Tuesday, June 25, 2013
2.22 (Binnengasthuis)
This paper aims to provide a corrective to the welfare state literature by re-conceptualizing welfare retrenchment as a reduction in the capacity to redistribute. It does so by proposing two innovations – one analytical and another methodological. Analytically, contending accounts in the conventional literature are based on surprisingly similar bases: ‘power resources’ theory and ‘the new politics’ approach, for example, both gauge the impact of distributional conflict by using left party incumbency and trade union power as proxies of pro-welfare class power. In fact, taking these two variables as measures of distributional conflict masks the true nature of the distributional conflicts’ effect on welfare reform. This paper proposes to re-conceptualize distributional conflict in terms of class preferences and class power in order to explain the nature and trajectory of welfare reform and the causal mechanisms that come to play in these processes. In this re-conceptualization, 'class power' denotes material and political resources that are available to socio-economic classes during reform episode, whereas 'class preferences' come to reflect classes' respective preferences toward reform in a given welfare programme. Methodologically, conventional accounts operationalize welfare retrenchment as decreases in welfare effort but they do so by largely overlooking dynamics of change in the revenue-side. The paper offers a novel method of operationalization by developing a new composite measure capturing changes in the redistributive capacity of a given welfare program. The ‘redistribution index’, which focuses on both the expenditure and the revenue sides, gauges changes in the generosity, conditionality, accessibility of entitlements as well as in the revenue side of the programme in question. By discussing these two correctives, this paper aims to enhance welfare state research’s capacity to deal with the complex causality of the welfare reform in the age of austerity.
