Variations of the Welfare State: Great Britain, Sweden, France and Germany between Capitalism and Socialism
Even as comparative international research in social science has become increasingly important over the last three decades, especially in political science but also in empirical economics and sociology, the results remain subject to strong criticism in te
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1 Preliminary Methodological Remarks Even as comparative international research in social science has become increasingly important over the last three decades, especially in political science but also in empirical economics and sociology, the results remain subject to strong criticism in terms of both methodology and content.1 These difficulties must be laid out in the introduction to explain the approach I have chosen here. My subject is a comparison of national fields of politics or complexes of institutions that can be considered an expression of the social state.2 The relevant units of study are therefore states (polities), the institutions of their social or welfare sector and their operation (social policies), the political debates and conflicts leading to their establishment or change (social politics), and the notions underlying these debates (social ideas). Four fundamental approaches for a comparison of such macrophenomena can be distinguished: The most common method, the so-called quantitative one, uses the sort of statistical indicators that are generated chiefly by national statistical offices, and
1 For comprehensive accounts of the comparative method, its different techniques, and the difficulties that must be taken into account see Madison (1980); Higgins (1981, pp. 1–46); Jones (1985); Berg-Schlosser and M€ uller-Rommel (1997). – Fundamental for a hermeneutics of comparison is Matthes (1992). 2 While the term “Sozialstaat” is predominantly used in the German context, the international context is dominated by the semantics of the “welfare state.” I follow this dual conceptualization in the sense that “social state” (and frequently also “social market economy”) is here seen as the typically German designation of the welfare state program. Thus, “welfare state” refers here not only to the “Scandinavian model” of what in German is called the Versorgungsstaat (provisioning state), but a general configuration that will be described in greater detail in Sect. 2 and includes the German case. In addition, I distinguish between the social or welfare states as empirical objects and the social or welfare state principle as a theoretical concept to designate the specific program of welfare states.
F.-X. Kaufmann, Variations of the Welfare State, German Social Policy 5, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-22549-9_2, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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Variations of the Welfare State
occasionally also within the framework of scientific institutions and projects.3 These sets of data form an indispensable basis for the description of national systems and for their comparative study. However, the tabulated presentation of data generated in varying national contexts suggests a measure of definitude that usually does not exist. In addition to the usual issues of the validity and reliability of the data, we confront the problem of its comparability, which, in view of divergent definitions of the starting data and different practices of data aggregation, leads to difficult-to-resolve problems in many areas. More se
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