New Visions of the Welfare State

Abstract

The Great Recession ended a global period of job growth and resulted in stagnating incomes, increasing social inequalities and acerbated existing insecurities about life prospects in advanced industrialized societies. Modern welfare states are the central institutions to manage these social and economic risks. The welfare state enjoys therefore board popularity among the people. However, even before the Great Recession mature welfare states have come under a two-fold reform pressure: one the one hand, new demands for social protection due to structural social and economic changes were voiced and, on the other hand, pressures for financial consolidation and even retrenchment of welfare state spending were mounting. Fiscal consolidation of existing welfare state schemes at the one hand, and re-calibration of the welfare state on the other hand to cover “new social risks”, expand coverage of existing schemes for previously weakly protected outsiders and the implementation of “social investment policies”, i.e. policies that invest in human capital employability, and employment-creation rather than income replacement and job protection focus of the old welfare state. These reform processes create new distributive divides within societies and their success depends crucially on the willingness of voters to accept reforms. The papers of the panel study attitudes and preferences towards new visions of the welfare states, such as basic universal income, social investment policies, and activation policies and the effect of such policies on economic growth in advanced industrialized societies. The papers do not only consider the role of cultural value preferences and socio-economic determinants, but consider subjective and dynamic perceptions of economic well-being as drivers of political preferences.