Go Work, Integrate Well, and Live Healthy! Social Regulation and Welfare Goals in Policy Change

In this article, I analyze the link between social regulation and welfare goals in policy change. I conceptualize how governments link social regulatory and behavioral policy instruments with cash transfers and services in three fields of social policy – immigration, public health, and unemployment. After that, I conduct a comparative empirical analysis of reform events in the three policy fields and thirteen countries, which is based on an original dataset of policy change towards integration and coordination reform events of the regulatory state and the welfare, in the period 1985-2014. In using multilevel time series regression analysis, I assess four theoretical mechanisms that could explain these reform events: the scope of the regulatory state, governmental power of left parties, qualities of the policy field, and the type of the welfare state. I show that the configuration of a larger scope of regulatory institutions, left parties in government, external problem pressure, time as well as expenditure for the specific policy field explain policy change events aiming to coordinate and integrate social regulatory and behavioral elements with welfare goals. With this article I contribute to understanding how regulatory elements have permeated social policy and the welfare state. This dynamic has also put pressure on regulatory governance because some regulatory elements have increased labor market dualization. Furthermore, I demonstrate how econometric methods, such as multilevel time-series regression, can be used for comparative policy analysis.