The Future of the Welfare State. Crisis Myths and Crisis Realities
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Book Review The Future of the Welfare State. Crisis Myths and Crisis Realities Francis G Castles Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 2004, 197 pp. ISBN: 0 19 927017 1 (hbk); 0 19927 392 8 (pbk). Acta Politica (2006) 41, 464–468. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500130
Some questions in social science research are here to stay. One such question is how the welfare state will look like in the future. The literature covering this topic produced many wild speculations and predictions. Some have already proven wrong, such as the crisis and eventual breakdown of the welfare state that was predicted in the 1970s and 1980s. In The Future of the Welfare State, Francis Castles, one of the leading scholars in comparative social policy, contributes to this literature with an attempt to discern the trajectory of future welfare state development in 21 OECD countries. Putting crisis, myths and measurement at the centre of his analysis, Castles investigates whether processes of globalization, population ageing and declining birth rates that allegedly endanger the welfare state ‘will lead to social policy disaster or whether they too will turn out to be mythical in character’ (p. 2). Since these globalization and demographic crises hypotheses can be formulated more or less explicitly in terms of expenditure implications, Castles uses measures of social expenditure to comparatively test these hypotheses. His systematic analysis of the changes in the expenditure patterns between 1980 and 1998 does a great job at debunking the globalization and population ageing hypotheses for most countries. In addition, his ‘steady-state spending’ thesis, positing that ‘aggregate expenditure levels can, in future, be expected to move within narrower bounds and, [that] where pressures for expenditure growth continue to be experienced, (y) growth is likely to be more gradual than in the past’ (p. 169), is an interesting addition to the welfare state literature. However, since — despite a few exceptions — Castles only studies the changes between these two years, the presented evidence neither convincingly supports his claims on the causal mechanisms underlying the patterns found nor his predictions about the future trajectory of the welfare state. The first part of the book consists of three largely descriptive chapters in which Castles seeks to identify the changes in social expenditure and subsequently uses this information to assess the accuracy of a specific part of the globalization hypothesis, that of a ‘race to the bottom’. The complexity of the measures Castles uses increases as the book evolves. He begins by demonstrating that a ‘race to the bottom’ simply does not materialize in
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aggregate social expenditure (Chapter 2). Then he constructs an expenditureshares typology based on disaggregated spending data (p. 48), which reveals that the structure of social provision and the priorities of the welfare types barely converge (Chapter 3). Next, Castles assesses the highly contented claim of a ‘European social model’. He finds that,
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