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State Development (state + development)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Developing new measures of welfare state change and reform

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 5 2002
Francis G. Castles
Since the publication of Gøsta Esping,Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Esping,Andersen 1990), which built its typologies on a rich database of detailed programme characteristics, it has been generally accepted that measures of social expenditure are an inferior, and even a misleading, source of information concerning the character of welfare state development. The problem is, however, that the kinds of detailed programme data Esping,Andersen used are not routinely available, while the quality of social expenditure data has been improving rapidly, culminating in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) now regularly updated and highly disaggregated Social Expenditure Database (SOCX). This article explores the possibility of using SOCX to devise measures of the extent, structure and trajectory of welfare state change and reform in 21 OECD countries over the period 1984 to 1997. On the basis of these measures, it suggests that there has been almost no sign of systematic welfare retrenchment in recent years and only limited evidence of major structural transformation or programmatic reorientation. [source]

Decentralization, Local Government, and the Welfare State

GOVERNANCE, Issue 4 2007
JEFFEREY M. SELLERS
Despite growing interest in decentralized governance, the local government systems that comprise the most common element of decentralization around the world have received little systematic attention. This article, drawing on the first systematic index of decentralization to local government in 21 countries, demonstrates a close relation between Social Democratic welfare states and an intergovernmental infrastructure that in important respects ranks as the most decentralized among advanced industrial countries. This empowerment of local government in these countries was less an outgrowth of Social Democratic welfare state development than a preexisting condition that helped make this type of welfare state possible. [source]

Welfare municipalities: economic resources or party politics?

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, Issue 1 2001
Norwegian local government social programs of the 1920s
This article analyses the introduction of Norwegian local government social security programs for the elderly, disabled persons, widows and single mothers in the 1920s. The role of local government as an agent and initiator of welfare state development has been for the most part neglected within the welfare state literature. Indeed, the first social security programs in Norway were introduced by local governments, affecting nearly half of the population. Even if these programs were not very generous compared with the social security programs of our time, many of them were equal to, or even more generous than, the national pension scheme introduced in 1936. This article examines what distinguished the social security municipalities from those that did not implement such programs, and the variation in generosity profiles. The conclusion is that the main determinant regarding the implementation and generosity of the local social security programs is the political strength of the two Norwegian socialist parties at the time , the Social democratic party and the Labour party , both being too impatient to wait for a national social security plan, and both being willing to mobilise economic resources through taxation and borrowing. [source]

The State in World History: Perspectives and Problems

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 3 2002
Gregory Melleuish
This paper investigates the role of the state in world history and analyses some of the major issues confronting such an investigation with a particular focus on the relationship between the modern European state and the other historical forms of the state. Firstly it considers the problems raised by the fact that the terminology of state analysis is derived from a discourse that arose to explain the particularity of European state development. Secondly it considers the problem of the origins of the state. It examines two major issues: van Creveld's argument that only modern European states are real states and the chiefdom/state distinction. It argues that new political forms occurred both with the emergence of civilisation and the "state" in the ancient world and with the development of the modern European state after 1300. Thirdly it considers the issue of a typology of states through an examination of the model developed by Finer in his The History of Government. It argues that this model is only really effective in dealing with pre,modern political forms and that the modern European state needs to be understood as a deviant from the Eurasian norm of the agrarian empire. [source]