The impact of culture on welfare politics and welfare state types

文化价值观在塑造社会政策方面的核心作用，这一领域的早期研究者已经明确指出，他们看到福利制度立足于社会中关于人性是什么的主导观点，以及对“谁应该得到什么和为什么”等充满价值观的问题的共同答案。然而，当代分析家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扮演的角色。在某种程度上，文化被忽视是因为在定义和衡量文化方面存在实际困难。然而，随着最近发布的最新一轮欧洲价值观调查，分析家们掌握了前所未有的大量关于欧洲国家人民信仰和价值观的数据。此外，这些数据现在跨越了最近30年的历史，使我们能够回顾相当长一段时间的社会，政治和经济变革的价值观。研究小组以前的工作开创了一种方法，用于识别稳定价值观的模式，这些模式介于一些分析师认为可能很重要的文化基础（例如自由主义，社会主义，保守主义）的非常抽象的概念和最近许多工作中分析的非常流动和快速变化的民意维度之间。这种中级文化概念依赖于对长期价值观的详细数据进行分析，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，即使在面临重大社会和经济变化的情况下，也会随着时间的推移而相当稳定。在第一阶段，研究将利用最近公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和欧洲各地的社会政策的不同模式之间的联系。在最后阶段，本研究将采用创新的方法，探讨如何将文化作为一个关键因素，来确定高收入国家存在的不同类型的福利国家模式。在完成上述研究的过程中，本研究将解决的具体问题包括：（i）是否有强有力的实证证据支持“文化在福利中的重要性”这一论点？(ii)政策制定的文化背景是否可以从比较数量的角度进行衡量？如果是，在何种理论框架内，通过何种方法可以衡量，这些方法的合理性如何？(iii)在过去的三十年里，欧洲人经历了什么样的价值观变化？特别是，宗教信仰/世俗化、政治保守主义和家庭价值观的模式是什么？(iv)福利态度的模式如何变化-例如，对福利依赖性的看法和公众对贫困原因的看法如何变化？(v)文化背景在公众对特定社会政策的公共福利意见、政策决定和政策态度中的作用有多大？(vi)欧洲社会的文化背景有多大的不同（尽管它们在地理上和历史上相对接近）？是否有任何国家集团在文化背景方面具有明显的相似性和独特性？(vii)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？而且，把这些线索联系在一起，文化如何才能最好地作为福利国家类型学的组成部分？简而言之，通过对欧洲社会稳定价值观的不同模式的定量数据进行分析，并探索这些价值观与福利国家战略之间的联系，我们的目标是将“文化层面”带回到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.