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

在评估社会变革、危机现象或政治改革的必要性时，中产阶级一直是一个参考点。在这些交流的背景下，福利国家往往扮演着矛盾的角色，因为它既被描绘成中产阶级的威胁，又被描绘成中产阶级的支持者。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给定的，而是通过特定的感知和解释方式进入政治话语和决策。由于其话语的无所不在，我们可以预期中产阶级的范畴将成为协商社会秩序和政治计划的一个特别强大的方面。然而，与此同时，我们对中产阶级成为一个有意义的话语实体的论证实践以及这些话语如何构建福利改革知之甚少。通过对这种相互关系的解释性研究，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似乎质疑已经建立的路径依赖和因果机制，这一点尤其适用（Pierson 2001）。为了回答“中间阶层”是如何被话语建构的，以及这些建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、话语分析性的角度比较了德国、英国和瑞典的案例。与福利国家研究的主流相反，该项目并不旨在开发和测试基于广义影响因素的基于变量的方法。相反，它将重建社会实践，这些实践构成了关于社会中产阶级及其对福利政策的重要性的具体知识储备。为此，该项目将首先调查媒体（和其他公共）话语，询问社会中间是如何（主要）在报纸文章中构建的。其次，它研究了福利改革和改革举措的设计和论证正当性是如何面向中产阶级需求和愿望的集体想象的。这两个方面都将通过对德国、英国和瑞典的系统比较来研究，以确定总体结构和国家特点，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.