Imaging Welfare States: Narratives in Literature and Social Provision in Britain, Denmark and France

Social democratic, Christian Democratic and liberal welfare states offer substantially different approaches to ameliorating social problems, yet their historical origins remain disputed. Scholars explore churches, labor movements, employers’ organizations, and party systems to explain cross-national variation in welfare state regimes; however, the role of culture has been largely neglected. This paper suggests that writers of fiction play a crucial role in imaging early welfare state regimes, and uses machine learning analyses of large corpora of British, Danish and French literature dating back to 1700 to demonstrate these literary impacts. We argue that views of the individual, society, and pre-industrial social groups influence the crucial policy paths of early welfare states. Thus whereas social provision is posited as charitable aide for individuals in Britain, social benefits take the form of investment for a strong society in Denmark and concessions to angry class factions in France.