The role of parties and union politics

Social policy is primarily about politics. The political approach draws on this conflictual nature of the policy-making process, arguing that welfare provision reflects not only structural, objective needs, but mainly the interests, conflicts and power relations prevailing in specific social contexts. This ‘politics matters’ strand (van Kersbergen, Reference van Kersbergen2006) is composed of various schools of thought, prominent among which is the power resources theory (Esping-Andersen, Reference Esping-Andersen1985; Korpi and Palme, Reference Korpi and Palme2003; Korpi, Reference Korpi2006). Drawing on social-democratic sentiments, power resources scholars argue that in democratic societies, characterised by universal suffrage and competitive elections, social policy is not (only) a straightforward reflection of general structural needs and changes, but rather primarily a result of political struggle between labour and capital. According to this line of thought, welfare state programmes are largely rooted in class conflict, so that when working class parties or trade unions are powerful, they are able to counterbalance capital, resulting in welfare state expansion.

Over time, internal critiques have led to several adjustments in power resources theory. The first being that working class mobilisation is not sufficient, in itself, to counterbalance the economic power of capital, and hence the ability to build class alliances should also be taken into consideration (e.g. van Kersbergen, Reference van Kersbergen2003). Moreover, in many cases, the main political force behind welfare state expansion is not necessarily social-democratic parties or unions, but rather their Christian-democratic counterparts, and centre-right conservatives more generally. According to this line of thought, parties, unions and labour power are indeed critical in pushing the welfare state forward, but it challenges the assumption that ‘the power of labour equals the power of social democracy’ (Kalyvas and van Kersbergen, Reference Kalyvas and van Kersbergen2010: 197).

A large body of studies has provided us with credible empirical evidence to suggest that partisanship does matter and that left mobilising power, through working class parties and trade unions, is at least to some extent positively associated with welfare state efforts (Korpi and Palme, Reference Korpi and Palme2003; Allan and Scruggs, Reference Allan and Scruggs2004). This association has been especially evident during the golden age of welfare state expansion, but it still holds true in our ‘era of austerity’ and under the ‘new politics’ regime (Finseraas and Vernby, Reference Finseraas and Vernby2011).

However, to what extent is power resources theory indeed applicable to the realm of disability policy? Put differently, should we take for granted that playing a progressive role in shaping the structure of the welfare state has also led working class parties and trade unions to play a progressive role in shaping disability policy? In addressing these questions, we argue, one needs to pay attention to the marginal position of disabled people in domestic politics, and consequently to the possibility that politics might have played a different, even regressive role, in shaping disability policy.

Let us first look at unions. As a formal political channel, unions present disabled people with several key challenges. To begin with, they tend to advocate mainly for the needs and preferences of the average workers, leaving many others, including disabled workers, ‘out in the wilderness’ (Humphrey, Reference Humphrey2000: 265). This is especially true in majoritarian systems, in which minority interests tend to be overlooked. This problem is exacerbated if we take into consideration that accessibility issues (in their broad sense) often restrict disabled people’s participation in union activities (Humphrey, Reference Humphrey2017; Lurie, Reference Lurie2017). Additionally, in representing worker interests, unions tend to overlook and sometimes even go against the interests of those excluded from the labour market, including disabled people. An illustrative example is self-directed social care, in which ‘some of the battle lines’ (Glasby, Reference Glasby2014: 254) have been drawn between care recipients and public service trade unions.

Significant difficulties can also be found in the partisan arena. Disability scholars have long pointed at the potential difficulties faced by disabled people in exercising their political rights as voters. These include being denied access to necessary information or ‘locked’ in segregated residential services, social isolation, low levels of education or negative and stereotyped attitudes. The result is that disabled citizens are less likely than non-disabled ones to vote and participate in other formal political activities (e.g. Schur et al., Reference Schur, Ameri and Adya2017; Teglbjærg et al., Reference Teglbjærg, Mamali, Chapman and Dammeyer2021). Moreover, the medical subcategorisation of disabled people, as reflected in health and welfare systems, makes it difficult for them to think of themselves as a unified group. This divide-and-conquer attitude ‘has obvious implications for any notions of class based political activity’ (Oliver and Zarb, Reference Oliver and Zarb1989: 222).

These obstacles to formal political participation are also evident when we examine disabled people as elected representatives. Compared to their non-disabled counterparts, they have fewer opportunities to engage with and be represented in formal politics, especially in the partisan arena. Importantly, as elaborated below, this low level of formal participation is highly related to the ableism of the institutional-legal landscape (Chaney, Reference Chaney2015). A good example would be that unlike other minorities, disabled people are usually not conceived as a social group entitled to equal representation, although this seems to vary across countries (Priestley et al., Reference Priestley, Stickings, Loja, Grammenos, Lawson, Waddington and Fridriksdottir2016). This ableist setting not only makes it difficult for candidates to become elected, but can also lead politicians with disabilities to ‘pass’ as non-disabled whatever possible and avoid focusing their public activities in that area.

Taken together, all these barriers should at least put a question mark on our assumption that traditional, formal politics, including unions and worker parties, often play a pivotal, progressive role in shaping disability policy. Due to the paucity of studies, such assumption has rarely been studied empirically, let alone on a comparative basis. This means we know very little not only about differences between countries in exercising political rights, but also about the effect of this scarce resource on disability policies. Accordingly, a key future research agenda is to delve deeper into these issues. Among other things, this agenda would benefit from exploring the organisational, institutional, and political conditions, if any, under which disabled people manage to articulate their interests through unions and working-class parties.

Another, related direction for future research stems from the disability studies insight that ‘disability friendly’ policy should be not only about redistribution but also about recognition (Goodlad and Riddell, Reference Goodlad and Riddell2005). Good examples are issues of choice, autonomy, and stigma. Hitherto, power resources theory has tended to ignore them, and consequently struggled to address some important questions. For example, do trade unions and working class parties also shape issues related to choice and stigma, or are these issues affected mainly by other political actors such as the disability movement? Put differently, although class-based organisations such as unions are critical in shaping disability redistributive measures, could it be that issues of control, autonomy and choice are shaped by other political forces, including service users? Such underexplored questions remind us that we cannot assume that welfare state efforts are monolithic. Rather, it is more sensible to assume that they have multiple aspects shaped by different political factors and casual mechanisms (Bolzendahl, Reference Bolzendahl2011).

Social policy making from below

The insight that disabled people face multiple structural barriers in participating in traditional, formal representative structures has led disability studies scholars to suggest alternative channels of political activism, prominent among which is social movements (Oliver and Barnes, Reference Oliver and Barnes2012). They argue that through a diverse set of non-conventional, confrontational, political tactics practiced by a loose ‘network of grassroots organisations controlled and run by disabled people’ (Campbell and Oliver, Reference Campbell and Oliver2013: ix), disabled people can best resist discrimination, promote progressive policies and achieve a non-disabling society. Moreover, unlike traditional class-based politics, the disability movement is perceived ‘as an exemplar of Fraser’s triple movement, criticising domination through social protection and marketisation’ (Dodd, Reference Dodd2016: 162), thus aiming to achieve both redistributive and recognition goals.

Despite the normative contribution of this argument, however, and despite the potential impact of the disability movement in the social and cultural realms, research has been slow to systematically theorise and evaluate the movement’s political impact. In fact, until recently most of the available literature has relied on anecdotal evidence, with little empirical data to back this argument, and with little borrowing of theoretical arguments from the growing literature on social movements’ impact. This empirical and theoretical basis is especially shaky with regard to the cross-national perspective (Waldschmidt, et al., Reference Waldschmidt, Karačić, Sturm and Dins2015).

Consequently, several questions remain to be answered in future research. For example, what conditions contribute to disabled people’s ability to mobilise? Is that ability related to the enactment of progressive disability policies? What institutional and political conditions moderate this relationship? Are disruptive tactics (e.g. sit-ins) more useful than moderate activities (e.g. lobbying)? And is the movement’s power relevant not only to choice, autonomy and stigma issues, but also to redistribution? Again, it is only in recent years that these questions have (slowly) begun to be systematically and empirically addressed (e.g. Waldschmidt et al., Reference Waldschmidt, Karačić, Sturm and Dins2015). Moving forward in this avenue will enable us to better understand the dynamics of the disability movement and the conditions under which it is in position to make a difference (Pinto, Reference Pinto2018).

Importantly, addressing these questions will also allow us to rethink the role of social movements in shaping social policies. In fact, the lack of studies on the impact of the disability movement on the welfare state and disability policy is also due to the limited use of the social movement conceptualisation within the social policy discipline (Nadasen, Reference Nadasen2014). This paucity is not coincidental. Over the past few decades, we have witnessed the deepening of the rigid and simplistic division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ social movements and consequently the absence of the latter from the social policy discipline. As Annetts et al. (Reference Annetts, Law, McNeish and Mooney2009: 7) rightly argue, this separation fails ‘to do justice to the struggle over welfare of the past couple of centuries, let alone the past few years’; these struggles, they argue, have been always about recognition as well as about the ‘politics of the belly’. In this regard, the disability movement can serve as an illustrative case for understanding the nature of these social welfare movements and their role in shaping both the redistributive and recognition dimensions of the welfare state.

In highlighting the disability movement’s power to shape social policy, we should also not overlook the fact that whilst social movements differ from parties and unions in their structures and processes, both forms of politics are dynamic and interconnected. Particularly interesting for our purposes is the emphasis in recent social movement scholarship (e.g. Kriesi, Reference Kriesi, Porta and Diani2015; Piccio, Reference Piccio, Bosi, Giugni and Uba2016) on the fact that social movements often establish various forms of interaction with parties, seen as playing a critical role in those movements’ political outcomes. We should therefore pay attention to how far the disability movement has managed to incorporate the social model of disability into the ideologies and practices of institutionalised political channels such as parties and unions; to the political, electoral and organisational conditions under which such impact is more likely to succeed; as well as to the degree to which such interaction is effective in pursuing the movement’s long-term goals in the form of ‘disability friendly’ policies. ^{Footnote 2}

Finally, by acknowledging the fluid, sporadic, local, and informal nature of both power and resistance, disability studies have joined other critical perspectives (Luna, Reference Luna2009) in broadening our conventional understanding of politics. Under this reconceptualisation, usually overlooked by the mainstream welfare state literature (Lister, Reference Lister2004), individual practices taking place in the private sphere – including welfare fraud, withdrawal from the labour market, online shaming, sabotage and other violent acts towards service providers – carry political meaning, usually in the form of resistance (Goodley et al., Reference Goodley, Lawthom and Runswick-Cole2014; Holler, Reference Holler2020), or what Williams (Reference Williams, Irwing, Fenger and Hudson2015) calls ‘aggregate resistance’.

This rereading of the political enables us to view everyday practices as a form of resistance and subsequently locate agency in disabled people’s lives. Despite its importance, however, theoretical obscurity and lack of empirical research mean that the extent it allows us to better understand the development of disability policy and its cross-country variations is still unclear. Among other things, it is not quite clear how these ad-hoc forms of ‘everyday resistance’ (Scott, Reference Scott2008) are effective in shaping disability policies and in adding up into aggregate consequences. What are the political, institutional, and ideational constellations that enable these local, sporadic actions to translate into meaningful policy change? And to what extent are they useful in explaining cross-country differences? Here, too, systematic and comparative analysis will add an important dimension to welfare state politics.

The political meaning: the role of ‘institutional ableism’

In their political sense, institutions refer to the rules of the game of the policy making process (Starke, Reference Starke2006) – from the type of electoral system to the degree of vertical and horizontal fragmentation of power. These rules structure the way interests, power, and preferences can be realised in the form of social policies (Obinger et al., Reference Obinger, Leibfried and Castles2005). Hitherto, only few social policy studies have used this institutional vantage point to identify the (unique) ways in which the rules of the game shape disability policy (e.g. Lewin et al., Reference Lewin, Lewin, Bäck and Westin2008). And despite the importance of these scarce studies, they too have mostly tended not to use disability as an analytical framework, thus leaving untouched the disabling impact of these rules.

Here, too, disability studies offer us a fruitful avenue for such an inquiry. Drawing on feminist ideas, disability studies have long challenged the supposedly objective separation between the public and private sphere. In a similar vein, this critical approach allows us to reconceptualise the rules of the political game. More concretely, similarly to feminist institutionalism (Mackay et al., Reference Mackay, Kenny and Chappell2010), it enables us to rethink what is included in those rules and thereby reveal significant institutional characteristics that have been ignored by the more traditional approach to the welfare state.

In particular, this reconceptualisation allows us to detect institutional ableism, the ‘systemic, pervasive, and habitual policies and practices that disadvantage’ disabled people in the policy process (Chaney, Reference Chaney2015: 169). It allows us to examine the extent to which (1) the political process enables service users to participate in policy making (Thill, Reference Thill2015); (2) formal and informal structures (e.g. representation on a national disability council) enable disabled people to be involved in policy making (Bonfils, Reference Bonfils2011; Priestley et al., Reference Priestley, Stickings, Loja, Grammenos, Lawson, Waddington and Fridriksdottir2016); (3) rules such as electoral quotas foster political representation of disabled people; and (4) the political environment is accessible (for example, by allowing non-conventional modes of communication; Evans and Reher, Reference Evans and Reher2020). Finally and above all, how does this ‘institutional ableism’ affect disability policy within and across countries?

The policy meaning: the role of policy feedback

In their policy sense, institutions are established welfare arrangements. Once enacted, these arrangements provide social groups with resources and incentives and help them shape their identities, interests, resources, and ideologies. This policy feedback process impacts future policies in various overt and subtle ways (Béland, Reference Béland2010). One theoretical example for a policy feedback mechanism is the concept of path dependency, which refers to self-reinforcing processes in a political system (Pierson, Reference Pierson2004). Highlighting the role of policy feedback does not mean, however, that stability is inevitable or even the norm. In fact, institutional change (including retrenchment measures) is always present, not necessarily in its radical sense, but rather in its gradual, low-profile sense.

Without necessarily using that term, various studies have shown that the policy feedback theoretical mechanism has great potential in understanding disability policies. This conceptualisation also allows us to rethink some of the basic assumptions of disability studies and their criticism towards traditional welfare programmes. In particular, this mechanism helps unfold the way these programmes have historically shaped the interests of disabled people, their shared identity, and their ability to organise collectively. In Northern Ireland, for example, Acheson and Williamson (Reference Acheson and Williamson2001) show that by providing opportunities for social contact, existing welfare structures, although conceived by the disability movement as paternalistic, have been highly influential for collective action, in fact providing ‘one of the few potential routes to activism’ (100). Focusing on the British case, Millward (Reference Millward2014) convincingly explains how the emergence of the disability benefit scheme in the 1970s triggered a future path-dependency process, for example by restructuring attitudes towards disability.

This raises the question of the extent to which recent dramatic and progressive changes in disability policies have shaped the political actions of disabled people and their success. One example is de-institutionalisation. Along with their well-known devastating repercussions on disabled people’s lives, institutions have paradoxically provided them with a good starting point for (enforced) collective mobilisation. This leaves us asking how has their gradual closure affected the current and future nature of this mobilisation? Similarly, how much do individual budget programmes designed to empower service consumers individualise the political process? Do they truly empower disabled people collectively, or only as individual consumers (Thill, Reference Thill2015)? Importantly, as Roulstone and Morgan (Reference Roulstone and Morgan2009) show, the answers to these questions are not straightforward, but rather contingent upon the concrete ways these reforms are implemented. Based on the British personalisation reforms of social care services, they argue that ‘Ironically, in moving away from the enforced collectivities of day services and in the absence of a CIL [Centre for Inclusive Living] or user-led organisation in every locality, there is a risk of individual support solutions fostering enforced individualism and isolation’ (343).

A similar example is the growing emphasis on legal rights and ‘litigious policies’, which ‘promote the use of litigation in resolving disputes and implementing public policies’ (Burke, Reference Burke2002: 4). How significantly did the judicialisation of disability policy reshape the power and interests of stakeholders such as disabled people’s organisations? To what extent have the growing litigation and pursuit of legal rights reshaped their political tactics? Finally, to what extent have they individualised the political process and generated a more fragmented politics? Future studies will benefit from exploring this covert relationship between recent disability rights reforms and political processes.

Finally, the key role of policy feedback also urges us to consider how change often takes the form of layering. As Burke and Barnes (Reference Burke and Barnes2018) have rightly emphasised, this requires policy scholars to ‘become a kind of geologist, digging through layers of policies that originate in different periods in political history and reflect different operating logics, support coalitions, partisan foundations and understandings of policy issues’ (102). Most importantly for us is the unique, tense nature of disability policy layering, leading contradictory disability policies to operate side-by-side, reflecting different partisan bases and notions of disability (Baudot, Reference Baudot2018; Burke and Barnes, Reference Burke and Barnes2018). Consequently, we share Burke and Barnes’s call for disability policy scholars to ‘dig down to all the layers – and find the policy that emerges from the interstices and points of conflict between them’ (113).