Introduction

What are welfare states for? What do they do? These are the “big” questions we take up in this chapter. We again (see Chapter 1) quote Barr (2004: 7), who defines the raison d’être of the welfare state as follows: “The welfare state exists to enhance the welfare of people who (a) are weak and vulnerable, largely by providing social care, (b) are poor, largely through redistributive income transfers, or (c) are neither vulnerable nor poor, by organizing cash benefits to provide insurance and consumption smoothing, and by providing medical insurance and school education.” This describes in a general way what welfare states do: enhancing the welfare of vulnerable groups of people in society and offering or facilitating social protection for all.

In Chapter 4, we showed that welfare states come in different shapes and sizes. They are founded on diverging conceptions of social rights and duties, prioritize different values (freedom, equality, solidarity), and set out to accomplish different objectives. There we mapped the crucial dimensions of variation according to which the various welfare regimes do very different things. We therefore expect the various welfare regimes to deal differently with the general objective of enhancing the welfare of the vulnerable and providing social protection for the population at large. The Anglo-Saxon, liberal, market-oriented, and targeted welfare states pledge to take care of the weak and the vulnerable. In contrast, the Scandinavian, state-oriented, and universalist systems also wish to take care of the middle class, as they are organized around the ideal of social citizenship. The continental and southern European family-oriented and particularist welfare states hold a middle position. They take care of various occupational groups according to those group’s standards but rely strongly on the family for care. Still, Barr’s definition describes what, in a general sense, all welfare states (should) do: enhance the welfare of vulnerable groups of people in society and offer or facilitate some level of social protection for all.