Welfare, Mobility, and Political Backlash in Switzerland and the United Kingdom

Both Switzerland and the United Kingdom are commonly categorized as belonging to the liberal variety of welfare regimes; and thus to a sociopolitical configuration designed to ensure institutional flexibility, reward private forms of social provision, and limit state interventions to a minimum. For this reason, both countries have been among the earliest adopters of the so-called mobility paradigm, which holds that the long-term movements of the past (which we refer to as migration) are nowadays increasingly replaced by more short-term and contingent ones. For instance, a person may be born in one country, spend his formative years in another, enter the labor market in yet another, and finally, after many years abroad, return as a pensioner to his/her native land. This paper claims that the rise of this paradigm, in conjunction with generally heightened mobility levels throughout the Western world, poses a paramount challenge for any understanding of welfare that is based on maintaining a clear distinction between insiders/contributors and outsiders/recipients. Contrary to the assumption that liberal welfare regimes like the two aforementioned fare better under such conditions than social democratic or conservative ones, it establishes a causal connection between their role as pioneers of mobility and the populist-driven backlash otherwise often associated with opposition to migration.