By Clem Brooks
The world’s richer democracies all supply such public merits as pensions and well-being care, yet why are a few way more beneficiant than others? And why, within the face of globalization and financial pressures, has the welfare country now not been changed by means of one other version? Reconsidering the myriad concerns raised via such urgent questions, Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza contend right here that public opinion has been an immense, but missed, consider shaping welfare states in contemporary decades.Analyzing facts on 16 nations, Brooks and Manza locate that the personal tastes of voters profoundly impact the welfare guidelines in their governments and the habit of politicians in place of work. formed via slow-moving forces comparable to social associations and collective thoughts, those personal tastes have counteracted worldwide pressures that many commentators assumed might bring about the welfare state’s dying. in addition, Brooks and Manza convey that cross-national transformations in well known help support clarify why Scandinavian social democracies supply much more than liberal democracies such as the usa and the United Kingdom.Significantly increasing our figuring out of either public opinion and social coverage within the world’s so much built nations, this landmark learn can be crucial interpreting for students of political economic system, public opinion, and democratic idea.
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Extra info for Why Welfare States Persist: The Importance of Public Opinion in Democracies (Studies in Communication, Media, and Public Opinion)
Example text
The existing literature on policy responsiveness provides a useful point of departure. Social Policy Responsiveness In democratic polities, elected officials have an incentive to incorporate the policy preferences of voters so as to reduce the risk of electoral losses for themselves (or for members of their party), and also reduce the possibility of public reprisals in the form of civil disobedience or protests. The policy responsiveness proposition has been a key analytical innovation within the emerging tradition of opinion/policy research (Stimson 1995; Burstein 1998; Erikson et al.
Why is social spending effort a good measure of contemporary welfare states? First of all, there is an impressive body of empirical evidence that demonstrates how spending influences levels of poverty and inequality in the developed democracies (Kenworthy 1999; Huber and Stephens 2001; Brady 2003a; Moller et al. 2003). Spending measures capture the components of welfare states that are known to directly influence the contours of stratification. Further, because most earlier studies use similar or identical measures as their dependent variable, comparisons with previous research is facilitated.
They map poorly onto the policy agendas of national legislatures and major political parties. But matters such as pensions or health care are different. These represent a window into programmatic conflicts about the degree to which a society should be organized around government versus individual responsibility for social problems. Within capitalist democracies, competing views of social welfare among political parties, interest groups, and ordinary citizens represent a central cleavage (Taylor-Gooby 1993; Garrett 1998; Hicks 1999), with countries differing according to whether public policies give greater priority to government or instead to private forms of social provision.