How Universal Is the Danish Welfare State?

The conventional story in comparative welfare state research is that the Scandinavian countries belong to the avant-garde among of the economically advanced nations. The social investment literature praises the Danish welfare state in particular for an efficient combination of labor market and social policy. We think it is warranted to qualify this overly positive assessment in the literature. More specifically, we would maintain that the depiction of Danish and Scandinavian universalism unduly downplays some important consequences of the fact that politically, the Danish and other Scandinavian welfare states are middle class projects. This, we argue, makes them particularly responsive to interests of labor market insiders. We show that recent political dynamics in the Danish welfare state have preserved (or even expanded) policies benefiting the middle class, namely social investment strategies allowing people to strike a balance between family and work life. Retrenchment measures, on the other hand, have been targeted at outsiders and left them in a more vulnerable social and economic situation. Hence, we disagree with the assertion that ‘dualization’ is a policy trajectory largely constrained to Continental European political economies.