POLICY LEGACIES AND THE “COMMUNIST” WELFARE STATES IN EAST CENTRAL EUROPE

Our cross-national comparison of institutional development of the Czechoslovak, Polish, and Hungarian welfare states revealed the significance of institutional legacies of the imperial period during their early, formative years. It has also illustrated the ways in which these legacies are reproduced over time under the influence of national “blueprints” and in conjunction with major changes in political regime. This chapter presents a longitudinal analysis of the historical development of the major social insurance programs, pensions, sickness/maternity benefits, family allowances, and child-care payments in the three countries during the communist period. It aims to further expand our inquiry to uncover relevant continuities and discontinuities in government decision making. Moreover, this kind of disaggregated examination of historical trajectories of social insurance benefits enables us to better map, analyze, and compare individual “developmental paths” of the East Central European welfare states in a broad economic and sociopolitical context. These systems of social protection seem to have evolved in distinctive stages of retrenchment and expansion that often corresponded to the cycles of major crises of the polity and economy; as such their development contrasts with the conventional, linear trajectory of western welfare states, that is, one leading from the common “imperial” origins through periods of rapid postwar expansion to retrenchment or reform in the post-industrial era of economic austerity and globalism.