European Sociological Review 4:181-205 1988
© 1988 Oxford University Press
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Is there a crisis of the welfare state? Crossnational evidence from Europe, North America, and Japan
Critics of the welfare state combine assumptions about likely trends in welfare state development with hypotheses on its side effects on social integration and system integration. These assumptions are eleborated and confronted with empirical evidence for 16 major Western countries. The central findings are the following: (i) Growth rates of social spending have declined sharply since 1975, albeit with marked cross-national variation. The slowdown of growth is related to a series of legislative cutbacks. (ii) There are neither signs of a general welfare backlash nor of a legitimation crisis caused by the curtailments. Welfare state programmes still enjoy a high level of mass support, and there are no signs of new cleavages created by the unequal distribution of welfare entitlements. (iii) All welfare states have growing difficulties balancing their budgets, but again there are marked cross-national variations. The growing deficits point to problems of system integration which cannot, however, be attributed to the growth of the welfare state, but should be seen as problems of adaptation to a new historical macro-constellation which developed independently of the functioning of the welfare state.
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