Rediscovering social investment in developmental welfare state ...

R E D I S C O V E R I N G S O C I A L I N V E S T M E N T I N D E V E L O P M E N T A L W E L F A R E S T A T E P O L I C I E S :
B A C K T O T H E F U T U R E
increasing the policy relevance of the former and refining the disparate nature of the latter. Finally, it
aimed to support future research by developing a principle-based theoretical framework that is
flexible enough to accommodate additional developmentalist policy dimensions beyond those that I
associated with the social investment function of the welfare state in my analysis. 2
While touching on several of these areas, my focus in this paper is primarily on summarizing the
third conceptual contribution of the dissertation. This paper will attempt to demonstrate how it is
possible to reconceptualize developmentalism, currently a loose collection of ideas, and apply it to
thinking predictively about comparative social policy (CPS), and especially policy that is
simultaneously protective and productive. Additionally, I will briefly summarize the tentative
empirical findings from the dissertation, which were based on a relatively simplistic test of whether
the policies that I believe reflect developmentalist principles are in fact associated with lower poverty
posttax/transfer as well as market poverty.
The history of the welfare state, and its study, has been marked by a series of transitions from one
phase to another. Regardless of the periodization one applies, this pattern of sequential or
generational thinking is discernible. The most recent and ongoing stage arguably began with the EU
slogan of social protection as a productive factor and marches on under the banner of social
investment, among related labels (Morel, Palier, & Palme, 2012). Unlike developing world welfare
states, the progress of whose social policy systems has oscillated—expanding and contracting with
economic exigencies such as procyclical pressures in Latin America (Kim, 2010) or changing
authoritarian political priorities as in the case of China (Lin, 2010)—the fate of welfare states in
developed nations has been more evolutionary, continuous and cumulative, where path dependency
tends to prevail. Study of the welfare state has been driven by the historical circumstances
confronting it. The need to justify the welfare state marks a stark challenge to the slow moving
theoretical world of regime typologies and path dependency. Much of this legacy of gradualism is
owed to the fact that the welfare state emerged through complex and successive social and political
processes rather than resulting from planning (Arts & Gelissen, 2002).
Amenta (2003) offers a compelling explanation for the historical progress and possible problem now
confronting the field: ―the literature on social policy has advanced as far as it has partly because
there was relative agreement on what was to be explained, while there was disagreement over the
possible explanations‖ (p. 114). In this context, the continued focus on normative issues of
redistribution and inequality and reliance on measures of effort (that lack conceptual coherence),
highlights the limitations of using old theoretical and empirical tools to address pressing new
problems. The problems now confronting the welfare state are not addressed by the two major
questions on which, according to Esping-Andersen (2004), welfare comparisons have focused: (1)
What explains national differences in welfare effort and welfare state type? and (2) What are the
distributional consequences of social policy variations? The central theoretical question is no longer
about why welfare states emerged and persisted but rather what they produce; specifically, in terms of
the productive consequences of distribution. The promise of recent scholarship is hampered by the
absence of a coherent conceptual framework for developing predictions about social policies that
are simultaneously protective and productive.
2 The term function is used here in order to recognize that much of the investment impact of the welfare state may be
implicit or unintended and therefore in need of discovery and explanation.
C E N T E R F O R S O C I A L D E V E L O P M E N T
W A S H I N G T O N U N I V E R S I T Y I N S T . L O U I S
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