This chapter has considered a number of dimensions of inequality that are important to the concerns of the chapters that follow. However, there are many other dimensions that have not been captured here, as well as further nuances to the debates and questions that have been discussed which add further complexity to the policy challenges arising. As a general position taken here, the conclusion is that there are broad global forces at work encouraged by capitalist perspectives on how development should occur that give little attention to social issues.
Actual policy responses depend a great deal upon decisions by actors within individual nation states. In this respect there is, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, no simple uncontestable way of explaining how social policies have grown to such levels of importance in societies today. This account has concentrated upon the consequences of capitalist economic processes for the generation of inequalities. But, in passing, it has been noted that social policy development may also be explained by concerns to limit social unrest and win support for the status quo. These themes secure more attention in the next two chapters.
It has also been observed that the egalitarian thrust of some policies has been constrained by limitations that focus upon changes within individual life cycles (the welfare state as ‘piggy bank’). Moreover, when attention turns, as it will in Part II of this book, to specific policy areas, it will also be seen that, for example, health policies may be viewed as ways of dealing with risks for individuals rather than as generically redistributive. If treated as ‘universal’ in scope they cope with unexpected problems regardless of the original economic status of patients. Similarly, education policies can be seen as driven by economic concerns, and as noted they are unlikely, on their own, to have egalitarian outcomes. Finally, environment policies address societal risks alongside individual risks, and this is particularly illustrative of the limits of international equalization across unequal nations and the peoples within them. An important feature of the development of the study of social policy since the mid-twentieth century has been a recognition of the need to limit global generalizations (generally based on the experiences of the richest economies in the global North) and to recognize variations in national responses. This is particularly manifested in the development of comparative analysis, explored further in Chapter 3.
In trying to offer an account of social policy that takes a world view rather than one centred upon one country, it is essential to make use of ideas developed in comparative studies. Even if many of the world’s smaller, poorer and less powerful countries are left out, any account organized country by country would resemble a dictionary, with brief unrelated comments on each country mentioned. Comparative studies uses typologies to explore the extent to which there are clusters of countries with commonalities, and the extent to which differences between those clusters or between individual countries within them can be explained.
It was always a matter of urgency that social policy studies should break away from a narrow preoccupation with single countries. Some of the early attempts to do this simply drew upon information from a narrow sample of countries, putting accounts of policies alongside each other in separate chapters in a way that announced ‘other places are different and that is interesting’. The rise in interest in the spread of policies from country to country in the frame of ‘policy borrowing’ or ‘policy transfer’ (Rose, 1993; Dolowitz and Marsh, 1996, 2000) also stimulated attention towards similarities and differences between countries in the form of questions about why some transfers worked and some failed (or involved radical transformations). But there is a more fundamental reason why a systematic approach to comparison is important. The testing of hypotheses using the experimental methods favoured by natural scientists is largely ruled out for the study of policy processes, as researchers cannot control the variables and political processes themselves, making experimentation inappropriate. Hence, as Durkheim argued in his classic book on comparison in the social sciences (1982, p. 141):
We have only one way of demonstrating that one phenomenon is the cause of another. That is to compare the cases where they are both simultaneously present or absent, so as to discover whether the variations they display in these different combinations of circumstances provide evidence that one depends on the other.
Of course, taking the lead suggested by Durkheim depends on what one wants to explain, but if, as intended in this book, the objective is not to explore and test the efficacy of specific policies but rather to provide an informed account of policy variation and the explanations for its occurrence, then it needs to be accepted, as Higgins (1981, p. 223) suggests, that ‘Comparison, as a technique or method, is so crucially a part of any form of evaluation that one might wish to argue that comparative social policy is the parent discipline and any methodology not employing comparisons is of a lower order.’
The origins of comparative studies
Comparative approaches to the examination of social policy emerged from challenges to theories that saw its development as part of a modernization process in which economic, urban and demographic change were seen as explanatory variables producing policy convergence across the world. These challenges replaced this approach with typologies, recognizing the varied nature of social policy growth. ‘Regime theory’ has tended to dominate this work, first seeing political and economic variables as important for the varied features of social policy, and then becoming supplemented by examination of wider cultural and social factors and even by notions of the importance of ideas, factors which take comparative analysis far beyond a more crude assessment of public spending.
A simple comparison of social policy expenditure by different nations shows, not surprisingly, that high levels of such expenditure only occur in the richer nations of the world. The OECD average for social spending is around 20 per cent (OECD, 2019), but similar data are of limited reliability outside the OECD group of nations. Put simply, there is a relationship between high levels of GDP per head and high social expenditure, but this is a very imprecise relationship. This is particularly evident at the lower end of the spending ranking, where very prosperous nations such as the US, Australia, the Netherlands and Switzerland are relatively low spenders (OECD, 2019). Furthermore, as suggested in Chapter 2, it should not be taken for granted that high state social expenditure is necessarily a good indicator of effective use of that spending to reduce inequality.
Hence, the starting point for comparative analysis was a quest to explain the combination of evidence of a loose association between national prosperity and social policy expenditure with the other factors which might explain variation in that association. The evolving relationship between economic market systems and the state was an important driving force (Wilensky and Lebaux, 1965). Industrialization was seen as the generator of distributional changes in society and a source of demands for new ways of dealing with consequential disadvantages (Rimlinger, 1971). To then explain the expanding role of the state, arguments from welfare economics were applied. Firms recognized that meeting the health, educational and other welfare needs of their workforce imposed costs, which could make them uncompetitive by comparison with firms which did less. Hence, there was an increased tendency to look to the state as a means of enforcing the ‘socialization’ of those costs, sharing them more widely through society while lessening demands on private businesses.