What Have We Learned So Far? Answers to the “Big” Questions

In this book, we asked “big” questions about the welfare state in order to uncover, map, and explain the political opportunities and constraints of different types of welfare state reform in advanced capitalist democracies. We have one “big” question to go: can and will the welfare state survive the Great Recession (Bermeo and Pontusson 2012a) – the economic downturn that followed the financial crisis in 2008 and, in Europe, was aggravated by a series of sovereign debt crises? Before we can tackle that question properly and directly, we first shortly present the answers to the big questions we have answered so far and that can help us answer the final one.

Why did we need a welfare state in the first place and how did we get it? All welfare states have their origin in the need to respond to the socially disruptive consequences of modernization. The fast economic and social developments in the 19th century created unfettered capitalist labor markets that resulted in massive dislocation, poverty, and misery. Labor legislation arose everywhere as a counter force to the disruption caused by these labor markets. Early social insurance legislation directly addressed the social risks of the market-based industrial society but was also designed to foster the political integration of the working class and to assist national state-building. Increasingly, the whole edifice of social policies and the welfare state came to revolve around the realization that the type of social risks that emerge in capitalist market societies cannot be covered by the family and that markets are notoriously ill-equipped to deal with these risks. Hence, it was the state that had to take the responsibility for organizing social protection by pooling and redistributing social risks.