Rethinking the Linkage Between Party Politics and Welfare State Under Populism

• In Event: Populism, Italian Style

Abstract

The breakthrough of populist parties into Western European mainstream politics has inspired prolific theoretical and empirical research on the topic in the past three decades. Especially the social agenda has attracted considerable scholarly attention due the appropriation by populist parties of the political debate over the welfare state and the related socioeconomic issues (e.g. unemployment, inequality, privilege, social justice, and marginalization). Not only have populist parties employed those issues as a trump card for electoral success. They have also conflated the debate over welfare state reform with discussions over immigration and entry policies.
Literature has addressed the relationship between populist politics and welfare state through the notion of ‘welfare state chauvinism’ (Andersen and Bjørklund 1990). Welfare chauvinism denotes a nativist conception of the welfare state, which propounds the provisions of social benefits only to the ‘natives’ to the exclusion of those who are not considered as belonging to ‘the national community’ (Mudde 2007, 132). Scholarly agreement that welfare chauvinism has become the hallmark of Western European populist parties has encouraged researches to apply this concept to virtually all experiences. While supporting such claim, this paper contends that the picture appears more nuanced. Specifically, welfare chauvinism represents a cluster concept that hardly captures the specificities and national differences in welfare state discourse and practice under populism across Europe. Populist parties in different countries have mobilized on different forms of popular resentment and disaffection surrounding the welfare state. In some countries chauvinistic appeals have been hardly confined to migrant communities. Rather, the ‘othering’ rhetoric has also targeted some national groups based on their putative ‘undeservingness’ of welfare benefits. How to assess more accurately the complex linkage between populist party politics and welfare state?
In the attempt to address this question, the paper first traces the historical evolution of the changing relationship between party politics and welfare state from the end of World War II to present day in Western Europe. This section proposes an analytical framework by identifying three distinct stages of politics of welfare state reform and by examining for each of them changes and continuities in welfare state politics in relation to four dimensions: (i) the external context, including the predominant macro-processes and economic paradigm; (ii) the nature of political parties, party politics, and coalitional patterns; (iii) electoral patterns, (iv) the nature of social cleavages and conflicts surrounding the welfare state. The analysis aims to show the extent to which populist welfare state politics has differed from the previous two welfare state politics and to highlight its defining features.
Second, the paper advances its main argument, whereby welfare state chauvinism in fact encompasses not one but different national populist politics of welfare state. Although these politics share a great deal of similarities in terms of rhetoric and (in countries where populist parties are a government force) of policy, they also differ based on the existing national institutional structures characterizing the welfare state and on the main social cleavages surrounding it. Populist politics in different countries are structured by different sets of incentives depending upon the specific context in which they are formulated. The analysis supports this argument by drawing on several national experiences while devoting special attention to Italy and Sweden.While reviewing and bringing together the relevant literature on populism and the welfare state, this paper aims to make an original contribution by promoting a greater understanding of the interplay between populist politics and welfare state as shaped by different institutional and societal factors.Moreover, this study shines a light on a paradox associated with populism: despite its anti-institutional bent, populism leverages pivotal national institutions, such as the welfare state, to fulfill its promise of tackling the scourges of economic privilege and of engendering socioeconomic transformation. However, by maneuvering the welfare state, populism has the potential to reshape the social and economic reality through redefining entitlements and criteria of ‘deservingness’. These considerations suggest the relevance of this paper. Indeed, the welfare state is not just about public policy. It also encompasses an intra-societal dimension, insofar as it stratifies and orders the relative position of social groups by affecting the structure of income and risk distribution among them. Finally, by investigating the case of Italy, among others, this study contributes to partly reduce the dearth of research on populism as a government force.

Author

• Silvia Fuselli, Johns Hopkins University (SAIS)