User:Gwugradstudent/Welfare state

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Broadly speaking, welfare states are either universal, with provisions that cover everybody; or selective, with provisions covering only those deemed most needy. In his 1990 book, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen further identified three subtypes of welfare state models; liberal, social-democratic, and conservative.

[Edit] Esping-Anderson development of the three subtypes of welfare regimes were categorized under three dimensions: 1) state and market relations or the relationship between the state and market, 2) stratification or social relations and relationships, 3) social citizenship rights or whether or not an individual is dependent on the labor market.

Since the building of the decommodification index is limited and the typology is debatable, these 18 countries could be ranked from most purely social-democratic (Sweden) to the most liberal (the United States). Ireland represents a near-hybrid model whereby two streams of unemployment benefit exist: contributory and means-tested. However, payments can begin immediately and are theoretically available to all Irish citizens even if they have never worked, provided they are habitually resident.

Social stigma varies across the three conceptual welfare states. Particularly, it is highest in liberal states, and lowest in social democratic states. Esping-Andersen proposes that the universalist nature of social democratic states eliminate the duality between beneficiaries and non-recipients, whereas in means-tested liberal states there is resentment towards redistribution efforts. That is to say, the lower the percent of GDP spent on welfare, the higher the stigma of the welfare state. Esping-Andersen also argues that welfare states set the stage for post-industrial employment evolution in terms of employment growth, structure, and stratification. He uses Germany, Sweden, and the United States to provide examples of the differing results of each of the three welfare states.

According to Evelyne Huber and John Stephens, different types of welfare states emerged as a result of prolonged government by different parties. They distinguish between social democratic welfare states, Christian democratic welfare states, and "wage earner" states.

According to the Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein, in non-universal welfare states, the state is primarily concerned with directing resources to "the people most in need". This requires tight bureaucratic control in order to determine who is eligible for assistance and who is not. Under universal models such as Sweden, on the other hand, the state distributes welfare to all people who fulfill easily established criteria (e.g. having children, receiving medical treatment, etc.) with as little bureaucratic interference as possible. This, however, requires higher taxation due to the scale of services provided. This model was constructed by the Scandinavian ministers Karl Kristian Steincke and Gustav Möller in the 1930s and is dominant in Scandinavia.

Sociologist Lane Kenworthy argues that the Nordic experience demonstrates that the modern social democratic model can "promote economic security, expand opportunity, and ensure rising living standards for all ... while facilitating freedom, flexibility and market dynamism."

American political scientist Benjamin Radcliff has also argued that the universality and generosity of the welfare state (i.e. the extent of decommodification) is the single most important societal-level structural factor affecting the quality of human life, based on the analysis of time serial data across both the industrial democracies and the American States. He maintains that the welfare state improves life for everyone, regardless of social class (as do similar institutions, such as pro-worker labor market regulations and strong labor unions).

Gender and Welfare

Esping-Andersen's welfare typology is often criticized by feminists for being gender blind. According to Keerty Nakray, Esping-Andersen's three types of dimensions (state and market relations, stratification, and social citizenship rights) does not acknowledge unpaid care-work done by women within the household economy. This failure of recognizing unpaid work is due to the fact that welfare states are focused on the male-breadwinner concept. Because Esping-Andersen argued that the welfare state set the stage for employment evolution, the lack of gender analysis creates an unintended emphasis on male employment.

Sociologist Ann Shola Orloff reframes the three dimensions with a gendered lends. As she reframes, Orloff incorporates gender and expands the decommodification index within three dimensions: 1) focus on families and the welfare states in state and market relations, 2) including the relationship between gender and labor in stratifications on social provisions, 3) how men and women are dependent on the labor market and the effect of welfare on decommodification for both genders. Reframing the decommodification index with a gendered lens ensures women doing care-work don't get left behind within in the welfare state.

The UBI as a replacement for the welfare state

The Universal Basic Income (UBI) has been proposed as a replacement for the traditional welfare state where social protection schemes are also social policies with a precise aim that can be regarded as social engineering. The focus of the UBI is granting individuals more freedom in determining life choices by providing a lifetime of financial security regardless of one's career preferences or lifepath.

According to the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and nationally syndicated columnist Veronique de Rugy's statements made in 2016, as of 2014, the annual cost of a UBI in the US would have been about $200 billion cheaper than the current US system. By 2020, it would have been nearly a trillion dollars cheaper.