New Approaches to Conceptualizing and Measuring the Welfare State

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Nearly every governments across the developing and developed world provide some form of basic – or more extensive – social benefits to its most vulnerable populations. Given the importance of these services for the most underprivileged groups, as well as their vital role for alleviating social unrest and strife on a societal level, understanding the politics behind the welfare state should not be understated. Indeed, the study of social policy and the welfare state has a long and rich tradition within and across a number of literatures in comparative politics. Although there have certainly been advances in how we view and understand the welfare state (e.g. Esping-Andersen 1990), we continue to wrestle with ways of conceptualizing and measuring the creation and change of public social policies and how interact with society and affect socioeconomic outcomes. Given the speed at which contemporary economies and societies are changing, we should continue to develop new theoretical and analytical approaches to understanding the modern welfare state. What are the political origins of social policy formulation? How are changing global economic landscapes, as well as mass waves of migration, shaping contemporary welfare states? How do government policies affect socioeconomic outcomes?

This panel brings together new conceptualizations, and methodological, insights into the contemporary welfare state, as well as probing for explanations of its expansion (or lack thereof) across space and time. First, Niedzwiecki and Pribble provide a more fine-grained approach to understanding social policy expansion and retrenchment in post-commodities boom Latin America. Mauro seeks to understand the initial stages of social policy formulation among political actors during elections; finding that the strength of left within a given party system, and especially the relative level of competition between major parties, shapes how politicians and political parties discuss and advance social policy initiatives regardless of their respective prior ideological positions. Hunter views social policy provision through the lens of migration and citizenship, and how these processes affect the availability of social policy for individuals on the ‘inside,’ and ‘outside,’ of the nation-state. Huber and Stephens construct an expanded time-series cross-sectional dataset on inequality and redistribution, investigating how government policies affect socioeconomic outcomes across countries in the Global North.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Re-conceptualizing Social Policy Expansion and Retrenchment in Latin America - Sara Niedzwiecki, University of California, Santa Cruz; Jennifer Pribble, University of Richmond

• The Role of Welfare State Development in an Era of Global Migration - Wendy Hunter, University of Texas, Austin

• The Political Origins of Social Policy in Liberal Welfare States - Vincent Mauro, Cornell University

Chair

• Kurt Weyland University of Texas, Austin

Discussants

• Alisha Caroline Holland Harvard University

• Ben Ross Schneider Massachusetts Institute of Technology