Drivers for change

Since the late twentieth century European and North American scholars have mainly focused on welfare state retrenchment or ‘restructuring’, especially since Paul Pierson’s Dismantling the Welfare State (1994). This book on reforms that were unpopular emphasized that welfare states were ‘immovable or resistant objects.’ Nevertheless, welfare states have actually changed drastically, whether through potential path-departing procedures and/or incremental change (Thelen, 2004; Streeck and Thelen, 2005). Jacob Hacker’s contribution to these debates focused on ‘policy drift’ (2004). He argued that the lack of actual reform given demographic evolution and economic restructuring should in fact be considered as a major form of change masked by apparent inertia. Other contributions have underlined other types of developments beyond the retrenchment/

expansion dichotomy. These include transnational paradigmatic changes in what Jane Jenson has called ‘citizenship regimes’: who is in charge of welfare, the national, the local, the private sector, the individual (Jenson, 2008 and 2010)? Others focus on the redefinition of the welfare state as a guarantor against ‘new social risks’ (Bonoli, 2005) or as a ‘social investment state’ (Esping-Andersen et al., 2002). Many scholars have also highlighted shifts from general to targeted benefits, from public to private service delivery, from institutional care to cash benefits or fiscal subsidies, from passive to active social policies, from the welfare state to the ‘enabling state’ (Gilbert, 2004). Beyond the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) world,

change is also occurring, drastic in Latin America, systemic in post-communist states, induced by the pressure of international financial institutions in developing countries, and unstable in states where the welfare state depends on the sharing of revenues from national resources or migrant remittances. Change itself, let alone its determinants and mechanisms in the field of social policy, is bound

to be complex and analytically challenging. As Jochen Clasen and Nico A. Siegel put it: ‘Despite a growing availability and comparability of relevant data, the body of comparative welfare state research cannot be described as resting on a widely shared empirical basis or common understanding about how much change there is, what drives change, or how the nature of change should be understood or conceptualized’ (Clasen and Siegel, 2007, p. 4). To find our way, we first have to clarify what can be considered as change, depending of the level of change and the time-scale of the analysis (section one). Change can be defined as a process (e.g. policy drift) or

an actual moment where change is visible (e.g. reform, social pact) and is independent of the mechanism of change (e.g. a horizontal policy transfer whereby country A mimics country B). Then we must distinguish the ‘why?’ question and the ‘how and who’ questions. Analytically,

this means distinguishing variables such as demographic trends or macroeconomic policy trends that challenge existing welfare state arrangements from the policy process whereby actors’ constellations frame these trends and call for change exploiting proximate facilitating factors such as mobilizations or electoral policy windows (section two). In section three, we address the question of cross-national variation of these drivers of change and

the role of transnational institutions, which also raises the question of hypothetical convergence.

Change is a main challenge for social scientists. Concerning social policy and welfare state, three initial questions have to be clarified: what is the point of reference and the time-scale? What is the level of change taken in consideration? What are the factors of this change and the key protagonists of this story (ideas, institutions and actors)? From an historical-diachronic and long-term perspective, many current welfare state reforms

could be viewed as marginal adaptations on the long run, when from a more synchronic, sociological or political point of view some of these reforms (and sometime the same ones) are presented as real or potential turning points. If the reference is ‘the great transformation’ observed by Karl Polanyi (1944), how can we consider the current reforms of the late twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries? Another issue concerns the indicators of change. For example, even in the middle of the

neoconservative storm of the 1980s and 1990s where the rhetoric against expanding public sector and social protection was at its peak, the welfare state still expanded revealing the gap between ideological clashes and concrete consequences. Since then, at the aggregate level and against many expectations, expenditure on social protection has remained stable (see Table 28.1). The level of change is therefore not necessarily proportional to the intensity of the controversies

or rhetoric battles. Easily understandable as well, the fact that our diagnosis on the welfare state depends strongly of the current and ideological context. For instance, during the 1970s many social scientists following the theory of ‘social control’ were critical about the extension and controlling role of the welfare state. Thirty years later, others and sometimes the same scholars are much more cautious and, given the drastic consequences of current reforms, seem to defend the welfare state foundations against violent neoconservative attacks. This analytical reversal does not mean that social sciences are not objective enough, or that social scientists are just unpredictable, but that our categories to think changes also have to change when society as a whole has been deeply transformed over time (Castel and Martin, 2012). A similar phenomenon is at stake when important social scientists like Pierson or Esping-

Andersen were diagnosing the inertia of contemporary welfare regimes in the middle of the 1990s, while other academics argue after a decade that even the so-called ‘frozen’ welfare states are going through substantial, institutional and perhaps paradigmatic changes (Palier and Martin, 2008; Palier, 2010). One must understand that both interpretations are not contradictory but complementary. They just take pictures at different moments of the process of change. Retrospective and comparative analysis of the welfare state reforms raises the question of the

importance or the level of change (Hall, 1993). Many factors must be considered: the time period, the selected indicators, and the specific programs under study. For some sectors of social protection like pension schemes, for example, the evaluation of change needs an extended time-lag as the current reforms may have a dramatic impact many years down the road. But the

issue is: are these changes ‘minor’ or ‘substantial’, marginal or paradigmatic? Are they mere adjustments, adaptations or revolutions? Did they result from the traditional process of policy learning, characterized by the adjustment of policy measures and/or instruments and/or institutions according to their capacity to reach a given objective, or did the main goal of the policy change itself? Are we facing small cumulative changes in a ‘muddling through’ process? In other

words, are these reforms accumulating over time, as the incremental layering of new provisions and instruments which can lead to subtle policy changes or major turns depending of this accumulation and its final direction? Thus, as Hinrichs and Kangas suggest, the important question is: ‘when is a change big enough to be labelled as a system shift?’ (2003). According to Peter Hall, these different levels of change involve different levels of analysis.

‘Paradigmatic change’ suggests ideational transfers and shifts. Changes in policy instruments prompt to pay attention to institutional pathways and interest groups as well as the means to achieve change (e.g. incentive structures). Changes in policy settings get us closer to bureaucratic actors, implementation and policy learning. Another question to investigate concerns the respective roles of political actors, interest groups, and high civil servants.