The Continental Welfare State Sparked Partisan Struggle but Was It Made by Parties?

• In Event: 2129 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 4. Institutions - Emergence and Development

Abstract

Historical institutionalists are increasingly interested in the contested processes by which political alternatives become institutionalized and de-institutionalized. A prominent approach identifies political parties as generative of policy ideas. This paper investigates the scope conditions for this approach and develops an alternative for different conditions. The argument is made through a re-examination of the making of the child labor law of 1839, which is widely considered the beginning of social policy in Prussia and a corner stone of the Continental European, Weberian welfare state. Extant scholarship posits a party-political context and explains the law as the outcome of a struggle between conservatives and liberals. This paper identifies key empirical facts that challenge the existing account. It argues that the context was one of multiply embedded policy-makers, with coalitions of policy-makers crosscutting party-political lines. Investigated under this approach, the archival record discloses that the struggle was mainly about a proposal to implement child-labor regulation through local-participatory institutions encompassing factory workers. At stake was not whether liberals or conservatives would set up a Weberian welfare state but whether the Prussian welfare state would be Weberian at all. This substantive finding has novel implications for contemporary debates.

Author

• Pierre-Christian Fink, Columbia University