The “big society” and the british welfare state: a paradigm shift or just incremental policy change?

By Giulia Leoni

The main topic of the dissertation is the innovative Conservative-Liberal Democratic plan of the Big Society, aiming at liberalizing the public sector from an excessive incidence and influence by public institutions and reaching a new conception of “human needs”, empowering local people and communities.
Consequently, after an investigation of the innovative range of the Big Society plan, addressed to understand if it entails a paradigm change for the British Welfare State or just an incremental policy change, following the previous governments’ reforms, the second purpose of this study is to capture the viability of the new policies, located not only in a peculiar welfare state structure, but also in a particular historical time, requesting huge retrenchment.
Accordingly, a combined approach involving a comparison among the main OECD countries in the wake of Esping-Andersen analysis and an historical methodology focusing on the last fifties years' social policy, underline an unbroken line among the British social policy, supporting an institutionalist theory.
Subsequently, making use of civic involvement survey's figures, it will be evaluate the viability of the plan implied in the willingness of the British citizen to be accountable of the public sector and an analytical study will provide data for the first achievements of the Big Society devolving power to local communities and charities in the sake of fighting for the welfare sustainability, threatened by the red tape cut back.
The ensued limitation of the methodology adopted during six months of scrupulous research at the London School of Economics and Political Science, dwells in the short-term of the policy implementation, requesting time to reach a new conception of civic involvement and of public sector accountability.
Nevertheless, the comparative and historical approaches revealing continuity in the British social policy allow some forecasts regarding the trend of the plan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Giulia Leoni
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9788868551995

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Acknowledgements

In primo luogo, vorrei ringraziare la Professoressa Gualmini, non solo per avermi sempre sostenuta ed incoraggiata in questo progetto che è stato per me una grande opportunità di crescita professionale e personale, ma anche per essere stata sempre gentile e disponibile dimostrando professionalità e passione per il proprio lavoro.

Inoltre, vorrei ringraziare il Professor Hopkin per avermi dato l'opportunità di studiare presso la London School of Economics and Political Science, per i consigli e la disponibilità dimostrata.

In secondo luogo, vorrei ricordare quanto in questo progetto e nei mesi all'estero ci siano i condomini di Club 13, la compagna di un viaggio in Irlanda, chi in questi due anni mi ha fatto quasi da mamma (soprattutto controllando i tempi di cottura dei miei elaborati), l'onnipresente famiglia Sid, chi mi ha interrogato pazientemente prima degli esami, chi mi ha portato nelle feste più indie di Madrid, chi mi ha inserito nella vita londinese, chi con me ha condiviso tutto della vita londinese, chi mi ha spinto a dare il massimo e non a pensare solo all'arte, la compagna di shopping a Oxford Street, chi mi ha dato preziosi consigli sulla vita alla LSE, chi viene da Tavullia per sentire le mie storie, chi con il sorriso ha illuminato il nostro appartamento mansardato di Bologna, chi mi ha soprannominato Pepper, chi mi ha insegnato lo spagnolo, chi coglie l'occasione per applicare gli studi di psicologia durante lunghe pause caffè o prima di andare a dormire, a chi fugge con me a Numana e mi asseconda tutti i miei sogni, spingendomi a crederci sempre e rendendomi ancora più sognatrice.

Infine, non ci sono parole per esprimere quanto in questa tesi ci siate voi tre che siete tutto il mio mondo, a Londra o in Tanzania che sia; in tutti i miei sforzi, ci sono la tenacia e la musica del babbo, la tranquillità e la comprensione della mamma e tutta la dolcezza di Silvia.

Introduction

For well over a decade now, a good deal of scholarly attention has been paid to the process of welfare retrenchment in the capitalist democracies.

According to many observers, globalization is somehow responsible for the development of different social policy alternatives in contemporary systems, encouraging national governments to cut social spending and liberalize their welfare arrangements in an effort to attract inward investments.

Nevertheless, welfare systems, which have become deeply embedded over time, are unlikely simply to collapse in the face of the new challenges according to institutionalist arguments, acting as reminders of the complexities of rooted social, political and cultural arrangements in national welfare regimes; the existence of which reduce the likelihood of external pressures exerting a direct or linear transformative influence on national institutions (Ellison, 2006).

Accordingly, institutional infrastructures can mitigate economic pressures in ways that preserve the core characteristics of national welfare systems.

Bearing that in mind, the main topic of the dissertation is the innovative Conservative-Liberal Democratic plan of the Big Society, aiming at liberalizing the public sector from an excessive incidence and influence by public institutions and reaching a new conception of human needs, empowering local people and communities.

The project has been regarded with particular interest from many OECD countries because its success would have entailed a revolutionary simplification of the welfare system and would have involved civil society, thus discharging the state.

However, according to the assumptions above, the institutional framework could undermine the innovative range of the policy as well as the 2008 economic crisis, playing an overwhelming role setting the Conservative- Liberal Democrat coalition's social priorities in compliance with the need of budget reduction.

Consequently, after an investigation of the innovative range of the Big Society plan, addressed to understand if it entails a paradigm change for the British Welfare State or just an incremental policy change, following the previous governments’ reforms, the second purpose of this study is to capture the viability of the new policies, located not only in a peculiar welfare state structure, but also in a particular historical time, requesting huge retrenchment.

Accordingly, a combined approach involving a comparison among the main OECD countries in the wake of Esping-Andersen analysis and an historical methodology focusing on the last fifties years' social policy, underline an unbroken line among the British social policy, supporting an institutionalist theory.

Subsequently, making use of civic involvement survey's figures, it will be evaluate the viability of the plan implied in the willingness of the British citizen to be accountable of the public sector and an analytical study will provide data for the first achievements of the Big Society devolving power to local communities and charities in the sake of fighting for the welfare sustainability, threatened by the red tape cut back.

The ensued limitation of the methodology adopted during six months of scrupulous research at the London School of Economics and Political Science, dwells in the short-term of the policy implementation, requesting time to reach a new conception of civic involvement and of public sector accountability.

Nevertheless, the comparative and historical approaches revealing continuity in the British social policy allow some forecasts regarding the trend of the plan.

Accordingly, Chapter One is focus on the Esping-Andersen classification of the three Welfare State Regimes, linking the nature of social goods and forms of welfare delivery, on one hand, and the historical development and configuration of certain economic, social and political institutions that make up the wider system of governance in which these arrangements are located, on the other.

Briefly, Esping-Andersen distinguished three regime types; a Liberal Anglo-Saxon Regime drawn by means-tested benefit systems or social insurance programmes and high levels of social inequality, a Conservative Continental European Regime relies on employer and employee contributions to provide generous replacement rates for certain groups, and a Social Democratic Northern Europe Regime, highly decommodified with generous citizen benefits across all aspects of income security as well as universal access to social services.

But, how accurate does Esping-Andersen's model remain thirty years after?

Accordingly, figures will demonstrate Esping-Andersen's clusters continue to provide a convenient means of grouping different welfare systems as a foundation for further analysis; if anomalies will still exist and differences within regimes types as well as among them, this innate diversity is insufficient to undermine the entire regimes concept.

Consequently, Chapters Second and Third are underpinned on the British social policy evolution since the sixties years; notably, the hybrid social policy system, displayed continental and social democratic, as well as neoliberal characteristics is the result of the incremental process in the post-war period.

Benefit structures, developed under the insurance system originally devised by Beveridge and introduced by the Labour government's Social Insurance Act in 1946, had many features of the Bismarckian employment-based breadwinner model.

But, the post-war arrangement did not survive the recession of the early 1970s in the aftermath of the oil crisis and the Conservative government's reformism, which virtually privatized old age pensions and core services had been reorganized to mimic the workings of the market, like National Health Service and education, with an ensued increase of inequalities.

Similarly, when the employment rose over 10 per cent in the early 1990s, the following Labour government developed a policy shifting from its democratic socialist past to a more market-friendly, post-Thatcherism position (Drive and Martell, 1998 in Ellison, 2006), in compliance with New Labour's Third Way rhetoric.

In this framework is located the election of the first coalition government in the post-war period, explored in Chapter Four in order to locate its rhetoric in the British public policy history and underline the main features of the Coalition's Agreement, underpinning the Big Society plan. Indeed, localism and red tape reduction, pursued in the sake of beating the deficit, are offset by empowering citizens in their communities, enhancing democratic skills and mobilising them to get involved.

Accordingly, the Fifth Chapter provides an accurate investigation of the Big Society plan underlining the main features of participation and localism entailed in the project developed, tracing out some policies adopted by the previous governments.

Thus, is the Big Society a paradigm shift or just incremental policy change?

Even so too soon to judge the achievements of a plan aiming a shift in the citizens conception of civic involvement, figures will show strong relevance to the difficulty of the policy to cope the expenditure reduction: in this framework, the Big Society requires a sea-change in the way citizens engage in democracy and must work to address the structural issues of socio-economic and political marginalisation and strengthen young citizens' sense of efficacy.

1.

The British Welfare State in a Comparative Perspective

If it has long been recognized that welfare states come in different shapes and sizes and vary substantially in their political orientations and distributional outcomes (Castles F.G., 2010, 571), drawing patterns relied on similar features persisting over time, Esping-Andersen‘s Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism has had a defining influence upon the whole field of comparative welfare state research since its publication in 1990.

Before that time, the dominant research style was a correlational approach, identifying a relationship between levels of social expenditure and levels of welfare stateness (Castles F.G., 2010): focusing his critique on the theoretical substance of welfare states, Esping-Andersen’s starting point was what welfare states do and how they do it, notably concerning to the degree to which a social service or social security benefits is without reliance on the market, the manner in which the major institutions guaranteeing social security interact in the production of social welfare and the kind of stratification system promoted by social policy.

In this way, he built a theoretical approach focused on historical and theoretical issues in which cross-national variation in welfare state development can be largely explained by the distribution of power resources in society between major interest groups, by the nature and levels of power mobilization, the structure of labour movements and patterns of political coalition-formation. Moreover, class-based parties, including those operating in coalition with other religiously oriented parties have used democratic politics in attempts to influence distributive processes through legislation and by institution building.

Consequently, welfare capitalism is best understood as the path-dependent outcome of political struggles and coalition formation at historically decisive turning-points, giving the rise to three ideal-typical developmental trajectories: a social democratic or Scandinavian model manifesting high levels of de-commodification, cross-class solidarity resulting in a system of generous universal benefits and strong etatism; a conservative/ Continental model manifesting a moderate degree of de-commodification, a narrow sphere of solidarity related to occupational status, and a commitment to subsidiarity and the preservation of traditional family structures typical of the countries of continental Europe; a liberal or Anglo-Saxon model, with typically low levels of de-commodification and a strong preference for private welfare spending.

In particular, the cornerstone of the study is that there are no pure cases but some of them which come close to the ideal typical regimes, like United States is the prototype of a liberal regime, Germany is the prototype of the conservative regime and Sweden of the social-democratic.

Consequently, identifying the main features of these clusters is pursued in order to illustrate how different nations' labour markets derive much of their logic from how they are embedded in the institutional framework of social policy.

Thus, establishing an empirical-theoretical study in order to explain the persistent cross-national variation in welfare regimes supported by empirical data, Esping-Andersen’s Three Worlds became a modern classic.

On the contrast, path dependency paradigm has been criticized for its propensity to overemphasize the worlds of welfare capitalism as "frozen