Rethinking Retrenchment Politics under a Conservative Welfare State

• In Event: The Welfare State: Tracing Changes Over Time

Abstract

While the literature retrenchment politics has significantly advanced our understanding of welfare state reform and the multiple ways in which retrenchment can occur, one major limitation is that retrenchment tends to be examined policy by policy (or program by program), each in isolation of the other, and against some unnamed version of what a liberal welfare state should look like. Thus, when conservative strategies to reform a welfare program fail over time, it is labeled as a program that has successfully entrenched, whereas when conservative strategies succeed over time, it is labeled as a program that has failed to entrenched or is under-entrenched. But this description in the U.S. context relies on Republicans still holding a “pure” textbook notion of conservatism: classic liberalism with minimal reliance on government. Today, there is little evidence that Republicans actually hold these beliefs. Conservatives attempt to shift public money toward conservative ideas, rather than eliminate public spending altogether or push for total reliance on the market. As many have explained, the American welfare state is larger than commonly believed and described. It is exceptional not only for its reliance on devolution and private provision, and outcomes that result in severe service fragmentation and benefits that are highly unequal, but also because it is a very large and active welfare state.
Because the purpose of this paper is to rethink retrenchment politics in the US, I argue that it is important to be clear about why type of welfare state is being expanded or retrenched. In this paper, I examine how conservative strategies entrench and build up Welfare State Liberalism, and argue that this insight is important for three reasons. First, welfare state liberalism increases public spending. This is crucially important because a conservative welfare state that largely benefits private actors, is often more expensive than a government-run, social democratic welfare state. Therefore, it is misleading to call conservative strategies “resisting the welfare state”, since Republican strategies often encourage, advocate for, and may further embed very expensive publicly-funded programs.
Second, because the U.S. conservative welfare state in its totality is so large, the conservative “oppositional” strategy includes retrenchment and expansion. It is important to recognize efforts to expand (or maintain) social benefits alongside efforts to retrench since a conservative welfare state will reward some constituents over others and that will be part of the strategic tactics.
Third, building on Epsing-Anderson’s insight that welfare states create a system of stratification, which either encourage commodification or decommodification, illuminates the limitations of studying how individual policies impact politics. Methodologically, it is important now to broaden the lens beyond analysis of particular programs to understand retrenchment politics to analyze the broader system within which policy is reformed. I use health reforms as a case to show how the enactment of Medicare alongside Medicaid created a stratified system, which embedded two-tiered dualism. Many others have discussed how the highly unequal and fragmented US health care system exacerbates inequities, but these systemic insights have not been incorporated into examinations of welfare state retrenchment. This incorporation allows one to rethink Medicare entrenchment as not one of our best examples of welfare state stability in the social democratic sense, but rather allowing for entrenchment of a Conservative Welfare State because its expansion allows for retrenchment in other parts of the health care system and for programs (e.g., Medicaid) targeting populations framed as ‘undeserving’. Finally, I will conclude by tying these three insights together to help explain how conservatives can run a retrenchment, anti-government campaign seemingly without electoral costs.

Author

• Colleen M. Grogan, University of Chicago