CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Makszin, Kristin Maria |
|---|---|
| Title | Reforming East Central European Welfare States: Governments, Technocrats, and the Patterns of Quiet Retrenchment |
| Summary | In this dissertation, I investigate diverse patterns of reform and continuity in East Central European (ECE) welfare policy and develop a framework to explain how party politics decisively shapes the resulting welfare states. Theories within political economy persistently renegotiate the relative influence of forces of globalization, history, and politics. This research relies on these extensive theories about the influence of international forces and historical legacies, but positions those factors as pressures that must be mediated by political agency and therefore contributes to the ‘politics matters’ hypothesis. In order to refine the models of welfare politics, I propose three alternative political mechanisms producing welfare state change. First, governments with high socio-economic ideological coherence are more likely to pass reform. Second, reform under non-coherent governments occurs only when technocrats use tactical approaches to build consensus for retrenchment. Finally, passive measures for welfare state change, which are less visible adjustments to the generosity of benefits, such as adjustments to benefit indexation, are applied even by governments that cannot pass reform and these can incrementally, but significantly redefine social policy instruments. This framework is evaluated through detailed case study analysis of welfare politics across four countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia – and three policy areas – pension, family, and unemployment policy – between 1990-2012. To complement the case studies, I develop indicators to measure the degree of welfare state change, including ones that capture the use of passive measures. Then I assess the findings across the policy areas and explain the absence of clear welfare state typologies. The contributions of this work include refining theories of welfare politics by incorporating a thus far neglected variable: government coherence. By testing it on postcommunist ECE welfare states and engaging with literature from Western European welfare states, the resulting framework has potential to explain welfare state development both in and beyond the more commonly studied advanced economies. Another contribution of this research is the advancement of tools for measuring passive change and investigating the reasons behind the prevalent use of ‘passive austerity’ as an alternative to more visible welfare state retrenchment. Finally, the findings of the empirical work explain the emergence of ‘patchwork welfare states’ in ECE and enable a reassessment of the utility of welfare state typologies. |
| Supervisor | Greskovits, Bela |
| Department | International Relations PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/nickel_kristin.pdf |
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