meaning of 1989 for welfare state development in the Eastern European countries
also suggest an entirely different approach to periodization. For it remains to be asked whether periodizations
along a single dimension may ever be plausibly applied to all countries and world regions. Isn't it necessary to
differentiate groups or ‘families’ of countries according to type of welfare state or level of economic development
and OECD membership status, or lack thereof? In short, is there a universal development trend that merely unfolds
in a more or less delayed fashion in various parts of the world, or should we indeed consider region‐specific
approaches to periodization?

Considerable evidence for the plausibility of region‐specific approaches may be gleaned from welfare state
development in East and South‐East Asia (Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand). In these
countries, the time from 1945 to the late 1990s appears to have been a single, uninterrupted phase of welfare state
expansion. After a slow beginning characterized by rather modest levels of social policy generosity,
democratization processes starting in the 1980s ushered in a marked expansion of social programmes (Haggard
and Kaufman 2008). Moreover, the oil crisis of 1973/4 and the end of the Bretton Woods system did not result in
economic downturns. Thus a more appropriate periodization might divide the long and ongoing welfare state
expansion phase of these countries into two sub‐periods: (p. 89) a first phase of restrained and a second one of
accelerated welfare state development since approximately 1980. In China, the expansion of social security
systems began even later, as exemplified by the reform of old‐age security in 1997 (Barr and Diamond 2008). The
situation in Latin America is more complicated. Up to 1980, social security systems with limited coverage,
privileging the manufacturing sector and public servants while neglecting the rural population, were established on
that continent. Hence, despite considerable social expenditure levels, the traditional social inequality in these
countries was essentially reproduced by their welfare states. In the 1980s, Latin America was faced with a twofold
challenge—democratization processes and economic crisis—which triggered rather different developments in the
individual countries and a back and forth movement between market‐oriented reforms and moves towards
universal access to social security. These developments were initially often dominated by privatization efforts
while, in recent years, there have been greater political efforts to fight poverty and implement a basic tier of social
security programmes. This is relatively congruent with the two‐phase periodization of the OECD. However, one
would have to interpret the democratic reinvention of the welfare state and the recent wave of social‐reform
oriented governments as a step in the direction of a new expansion phase of the welfare state (Segura‐Ubiergo
2007; Haggard and Kaufman 2008).

Policy‐ Specific Developments?

The terms ‘social policy’ and ‘welfare state’ refer to a number of policy fields. Which policies are subsumed under
these headings varies over time and in line with nationally specific traditions. Hence there is undoubtedly a
semantic core of the two terms (old‐age security, health, poverty relief, long‐term care, unemployment, etc., are
usually considered to be the major elements of social policy making and the welfare state), but a number of other
sub‐fields such as housing, education, and labour legislation are sometimes included in the national definitions and
understandings of these terms and sometimes not. Such different understandings may lead to very different
assessments of welfare state change. In the Bismarckian welfare state, the risks traditionally covered by social
insurances are the main reference points for every discussion of welfare state development. Against this backdrop,
the growing attention of social policymakers to education and child‐care policy over the last ten years is perceived
as an expansion of the traditional scope and meaning of social policy making and the welfare state. Given these
different understandings of individual policy fields, the expectation that ‘one‐size‐fits‐all’ periodizations are
plausible across different areas of social policy is rather questionable.

The assumption of a coherent logic of development across social policy areas is, however, prominent in the
discussion of welfare state regimes. Such typologies are currently attacked with the argument that the internal

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homogeneity of developments in different branches of national social security systems is much lower than Esping‐
Andersen assumed in his seminal contribution (Scruggs and Allen 2006 a). Hence (p. 90) such classifications
arguably do not do justice to internal differentiations between social policy areas or sub‐fields. This argument may
also be made for efforts at periodization. Thus a one‐size‐fits‐all periodization would seem to neglect the differential
dynamics of social policy developments. For instance, the Social Citizenship Indicators Programme (SCIP) data
show that the turning point in the development of replacement rates in the area of pension policy usually occurred
later than in the area of sickness payments and even much later than in the case of unemployment insurance
(Korpi and Palme 2007).

The question whether all programmes in a country belong to one and the same type of welfare state regime, and
whether shifts in different programmes may be described with one and the same periodization scheme, relates to
the internal coherence of welfare state arrangements and to the complementarity of individual programmes. As in
the debate on varieties of capitalism, one has to ask whether the overall constellation is coherent, and hence may
be viewed as an equilibrium of different social programmes and institutional arrangements. The ongoing debate
about Esping‐Andersen's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism since the book's publication two decades ago and
considerable evidence of ‘partial shifts’ between regime types in different branches of social security systems
illustrate that such complementarities and elective affinities are probably not as widespread as is frequently
assumed. On the other hand, there are attempts to identify complementarities not so much between areas of social
policy but rather between social policy and industrial relations, between social policy and production regimes,
between social policy and political‐institutional features such as electoral systems, between social policy and
vocational training—and also between social and foreign as well as security policy. Such evidence suggests that
national welfare state developments have been hitherto rather idiosyncratic. It is only under the auspices of
growing coordination within the EU that transnational influences become effective (Kaufmann 2003 a).

Exemplary Reforms as Markers of Welfare State Development?

The complexity of social policy developments in a variety of sub‐fields and the permanent changes in terms of
privileged instruments, benefit levels, and eligibility criteria are hardly noticed and assessed in all their details by
the public. The problems faced by social policy researchers who attempt to produce adequate overviews of the
social policy benefit levels of entire societies—overviews that generalize across sub‐fields while doing justice to
idiosyncratic developments in each of them—mirrors the difficulties faced by citizens and political elites in their
attempt to grasp the contours of welfare state development at given points in time. In fact, public perceptions of the
welfare state are typically grounded in perceptions of specific pieces of legislation, reform initiatives and areas of
social policy that appear to constitute major events and therefore achieve a paradigmatic status, thus hiding the
contours and effects of other programmes. The ‘true nature’ of the welfare state in a given country is, then, not so
much a function of measuring benefit levels but of everyday public (p. 91) assessments of exemplary reforms.
More than anything else, innovative pieces of social policy legislation have this event character. Parliamentary
decisions in favour of a bill or the implementation of new legislation thus signal ‘reform’ events that may determine
public assessments of entire phases of welfare state development. Such reforms—rather than turning points in the
development of benefit levels—represent the historical junctures that structure temporal processes. For instance,
consider reforms of old‐age security in Sweden and Germany during the late 1950s, the 1996 welfare reform in the
United States, the establishment of the NHS in post‐war Britain, or the privatization of old‐age security in Chile in
1981 (Müller 2003), and perhaps also the subsequent introduction of a basic pension (Barr and Diamond 2008) in
2008. An approach that focuses on paradigmatic shifts, reforms, and events is also more conducive to an
explanation of the shocks created by the radical market reforms under Reagan and Thatcher—after all, despite
continued social expenditure growth, it is hard to overlook the fact that social policy developments entered a new
path in the 1980s.

The danger entailed in such an approach is undoubtedly that one might capture the ‘image’ of reforms rather than
their reality and effects. Moreover, precisely those fields of social policy might be neglected by academic
researchers that also receive little public attention. Still, these images very much determine broader
understandings of social policy epochs. They are themselves part of social policy‐related processes and greatly
contribute to the framing of the material effects of social security systems. A focus on widely perceived reforms
also takes into account that greater weight has to be given to ruptures with regard to structural features, changes
of basic principles and the reformulation of basic norms in the analysis of welfare state development than to mere

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shifts in benefit levels—only the former are evidence for ‘deeper’ shifts. The threefold typology of Peter Hall (1993)
has gained an almost canonical status in the analysis of policy change, as it offers a heuristic for the distinction
between structural changes and mere adaptations of existing programmes (first order change: incrementalist
adaptation; second order change: new instruments; third order change: policy paradigm shift). Perhaps, however,
this typology should be modified for the analysis of welfare state development: changes that usher in a departure
from the institutional and ideological foundations of an established path and are accompanied by major shifts in
coverage, replacement rates and levels of social expenditure are particularly appropriate markers for the
beginning of new periods of welfare state development.

The Measurement of 65 years of Welfare State Development

In sum, the attempts to describe temporal changes in the development of welfare states by comprehensive
periodizations are not entirely convincing. We need more (p. 92) differentiated approaches which take into
account the complex character of welfare state developments.

In the following we therefore examine more closely the different criteria and measurement procedures on which the
described periodizations are based. Six different types of periodization, each based on a specific set of criteria,
may be distinguished. Periodizations may draw on:

1. the macro level of context factors—the economic, social, and political challenges of social policy making;
2. social expenditure trends;
3. the internal structure of social programmes, the generosity of social benefits, coverage, access, etc.
4. the distribution of welfare production between state, market, family, and civil society, as well as
governance types of social policy; the outcome of social policy interventions (e.g. poverty rates and
measures of inequality);
5. the public legitimation of social policy and the welfare state.

Challenges and Contextual Factors

A first type of periodization refers to the economic, social, and political challenges that constitute the backdrop of
welfare state development. This approach to periodization assumes that changes in these conditions translate into
risk structures on the one hand, and changing opportunity structures on the other. It largely corresponds with the
functionalist explanation of welfare state development. Such periodizations do not highlight the development of
social policy itself (even though they usually draw on social expenditure data as indicators of welfare state
development) but rather focus on external factors. In this perspective, the Golden Age of welfare state
development was brought about by highly favourable external conditions. All periodizations that refer to phases of
economic development such as industrialization, deindustrialization, and the rise of post‐industrialism, use
economic growth rates, Kondratiev cycles, and product innovations as criteria, point out the role of economic
globalization as a driving force of welfare state development, or highlight events such as the end of the Bretton
Woods system and the oil crisis of 1973/4 and propagate a periodization of welfare state history that is oriented to
external factors. The same holds true for references to changes in class and family structures, demographic shifts
or new gender relations. Likewise, references to political regime changes, waves of democratization, constitutional
reforms, or new levels of political mobilization are a—politics‐centred—variant of this approach to periodization. In
all the described versions, these periodizations imply that there is a direct relationship between contextual factors
and welfare state changes, and hence that functional requirements trigger quasi‐automatic mechanisms of
adaptation whenever social policy arrangements and their contexts are out of sync. In the expansion phase of the
welfare state, against the backdrop of an enormous GDP growth between 1950 and 1975, references to
industrialization processes were thus highlighted in (p. 93) periodization schemes and explanatory models
(Rimlinger 1971; Wilensky 1975). More complex models that built on Stein Rokkan's version of modernization
theory mostly added political factors (introduction of universal voting rights, democratization of political systems;
see Flora and Alber 1981). Moreover, despite the criticism levelled against functional explanations from the
perspective of the power resources approach, there was also a wave of approaches (based on capitalism theory)
that credited economic factors with the power to determine opportunities of social policy making. Three core
periodization concepts stem from these lines of thought, and they also entail three versions of the retrenchment
hypothesis:

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1. The hypothesis of an early onset of the retrenchment phase: it was the oil crisis of 1973/4, together with
shifts in international trade relations and the demise of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in
1971, that severely restricted opportunities for social policy making at the national level and put pressure on
the welfare state.
2. The globalization hypothesis: according to this second view, the above‐mentioned developments in the
early 1970s marked no more than the initial phase of economic globalization, which gained steam in the
1980s and 1990s and increased the exit options of (financial) capital; the possibility to search worldwide for
the most competitive investment locations, in turn, increased the power of corporations, and generous social
policy came to be viewed as a threat to national competitiveness. Not all versions of this hypothesis imply the
‘race to the bottom’ argument, but they all tend to assume that continued welfare state expansion is no longer
possible given the internationalization of markets and investment opportunities, and that the new phase of
welfare state development characterized by retrenchment was ushered in during the 1980s.
3. The postindustrialism hypothesis: according to this third view, technological changes, the rise of the
service economy and the knowledge society as well as the social developments fostered by the restructuring
of labour markets are more important than globalization itself. Lower economic growth rates coincide with less
job security and increased flexibility, greater qualification requirements, the disappearance of the working
class due to deindustrialization processes, increased female labour force participation and a shift in the
gender division of labour. These shifts create ‘new social risks’, and attempts beginning in the 1980s to deal
with those risks mark the transition from the ‘industrial welfare state’ to the ‘postindustrial welfare state’
(Taylor‐Gooby 2004).

The Development of Social Expenditures

Older versions of the functionalist paradigm were closely linked with a measurement concept of the welfare state
that viewed the development of social expenditures as a particularly good indicator for the performance of social
security systems. Since this assumption seemed entirely adequate with a view to the expansion phase, the notions
of a welfare state crisis and of retrenchment tended to go hand in hand with the (p. 94) expectation of dwindling
social expenditure levels. And while Esping‐Andersen's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism fostered a shift from
welfare state research that remained focused on social expenditure ratios (Wilensky 1975; Flora 1986–87) to
multidimensional research that also took the nature of social programmes into consideration, Paul Pierson's
influential retrenchment analysis (1994) greatly contributed to a shift back to the traditional focus on government
social spending (as a share of GDP) in academic debates. His study of this new phase did not use the complex set
of measurement instruments developed by Esping‐Andersen, and so did not capture shifts in terms of social rights.
His proclamation of a new phase rather encouraged attempts to fine‐tune the analysis of social expenditures. With
a view to the plethora of studies in this vein, one may, however, conclude that there is no evidence for the
retrenchment hypothesis based on public expenditure data alone (Castles 2007 b). Not social expenditures but
rather expenditures for other core responsibilities of the state declined in the 1980s and 1990s. A comparison of
twenty‐one OECD states between 1980 and 2002 reveals a quite pronounced upwards trend of social expenditure
levels as percentages of GDP (and likewise for welfare state funding; Starke et al. 2008). This development is not
merely a function of demographic shifts, as we do not only observe a rise of expenditures for old‐age security (on
average, from 6.7 to 8.3 per cent of GDP), but also growing expenditures for health, unemployment and family
benefits. This evidence indicates that the race to the bottom variant of the globalization hypothesis has been
falsified if social expenditures are accepted as the primary indicator for welfare state development and
retrenchment. However, if this indicator is employed, the two‐phase periodization of welfare state development is
no longer tenable. The comparison of social expenditures highlights continuities and downplays potential ruptures.

Benefit Levels and Other Programme Characteristics

Even early research on welfare state development had already used other indicators alongside social expenditure
levels such as, for instance, coverage. Drawing on a dataset compiled by Walter Korpi on the programme
characteristics of social insurances, Esping‐Andersen (1990) then presented a theoretically sound and particularly
successful concept for the measurement of welfare state quality (focusing on decommodification, social
stratification, state‐market‐family relations). His quality standards were derived from a comparison of different
social policy traditions in Europe, and the approach corresponded with the power‐resources and conflict‐based
explanation of welfare state development. Meanwhile the dataset (SCIP) has been developed further and has

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 Post‐War Welfare State Development

become publicly accessible (Korpi and Palme 2007). The data of the SCIP project for eighteen OECD welfare states
make it possible to reconstruct the development of social rights and benefit levels in five social policy sub‐fields
since 1930 in five‐year steps. Most importantly, average replacement rates for the different branches of social
security systems offer a basis for research into the beginning of the retrenchment phase: the year with the highest
replacement rate can be viewed as the (p. 95) end point of the expansion phase. That there has been
retrenchment—a claim that is not corroborated by the analysis of social expenditures alone—is illustrated by the
fact that the bulk of the measurement values for 1995 (forty‐six out of fifty‐four values for eighteen countries and
three types of insurance benefits—sickness payments, unemployment insurance, pensions; see Table 35.1 in
Chapter 35 of this volume) are below each country's peak levels of the average replacement rate for the
respective programme area. Only two of the peak years are before 1970 and twenty‐three (42.6 per cent) are in
the 1970s (i.e. 1970, 1975, or 1980). In all the other cases, the 1970s still have to be viewed as part of the
expansion phase. This is particularly true for the Nordic countries in the areas of sickness benefits and pensions,
for the Christian Democratic/continental European welfare states in the area of unemployment insurance (with the
exception of Germany and Italy), and for the liberal welfare states in the area of pensions. This measurement
concept—based on a combination of programme structures and benefit levels—thus allows us to corroborate the
hypothesis of welfare state retrenchment, even though the turning point between the expansion and retrenchment
phases apparently occurred later than expected, in the 1980s.

The datasets of the SCIP project and the highly complex measurement instruments of Huber and Stephens (2001 a)
—which combine various social expenditure indicators with Esping‐Andersen's and other programme‐related
indicators—enable a very comprehensive perspective on welfare state development. Still, three deficits remain if
the ultimate objective is a ‘complete’ measurement of welfare state development. First, these measurement
concepts do not sufficiently take into account those social benefits that are granted or produced by firms or private
actors (with state support)—extant measurement concepts assume the direct provision of social benefits and
neglect indirect effects, which are usually fostered by tax incentives. And as soon as tax policy is included, core
elements of income tax policy would have to be interpreted as elements of social policy. Secondly, important policy
fields that are viewed as core elements of social policy in relevant European countries are not sufficiently covered
by available time‐series data. This is true for a number of social services, labour legislation and workplace safety
regulations. It is also true—to a lesser extent—for the education sector. Thirdly, these measurement concepts are
still very much grounded in an understanding of the welfare state as a social insurance state, and so they cannot
sufficiently capture changes of the internal logic of social programmes—for instance, changes that are referred to
with labels such as activation, increased social control, or social investment. One could undoubtedly attempt to
classify individual programmes and related expenditures as activating or social investment oriented and examine
the development of expenditure profiles along those lines, thus merely adapting and expanding the conventional
approach to the measurement of welfare state development. This would, however, allow no more than a post hoc
reconstruction of programmatic changes.

A more comprehensive measurement of social policy developments could have revealed that social policy in East
Asia during the early post‐war years had a very specific character that was, in fact, close to what is called a social
investment strategy (p. 96) today. The economic strategy of export‐oriented industrialization was premised on
low wage costs, but also on skilled workers. Therefore wages were not burdened by social insurance contributions,
and only limited social benefits were granted. By contrast, the state was much more active in the areas of primary
and secondary education and vocational training (Haggard and Kaufman 2008). The concept of the social
investment state, as propagated for Europe by Anthony Giddens (1994: 89), also highlights another investment‐
oriented feature of welfare production in Asian economies: investment in social capital via support for networks of
family members and friends as an instrument of economic and social policy. The combination of these two
investment‐oriented elements, namely, investments in human and in social capital, in East Asia has thus become a
model for those in Europe who call for a shift from the traditional welfare state to a social investment state (Giddens
1998) and a child‐centred social investment strategy (Kaufmann 1990: 64–7, 172–8; Esping‐Andersen 2002) that
puts the education and participation of children and youth front and centre in social policy. These new concepts
first characterized Third Way social policy in Great Britain and Canada (Lister 2004) and now have been emulated
by many OECD states. Thus education and family policy, child care, and measures aimed at the compatibility of
employment and family move towards the centre, and the meaning of the term ‘welfare state’ has become more
encompassing than the traditional understanding of ‘social insurance state’. This, in turn, may be viewed as a key
indicator for a new phase of welfare state development that started during the 1990s in most OECD countries—and

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 Post‐War Welfare State Development

which is not immediately revealed even by a programme‐centred measurement of social policy developments
along the lines suggested above.

Welfare Production and Welfare Governance

Changes in the combination of state, market and firm‐based, or associative and family‐based forms of welfare
production (defined as the sum of all transactions that create benefits for third parties; Kaufmann 2001) play a key
role in our understanding of the welfare state. The expansion phase is widely viewed as a phase of intensive
nationalization of social services, accompanied by the marginalization notably of family‐based forms of social
service provision. Privatization and the withdrawal of the state, the prioritization of the market and the creation of
fields of private welfare production by competitive businesses (welfare markets) are, by contrast, characteristics of
the retrenchment phase. However, it seems difficult to adequately capture all forms of welfare production and to
compare the respective shares of markets, the state, families, networks, and civil society in the overall volume of
welfare production over time. That the familiar periodization of the 1980s and 1990s as decades of privatization
need not be plausible is illustrated by the findings of Howard (1997) and Hacker (2002). They challenge the
traditional understanding of the American welfare state, which appears much more extensive than is usually
assumed if firm‐based and private security systems supported by tax credits and other taxation (p. 97)
instruments are considered. Hacker (2002), moreover, shows that the introduction of the Social Security Act
fostered an expansion of private welfare production in the form of firm‐based and private insurance solutions, and
hence that the expansion of the private welfare sector in the United States (also) peaked during the 1940s.

The organization of the welfare state is, however, not only characterized by its role in direct welfare production but
also by the tier of government that is responsible for deliberation and decision making in the social policy field. On
the one hand, social policy has still not become a field that is subject to the mechanisms of multi‐level governance.
The authority of international organizations and supranational regional organizations such as the EU to make
collectively binding decisions remains very limited. On the other hand, however, policy is increasingly formulated in
the context of international networks and exchanges in which conceptual developments, recommendations and
decisions, as well as the resources of international organizations, have begun to play a certain role. As indicated,
the 1940s were already characterized by an internationalization of social policy ideas. There are institutional
precursors of internationalized social policy regimes. After 1945, the Bretton Woods economic and monetary
regime came to define the context of social policy making; after 1971—culminating in the Washington Consensus—
it was the increasingly market liberal economic policy of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank
that played this role. Over the last couple of years, the strict retrenchment orientation at the international level has
somewhat abated. Perhaps the year 2000 may be qualified as a turning point and the beginning of a new phase of
welfare state development, because even the IMF and the World Bank have now begun to recognize social
development as an objective of all types of support programmes, as the signing of the millennium goals indicates.
Social policy has thus become part of the policy‐making activities even of those international organizations that are
not—like the ILO—primarily dealing with social policy issues (Deacon 2007). Early steps in the direction of
internationalized social policy making in the immediate post‐war years are, in other words, continued in the form of
a new welfare internationalism. Still, the dominance of national actors and institutions in the social policy field has
not yet been overcome, not even in the EU. The EU's regulatory social policy in the areas of labour law, workplace
safety, gender equality and anti‐discrimination is successful because it helps enforce stricter standards. With
regard to social insurance and issues of redistribution, however, the greater or lesser effects of Open Method of
Coordination processes are essentially determined by specific national political constellations (Ferrera 2008).

Outcomes: The Results of Social Policy Activities

A fifth approach to periodization, which focuses on the outcomes of welfare state programmes, is less common.
Different phases in the development of social security systems may also be distinguished on the basis of their
impact or effectiveness, that is, through consideration of the extent to which they have created or transformed
social (p. 98) realities. Hence one might, for instance, distinguish the age of relative equality and middle‐class
orientation from a period characterized by the shrinking of the middle class and growing inequality. This approach,
then, is close to impact studies, especially studies of the distributional effects of welfare state programmes.

Esping‐Andersen's measurement concept of social stratification is not an outcome measure in that sense because

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 Post‐War Welfare State Development

it considers no more than the entrenchment of equality as a social policy norm in individual programmes. If the
equality criterion is applied to historical time series, the retrenchment hypothesis may, however, be further
corroborated: Scruggs and Allan's replication and update of Esping‐Andersen's analysis of social stratification
yields evidence for an OECD‐wide trend between 1980 and 2000/02 ‘to gradually “residualize” the welfare state’
(2008: 664). The described trend combines the ongoing universalization of social insurance programmes with a
growing number of targeted programmes and rising inequality in social security programmes (a decrease of benefit
equality). Research on pension policy, for example, indicates a general tendency to shift risks to the beneficiaries
through shifts from defined benefit to defined contribution approaches, whether these are private or public (see
e.g. Hacker 2006).

On the basis of the Luxembourg Income Study and with a view to the unequivocal outcome indicator of relative
poverty, Scruggs and Allan (2006 b) conclude that poverty grew between the mid‐1980s and approximately 2000
in the OECD countries, and sometimes markedly. The OECD study Growing Unequal (2008a) corroborates this rise
of the poverty rate and of income inequality over the last twenty years (mid‐1980s to mid‐2000s) for thirty
countries, and with few exceptions. As social expenditures have been growing at the same time, this finding not
only demonstrates the widespread ineffectiveness but also the inefficiency of social policy if its success is
measured against the standard of a moderate reduction of income inequality and the avoidance of income poverty.
Yet there are no complete time‐series data for the entire post‐1945 period, and hence only the negative trend since
1980 can be used for periodization purposes.

However, the measurement of welfare state outcomes cannot focus exclusively on income distributions. If, for
instance, the area of old‐age pensions is considered, it has to be kept in mind that the expansion of the welfare
state through the creation of comprehensive old‐age security systems institutionalized a whole new phase of the
life cycle—with massive consequences for the life‐world of citizens. The post‐1945 welfare state contributed to a
standardization of life cycles and enabled older people to enjoy poverty‐free lives to an extent previously
unknown. It created a new gender division of labour and family relationships that were no longer dictated by
economic necessity. And it contributed to the development of a middle‐class society, even though it could not
prevent the reversal of this trend due to changing labour market conditions, the increasing fragmentation of
societies and the growth of an underclass. Palier and Martin (2008: 17) speak of a general trend towards
dualization in the Bismarckian countries: ‘The recent trend would deepen the divisions towards a more cleft world:
a dual labour market, a dual welfare system and a society divided between insiders and outsiders.’

(p. 99) Finally, one might also consider the set of social policy institutions itself as an outcome—the
bureaucracies that administer and pay out social benefits, as well as the sector of professionals working in health
care or other social service areas. As shown by Paul Pierson (1994), the welfare state creates its own apparatus
and support base—which does not, however, mean that it is necessarily protected against cuts and retrenchment.
With a view to social structures as well as organizational and institutional aspects, it would seem that the modern
welfare state is primarily dealing with the consequences and requirements of its own emergence and reproduction;
social policy has largely become a kind of second‐order operation focusing on internal problems, and hence at
least temporarily losing its contact with actual social risks and problems. As such, the retrenchment phase may
also be interpreted as a consolidation phase of a rapidly developed and complex apparatus, or—more negatively—
as a phase of increasing ‘introspection’.

Transformations of Welfare State Legitimacy

In our discussion of the question of whether 1945 represents an important historical juncture in the context of
welfare state development, we have already hinted at the role of ideas and frames in the periodization of social
policy trajectories. Compared with a type of policy that tackled the ‘social question’ with a hodgepodge of issue‐
specific instruments and benefits, the post‐war understanding of social policy—grounded, as it was, in the notion of
basic social rights expressed in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—represents an ideological
breakthrough. An ideational approach is most apparent in literature that examines the religious roots and
motivations of social policy. For instance, Rieger and Leibfried (2003) compare cultures in order to shed light on
the moral foundations of social policy. Drawing on Weber's systematic categories and his sociology of religion,
they contrast the Western with the East Asian paths of welfare state development. The different religious roots of
these two paths are viewed as causes for the strength or weakness of social policy activities in the face of global

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 Post‐War Welfare State Development

economic trends. Research that concentrates on Western Europe (Kersbergen and Manow 2009) highlights the
denominational cleavage between Catholicism, Lutheran Protestantism, and Calvinism, and suggests that religious
thought patterns and motives continue to be relevant, at least implicitly. These might not least help to tackle
problems with Esping‐Andersen's welfare state typology. Otherwise, the prominence of the Three Worlds of
Welfare Capitalism is also due to the fact that it links the analysis of social policy‐related data with an examination
of each country's welfare state conception and its ideological foundations. This is why his political labels for the
welfare state types (social democratic, conservative, liberal) have proved adequate. But it is not only Esping‐
Andersen's typology that is linked with an ideational approach. The retrenchment hypothesis, too, is grounded in
the perception of changes at the level of ideas (see Chapter 4). Even during their rise to power, before
retrenchment measures were implemented, neoliberal and anti‐welfare (p. 100) state parties had helped spread
the idea that the welfare state was faced with a legitimacy crisis.

However, we still lack data that would allow us to understand the public justifications of the welfare state and of
social policy—in party manifestos and government documents, parliamentary debates and the mass media—in a
comparative fashion, for different countries and over longer stretches of time. Closest to this is the Party Manifesto
Project which, however, concentrates on shifts on the left–right axis, contains no more than a few social policy‐
related items and does not permit a finer grained analysis of legitimation criteria for different social policy areas
(Budge et al. 2001; Klingemann et al. 2006). Otherwise, more narrowly circumscribed studies of the ideological
foundations or development of specific welfare state concepts dominate (on the Third Way: White 2004 b; on the
Nordic welfare states: Kildal and Kuhnle 2005; more broadly: Taylor‐Gooby 2005 a). Longer time series are,
however, lacking completely. Research combining the history of ideas and concepts on the one hand, and social
policy research on the other—drawing on methods of quantitative textual analysis—is therefore desirable. There is
considerable evidence for the hypothesis that there have indeed been important shifts regarding the ideas and
normative benchmarks used in the (de‐)legitimation of the welfare state (while nationally specific traditions also
remain present). These shifts, too, might be interpreted as evidence for the retrenchment hypothesis or inspire
further reflection on sub‐periodizations.

Future Trends

The global financial crisis of 2008/9 might have a huge impact on welfare state development and usher in a new
period. Based on a theoretical approach that highlights economic context factors, this expectation seems
particularly plausible, given that the crisis represents no less than the most severe recession of the post‐war era.
Social expenditures are most likely to grow as a consequence, at least in the short term, as GDP is shrinking
massively; swift expenditure cuts of a comparable size are unlikely to be implemented and might be explicitly ruled
out as cyclical programmes—long considered obsolete—experience a revival. This ‘emergency Keynesianism’
increases the state share of welfare production and delegitimates market liberal concepts of welfare state
retrenchment. Whether social benefit levels will ultimately be stabilized in the face of shrinking contributions and
tax revenues, rising debt and the related fiscal crisis of the welfare state, or whether social benefits might even be
further expanded (as in the cyclical programmes implemented by many countries in the first half of 2009), will
greatly depend on political constellations—these, in turn, also depend on economic developments and their
framing in public debates. As much as we know about the effects and roles of different political institutions, ideas
and actors in the context of (p. 101) welfare state development in individual countries, regions and policy areas,
events such as the current financial crisis raise the question of whether economic developments have acted like a
railway switchman and forced social policy and welfare state development onto fixed tracks, or whether cultural
values, institutional inertia and political traditions do matter in the determination of long‐term developments of the
welfare state. (p. 102)

Frank Nullmeier
Frank Nullmeier is Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science, Director of the Division “Theory and
Constitution of the Welfare State” of the Center for Social Policy Research (ZeS), Principal Investigator in the Collabo¬rative
Research Center on Transformations of the State (TranState, 2003–2014), and faculty member of the Bremen International
Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS, 2007 ff.), all at the University of Bremen, Germany.

Franz‐ Xaver Kaufmann

Franz‐Xaver Kaufmann is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Bielefeld.

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