How central is the middle? Middle class discourses and welfare state change in international comparison

在评估社会变化、危机现象或政治改革的必要性时，中产阶级是一个持续的参照物。在这些交流的背景下，福利国家往往扮演着矛盾的角色，因为它被描绘成中产阶级的威胁和支持者。然而，“中间”的社会结构边界、利益和规范意义并不是自然或客观地给予的，而是通过特定的感知和解释方式进入政治话语和决策的。由于其无处不在的论述，我们可以预期，中产阶级这一类别将成为谈判社会秩序和政治纲领的一个特别强大的方面。然而，与此同时，我们对中产阶级如何成为一个有意义的话语实体的争议性实践，以及这些话语如何构建福利改革知之甚少。通过解释这种相互关系，我们可以更好地理解话语的功能和福利政策的转变。鉴于福利国家的新政治学似乎质疑既定的路径依赖和因果机制，这一点尤其适用(Pierson 2001)。为了回答“中间”是如何被随意构建的问题，以及这些结构以何种方式与福利国家的变化相关，该研究项目从解释性、语篇分析的角度比较了德国、英国和瑞典的案例。与福利国家研究的主流不同，该项目的目的不是开发和测试基于广义影响因素的变量方法。相反，它将重建社会实践，这些社会实践构成了关于社会中间阶层及其对福利政策的意义的具体知识储备。为了做到这一点，该项目将首先调查媒体(和其他公共)话语，询问(主要是)报纸文章中的社会中间层是如何构建的。其次，研究了福利改革和改革倡议的设计和论证理由是如何适应中产阶级需求和愿望的集体想象的。这两个方面将通过德国、英国和瑞典的系统比较来调查，以确定总体结构和国家细节，并将这些话语分析结果与比较福利国家研究联系起来。

When it comes to assessing social change, phenomena of crises or the necessity of political reforms, the middle class serves as a continuous point of reference. In these contexts of communication, the welfare state often plays an ambivalent role as it is portrayed both as a threat for and as a supporter of the middle class. However, the socio-structural boundaries, the interests and the normative meaning of "the middle" are not naturally or objectively given but find their way into political discourses and decisions through specific ways of perception and interpretation. Due to its discursive omnipresence we can expect the category of the middle class to be a particularly powerful facet for negotiating ideas of social order and political programs. Yet at the same time, we know little about the argumentative practices through which the middle class becomes a meaningful discursive entity and how these discourses structure welfare reforms. By investigating this interrelation interpretively we may gain a better understanding of the functioning of discourses and the transformation of welfare policies. This applies all the more so in view of a new politics of the welfare state which seems to question well established path dependencies and causal mechanisms (Pierson 2001).To answer the question how "the middle" is discursively constructed and in which ways these constructions are relevant for welfare state changes, the research project compares the German, British and Swedish case from an interpretive, discourse-analytical perspective. In contrast to the mainstream of welfare state research, the project does not aim at developing and testing a variable-based approach grounded on generalized impact factors. Rather, it will reconstruct the social practices which constitute specific stocks of knowledge about the societal middle and its significance for welfare policies. To do this, the project will, firstly, investigate media (and other public) discourses by asking how the societal middle is constructed (mainly) in newspaper articles. Secondly, it is examined how design and argumentative justification of welfare reforms and reform initiatives are geared towards the collective imagination of the needs and desires of the middle class. Both aspects are to be investigated by a systematic comparison of Germany, Great Britain and Sweden to identify both the overarching structures and the national specifics and to relate these discourse-analytical results back to comparative welfare state research.