The impact of culture on welfare politics and welfare state types

该领域的早期研究者清楚地阐明了文化价值观在形成社会政策方面所起的核心作用，他们认为福利制度建立在社会对人性的主流观点和对“谁应该得到什么以及为什么”等充满价值的问题的共同答案上。然而，当代分析人士很少关注文化对福利国家形成的影响，也很少关注文化在塑造不同国家的不同福利模式中所起的作用。在某种程度上，文化之所以被忽视，是因为在定义和衡量文化方面存在实际困难。然而，随着最新一波欧洲价值观调查的发布，分析人士掌握了有关欧洲国家人民信仰和价值观的前所未有的大量数据。此外，这些数据涵盖了近30年的历史，使我们能够回顾一段相当长的社会、政治和经济变革时期的价值观。研究小组之前的工作开创了一种方法，用于识别稳定价值观的模式，这些模式位于一些分析人士认为可能很重要的非常抽象的文化基础概念（如自由主义、社会主义、保守主义）和最近许多工作中分析的非常流动和快速变化的公众舆论维度之间。这种中级水平的文化概念依赖于对一段时间以来关于价值观的详细数据的分析，其目标是揭示文化背景的各个方面，这些方面深深植根于社会中，并且随着时间的推移相当稳定，即使面对相当大的社会和经济变化。在第一阶段，研究将利用最近发布的欧洲价值观调查数据，以确定30个欧洲社会中稳定价值观的不同模式。然后，它将探讨这些价值观与欧洲不同社会政策模式之间的联系。在最后阶段，研究将使用创新的方法来研究如何将文化作为确定高收入国家存在的不同类型的福利国家模式的关键因素。在完成上述内容后，研究将解决的具体问题包括：(i)是否有强有力的经验证据支持“文化影响福利”的论点？从比较数量的角度来看，制定政策的文化背景是否可以衡量？如果是，在哪个理论框架内，通过哪种方法是可测量的，这些方法有多可信？（三）过去三十年，欧洲人经历了怎样的价值观变化？特别是，宗教虔诚/世俗化、政治保守主义和家庭价值观的模式是什么？福利态度的模式如何改变- -例如，对福利依赖的看法和公众对贫穷原因的看法如何改变？（五）文化背景在公众对具体社会政策的公益意见、政策决定和政策态度中有多大（很大）影响？（vi）欧洲社会的文化背景有多大差异（尽管它们在地理和历史上相对接近）？在文化背景下，是否存在具有明显相似性和独特性的国家群体？（vii）即使就其文化背景而言，是否存在三个（或四个）福利资本主义世界？并且，将这些线索联系在一起，如何才能最好地将文化作为福利国家类型的组成部分纳入其中？简而言之，通过对欧洲社会中稳定价值观的不同模式的定量数据的分析，以及对这些价值观与福利国家战略之间联系的探索，我们的目标是将“文化维度”带回关于社会政策跨国差异的辩论中。

The central role that cultural values play in shaping social policy was clearly stated by the early researchers in the field who saw that welfare systems stood on dominant views in society of what human nature is and on the shared answers to value-laden questions about 'who should get what and why'. Yet, contemporary analysts have paid rather little attention to the impact of culture on welfare state formation or the role culture has played in shaping the rather different models of welfare found across different nations.In part, culture has been neglected because of practical difficulties in defining and measuring it. However, with the recent release of the latest wave of the European Values Survey, analysts have an unprecedented amount of data about the beliefs and values of people in European nations at their disposal. Moreover, this data now spans three decades of recent history allowing us to look back on values over a considerable period of social, political and economic change. Previous work by the research team has pioneered a method for identifying patterns of stable values that rest in between the very abstract notions of cultural foundations (e.g. liberalism, socialism, conservatism) that some analysts have suggested may be important and the very fluid and rapidly changing dimensions of public opinion that have been analysed in much recent work. This conception of culture at an intermediate level relies on analysis of detailed data about values over time for its goal is to reveal aspects of the cultural context that are deeply embedded in society and quite stable over time, even in the face of considerable social and economic change. In its first stage, the research will exploit the recently released European Values Survey data in order to identify differing patterns of stable values in 30 European societies. It will then explore the links between these values and different patterns of social policy across Europe. In its final stage, the research will then use innovative methods to examine how culture might be included as a key factor in identifying the different types of welfare state model that exist across high-income countries.In completing the above, specific questions that will be addressed by the research include: (i) Is there robust empirical evidence to support the 'culture matters in welfare' thesis? (ii) Is the cultural context for policy making measurable from a comparative quantitative perspective? If so, within which theoretical framework and through which method is it measurable and how plausible are such approaches? (iii) What kind of value changes have European people experienced in the past three decades? Especially, what are the patterns of religiosity/secularisation, political conservatism and family values? (iv) How are the patterns of welfare attitudes changing - for example, how are views around welfare dependency and public perceptions of the cause of poverty changing?(v) How (strongly) does the cultural context matter in public welfare opinions, policy decisions and policy attitudes of the public toward specific social policies? (vi) How different is the cultural context across the European societies (in spite of their relative closeness geographically and historically)? Are there any groups of countries with clear similarities and distinctiveness in the cultural context? (vii) Are there three (or four) worlds of welfare capitalism even in terms of their cultural contexts? And, tying these strands together, how might culture best be included as component in welfare state typologies?In short, through an analysis of quantitative data about differing patterns of stable values in European societies and an exploration of the links between these values and welfare state strategies we aim to bring the 'cultural dimension back in' to debates about cross national variations in social policy.