Concepts of Social Justice in the Welfare State. Great Britain and Germany since 1945
Concepts of social justice are at the very heart of the welfare state. From the perspective of the history of institutions, the article reconstructs the principles of justice which underlie the architecture of the social security systems in Great Britain and Germany and analyses how they have changed since 1945. It turns out that in general both welfare states are based on mixtures of different concepts of justice. Parallels can be found above all in the health care systems, which in both countries are based on a combination of two principles – equality of access on the one side and treatment according to one’s needs on the other side. There are more significant differences, in contrast, in regard to insuring against unemployment and to pension systems, whereby the British welfare state entails a link between the norms of equality and of neediness, whereas in Germany the principle of the equivalence between contributions and benefits is deeply rooted. All path-dependencies notwithstanding, a convergence in the institutional arrangements of both welfare states can be traced over the last decades. In Britain as well as in Germany means-tested benefits and thus the principle of neediness became increasingly important, most notably in the field of unemployment benefits. At the same time, both welfare states experienced the rise of new concepts of justice starting from non-class groups like families, women or generations.
Continental Drift: On Unemployment Policy Change in Bismarckian Welfare States
This article analyses the development of unemployment policies over the past 20 years in four continental European countries: Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands. It shows that, far from being as ‘frozen’ as many analysts have suggested, each of these Bismarckian welfare states has in fact seen considerable change in this policy sector in recent decades. In Belgium, France and Germany, significant changes in unemployment policy reforms have unfolded gradually, through an accumulation of small changes. This finding offers some support to recent theorizing on the potential for policy changes that are both incremental and transformative. However, while such processes have led to shifts in unemployment policy that are far from negligible, the article also argues that they fall short of those seen in this policy sector in other welfare institutional contexts as well as in the Netherlands, where substantive reforms have in the last decade been complemented with changes to the institutional framework for unemployment policy. Through its analysis of the relationship between the institutional features of these welfare states and the possibility frontier of unemployment policy reform, the article develops a nuanced perspective on the scope for and resistance to social policy change in continental Europe.
The Use of Qualitative Information in Macro-Economic Policy Analysis
The majority of macro-economic policy models takes for granted that conflicts among objectives can be assessed by means of a tradeoff analysis. Such tradeoffs imply that sacrifices and benefits of various impacts of decisions can be measured on a cardinal scale, so that a conventional macro-economic utility or welfare analysis can be applied.