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KMID : 1001320110380030105
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Social Welfare Policy
2011 Volume.38 No. 3 p.105 ~ p.129
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Post-Industrialization and the Changes in Social Policy: An Evaluation on Neo-institutional Analysis
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Cho Young-Hoon
Shim Chang-Hack
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Abstract
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It is often said that globalization, de-industrialization, the expansion of service economy, population ageing, changes in family structure, and the increase of female employment are the main elements promoting the changes in the Keynesian welfare state. All those elements are considered part of post-industrialization, except for globalization. Those post-industrial elements are said to bring about new social risks not properly covered by the traditional welfare state, and thereby to give a pressure of restructuring upon the welfare state. The neo-institutionalist approach, emphasizing institutional stickiness and path dependency of the welfare state, argues that almost all the Western welfare states have not dealt with the new social risks very well, because old social security programs are still so popular that they cannot afford to introduce new social programs in the age of permanent austerity. It also argues that the way of response to the pressure from the new social risks differs from one welfare type to another. It speculates that the conservative welfare states in the Continental Europe are particularly vulnerable to the new social risks, because they have strong protective measures for labor market insiders and well developed social security programs designed to protect against old social risks. This article aims to show how fast, and to what direction, the current welfare state is recast as a consequence of post-industrialization. This paper is going to examine how much social programs for old risks and new risks are expanded or shrink among advanced industrial economies during the last 20 years. The work of this paper will let us evaluate the arguments of the neo-institutionalist approach. The assumption of this study is that the current welfare state cannot avoid restructuring if the response to new social risks feels urgent, and that the popular resistance to the restructuring remains just moderate if the restructuring does not lead to the decline of welfare in general but to redistribution of part of the welfare resources from the current beneficiaries to the new ones. From this perspective, the response of advanced industrial economies to the challenge of new social risks can be more radical than the neo-institutionalist approach presumed, and the conservative welfare type is no exception to the need for the restructuring of the welfare state.
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KEYWORD
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new social risk, old social risk, welfare type, old age, unemployment
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