Jochen Clasen. Reforming European Welfare States: Germany and the United Kingdom Compared. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. xii + 249 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-927071-2.
Herbert Obinger, Stephan Leibfried, Francis G. Castles, eds. Federalism and the Welfare State: New World and European Experiences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xvi + 363 pp. £19.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-61184-8.
Reviewed by Mark Vail (Department of Political Science, Tulane University)
Published on H-German (November, 2006)
Rediscovering the Polity: Political Institutions and Welfare-State
Each of these books offers an original perspective on a set of particular issues concerning the development of the welfare state in advanced industrial democracies. The first volume, by Jochen Clasen, details more than two decades of welfare reforms in Germany and the United Kingdom as a way of illuminating the politics of welfare reform more generally and the institutional and political factors shaping welfare-state development. The second, edited by Herbert Obinger, Stephan Leibfried and Francis Castles, is a volume composed of individual, national-level studies of welfare-state development and reform in federal polities and offers both a rich set of empirical studies and some significant theoretical insights into the effects of political federalism on the development of the welfare state. Though both volumes provide rich empirical treatments of their subject matter, the latter is generally more successful at achieving its central theoretical goals and, as such, repays careful reading in ways that will be of interest to a wide range of scholars of welfare states and comparative political economy.
The Clasen volume provides a conscientious, detailed account of the past two decades of reform and recalibration of the German and British welfare states. The book sets out to explore the complex and often contradictory politics of welfare-state reform and does so in direct opposition to commonly cited indices of social protection such as levels of social spending, which, the author rightly suggests, are both empirically misleading and theoretically unsophisticated (pp. 1-2). By contrast, Clasen argues that capturing the dynamics of welfare-state development in advanced democracies requires "systematic observations over relatively long periods" (p. 2). In undertaking these kinds of observations, he debunks prevailing images of the dynamics and character of German and British social policy. In the former case, more than a decade of scholarship has argued that the welfare state is "frozen," beholden to entrenched "insider" interest groups and impervious to significant structural reforms.[1] In the latter, memories of the somewhat overblown rhetoric of the Margaret Thatcher era give the impression of a welfare state that has been gutted and reduced to a bare neo-liberal skeleton. Clasen rightly points out that neither characterization is accurate, and he spends much of the rest of the book making this case. In so doing, he not only provides a useful corrective to prevailing notions about the German and British welfare states, but also challenges those who work on these issues to look carefully at policy and political developments in the two countries rather than relying on well-worn clichés.
That said, the book makes somewhat less theoretically of its admirable empirical contributions than it might and unnecessarily limits the potential audience of the volume. Early on, Clasen states that one of the volume's central aims is to "analyze processes in core policy domains which have been at the centre of political reform debates and activities for some time" (p. 6), in particular unemployment insurance, pensions and family policies. No one would dispute that reforms in these areas have been central to social policy debates in the two countries, but ultimately Clason's discussion manifests itself more as a catalogue of reforms rather than a substantive analysis of them. Despite citing various arguments about providing analytical accounts of the importance of identifying the causes, both political and institutional, of welfare-state trajectories (pp. 7 and chapter 3 passim), Clasen himself does surprisingly little of this himself. His preferred analytical construct is "motives, means and opportunities," a somewhat overused idea that he introduces in chapter 3 and uses throughout his empirical accounts. This depiction does not, however, amount to a compelling theoretical account of welfare-state development, or, in the language of James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer as cited by Clasen, the "identification of causal configurations that produce outcomes of interest" (cited on p. 7). Though Clasen is certainly right to argue that no single causal variable can explain trajectories of welfare reform and that one must explain how multiple variables interact (p. 13), he never really provides a clear assessment of the location of such interactions or how one might characterize them beyond the individual details of particular episodes of policy change.
That said, it is not entirely fair to criticize Clasen for doing what so many other welfare-state scholars do, namely, providing a list of details of policy reforms without any real theoretical account of why particular types of reforms occur in particular types of economic and institutional settings. It is just that the ambitiousness of the author's empirical accounts leads the reader to expect more of a payoff in the end. The richness of these accounts is commendable and will provide many welfare-state scholars with a wealth of detail about German and British welfare policy. For example, in chapter 4, Clasen furnishes careful, up-to-date accounts of the development of German and British unemployment insurance policies and shows the high level of innovation that recent governments in each country have undertaken. He shows, for example, that New Labour has developed a novel synthesis of discourses of individual initiative and collective responsibility within the broad framework of market-conforming economic policy. Here as elsewhere, Clasen basically gets the story right, notwithstanding highly contestable assertions such as the claim that German "reunification fostered structural stability" (p. 68). It is a bit regrettable that he makes so little of those stories theoretically. Implicitly admitting as much himself and as if to justify what seems to be an essentially ad hoc approach, the author claims at the end of the volume that "welfare states as a whole are ill-suited for comparisons of reform dynamics since actors and institutional settings vary across welfare state programmes within a country" (p. 188). Quite aside from the questionable validity of such a statement, one is led thereby to ask what we are supposed to learn from the comparison between Britain and Germany around which the book is structured. This problem points to the central limitation of the book as a whole: its lack of an overarching theoretical claim or a clear sense of what the experiences of Britain and Germany, which are so admirably described, are intended to show.
The other book discussed here is equally impressive empirically and has a good deal more to offer theoretically. The volume edited by Obinger, Leibfried and Castles explores the historical development of welfare states in federations in order to "provide a basis for understanding how political decentralization and social policy are likely to interact in the future" (p. 2). In so doing, the volume addresses one of the major shortcomings of much the welfare-state literature: its artificial and limiting self-separation from broader studies of political institutions and comparative politics and political economy. Forcefully institutionalist in approach, the book demonstrates clearly that no policy area, whether social, tax or environmental policy, can be studied without systematic and careful attention to the broader political-economic context within which reform takes place. By grouping federal countries from all of the "worlds of welfare capitalism" popularized by Gøsta Esping-Andersen and the cottage industry of welfare-state typologies that he helped to create,[2] the book shows that other elements of national political economies such as federalism may play a more important role in shaping the substance and dynamics of reform than, for example, the ideological foundations of the political system or the class configurations bequeathed by the process of industrialization.
Like most edited volumes, this one contains contributions of uneven quality, though overall the chapters are quite well done and offer original theoretical contributions. The chapters on Canada, the United States and Germany, by Keith Banting, Kenneth Finegold and Philip Manow respectively, are particularly good and provide the reader with novel theoretical insights into the nature of federalism and its relationship to social policy, rather than merely contenting themselves with an additive composite of welfare-state development and the development of federalism.
In his chapter on Canada, Banting argues that the Canadian welfare state has served both integrative and regionally distinctive functions, acting as "an instrument not only of social justice but also of statecraft, to be deployed in the competitive process of nation-building" (p. 90). The author's historical approach here reflects both the strength of his contribution and one of the best features of the volume as a whole: carefully situating of welfare-state development within specific historical contexts and using these contexts to show how and why national welfare states have undergone politically and institutionally distinctive paths of development. He carefully traces the development of the Canadian welfare state and shows that the dynamics of its reform and recalibration have been directly related to the territorial purposes to which it has been put. In different policy areas, family policy and health care, for example, different models of federalism have prevailed, what Banting calls "classical" and "shared-cost" federalism. These contrasting models speak to both the unique challenges of policy-making in each area and their distinctive relationship to Canada's ongoing challenge of national integration. In Banting's words, "Different models of federalism altered the mix of officials at the table and redistributed power among those that got there by requiring different levels of consensus for action" (p. 115). Banting then uses this insight derived from the Canadian case to substantiate the interesting theoretical claim that different models of federalism can prevail within a single polity across a range of areas of social policy-making, depending on the macro-political context and the shifting relationships between the welfare state and the political economy.
In an equally admirable chapter on the United States, Kenneth Finegold shows that American federalism "has facilitated as well as retarded the expansion of social policies" (p. 140). Finegold also explains that, at certain points in American history, federally de-centralized programs have provided an impetus to national-level, much more politically salient debates about the desirable character and structure of the welfare state. Even as an increasing number of social policy tasks have fallen to state rather than national bureaucracies, the states have become sites of innovation and experimentation that have in turn influenced debates over policy reform at the national level. This dialectical relationship between the federal and state governments is perhaps clearest in Finegold's discussion of U.S. President William Clinton's welfare reforms in 1996, but it also colored policy developments under Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and episodes such as the development of revenue sharing between Washington and the states under the so-called new federalism favored by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s (pp. 168-170). The lesson here is that there is no single relationship between federalism and the welfare state writ large, but rather a series of different, fluctuating connections between the structure of individual programs and the combination of federal and state-level bureaucracies responsible for their creation, implementation and regulation.
In perhaps the best chapter in the volume, Philip Manow uses the German case to show that the relationship between federalism and the welfare state not only varies by policy area, it also varies, and sometimes markedly so, depending the kind of federalism at issue. For Manow, the two most important variants of federalism are, first, a model in which the jurisdictions of the central and state or regional governments are separate and, second, a model in which these jurisdictions are shared, or interlocking (pp. 223-224). This latter model of "cooperative federalism," Manow argues, undermines any potential "race to the bottom" by regional governments with respect to social policy and can, given an ideological and political space shared by key political actors, actually result in the growth of social programs during boom periods and make them quite hard to cut during periods of reform and austerity. Manow tests these claims through a quite detailed analysis of the development of the German welfare state, from the empire of Otto von Bismarck in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary period. With his usual care and verve, Manow offers both a compelling account of this developmental process and synthesizes it into important theoretical lessons with applicability far beyond his current subject matter. For Manow, the German variant of cooperative federalism has resulted in an "overgrazing of the commons," meaning an over-reliance on the welfare state as a mechanism of social and economic adjustment in ways that have ultimately undermined economic performance and, he implies, social cohesion (p. 260). This observation flies in the face of traditional understandings of federal welfare states, which hold that the proliferation of "veto points" in such systems tends to limit both the scope and generosity of social protection. Though Manow (here as elsewhere) tends to underestimate the German system's capacity for reform and innovation,[3] his argument that German-style federalism has had some quite perverse effects with respect to the welfare state is unimpeachable.
Each of these books has a great deal to offer empirically, and the volume edited by Obinger, Leibfried and Castles represents a major theoretical contribution to welfare-state scholarship. Both repay careful reading, even if the interest of the volume by Clasen is likely to be limited to those who work on the same set of empirical questions.
Notes
[1]. See Maurizio Ferrera and Martin Rhodes, "Recasting European Welfare States: An Introduction," in their Recasting European Welfare States (Portland: Frank Cass, 2000); and Gøsta Esping-Andersen, "After the Golden Age? Welfare State Dilemmas in a Global Economy," in his Welfare States in Transition: National Adaptations in Global Economies (London: Sage, 1996).
[2]. The seminal work in this tradition is Gøsta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
[3]. Philip Manow, "Social Insurance and the German Political Economy," Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung Discussion Paper 97/2 (November 1997).
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Citation:
Mark Vail. Review of Clasen, Jochen, Reforming European Welfare States: Germany and the United Kingdom Compared and
Obinger, Herbert; Leibfried, Stephan; Castles, Francis G., eds., Federalism and the Welfare State: New World and European Experiences.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12527
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