The impact of culture on welfare politics and welfare state types

该领域的早期研究人员清楚地表明了文化价值观在塑造社会政策中所起的核心作用，他们认为，福利制度站在社会对人性是什么的主导观点上，以及对“谁应该得到什么，为什么得到什么”等充满价值的问题的共同回答上。然而，当代的分析人士很少注意到文化对福利国家形成的影响，或者文化在塑造不同国家之间存在的截然不同的福利模式中所扮演的角色。在某种程度上，文化被忽视了，因为在定义和衡量它方面存在实际困难。然而，随着最新一波欧洲价值观调查的发布，分析师们拥有了关于欧洲国家人民信仰和价值观的史无前例的大量数据。此外，这些数据现在跨越了30年的近代史，使我们能够回顾相当长一段社会、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确定稳定价值观模式的方法，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)和最近的工作中分析的非常不稳定和迅速变化的民意维度之间。这一中间层面的文化概念依赖于对长期价值的详细数据的分析，因为其目标是揭示文化背景的某些方面，这些方面深深植根于社会，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也是如此。在第一阶段，这项研究将利用最近发布的欧洲价值观调查数据，以确定30个欧洲社会稳定价值观的不同模式。然后，它将探索这些价值观与整个欧洲不同社会政策模式之间的联系。在其最后阶段，这项研究将使用创新的方法来研究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。在完成上述工作时，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“福利中的文化问题”这一论点？(2)制定政策的文化背景是否可以从比较数量的角度衡量？如果是这样的话，在哪种理论框架内，通过哪种方法是可衡量的，这些方法有多可信？(3)在过去的三十年里，欧洲人民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？(4)福利态度的模式正在如何变化--例如，对福利依赖的看法和公众对贫困原因的看法是如何变化的？(5)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(强烈)影响？(6)欧洲各社会的文化背景有多大不同(尽管它们在地理和历史上相对接近)？在文化背景上有没有明显相似和不同的国家集团？(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？将这些因素联系在一起，如何才能最好地将文化作为福利国家类型学的组成部分？简而言之，通过分析有关欧洲社会稳定价值观的不同模式的量化数据，以及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“文化维度”带回有关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.