This chapter looks at the major academic debates over the introduction of markets in the public sector. The first section reviews four alternative approaches to understanding markets in the welfare state, each of which presents markets in a particular way: as right-wing policy, as the “solution” to problems of governance, as a corrupt neoliberal agenda, and as variable, but largely historically determined. Despite the differences among these approaches, this chapter argues that none of them capture how markets in public services actually work, instead presenting markets as either uniformly good or bad or idiosyncratic and contingent.

The second section of the chapter argues that because these approaches do not conceptualize market variation on its own terms, none of them captures the politics of markets. Markets in welfare services are not equivalent to retrenchment, nor do they operate uniformly or in a historically determined fashion, but rather, they vary systematically. Reforms that build on these differences offer policymakers powerful mechanisms to change the way the state spends on, and produces, services. Accounting for this variation requires returning to, but also reconceptualizing, partisan battles in constrained environments.

POLITICAL PARTIES AND DISTRIBUTIVE STRUGGLES AROUND THE WELFARE STATE

Much work examining the politics of the welfare state has focused on social and economic policy as a site of distributive conflict among political parties and other actors such as unions and employers.