Nordic Welfare Chauvinism: A Crisis of Social Democracy?

北欧福利沙文主义：社会民主主义的危机？

• 批准号: 2881440
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2023 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2881440
• 关键词: Nordic; Welfare; Chauvinism; Crisis; Social

Social democracy is known for its 'decommodifying' welfare policy which endows citizens with social rights through immunisation from market dependency. This, however, is financed by progressive taxation, and thus high employment levels. As therefore a historical relation between labour and capital, this thesis seeks to explore the idea that welfare chauvinism is an institutional response to changing balances of power onset by contemporary economic stagnation, trade-union decline and neoliberal precarity.Conceptually, this research will operationalise a Critical Political Economy (CPE) framework. The dominant Power-Resource approaches to welfare state study focus on the strength of labour-mobilisation to account for the variability of welfare state design. This approach is obsolete where trade union decline across the region is widespread; welfare states are evidently embedded within the broader social, political and economic relations of contemporary society. The CPE framework, premised on social constitution, takes a holistic approach to the complexities of capitalism, where 'the economic cannot be understood without the social, the social cannot be understood without the political,and so on'. CPE thus provides a historically-contingent framework that understands how 'markets both depend entirely upon states and yet simultaneously constitutes an automatic social logic that imposes itself back upon states'. My project therefore looks at the state and market not as continually separated and re-introduced to one another through regulation, but as settling into new interactions as one is reciprocally constructed by changes in the other.Firstly, I will construct a genealogy of welfare chauvinism in Denmark, Sweden and Norway from 1990 until today. I will interrogate the theoretical and public discourses on welfare chauvinism, outlining major turning points for social democratic policy in terms of universality, starting with the 2002 reforms in Denmark, which significantly lowered benefits for immigrants and refugees, aiming to build a comprehensive overview of its lineage in policy-terms. This initial research acts as a necessary precursor to the second objective, where I will use process tracing to critically assess the interaction between state, market and society in the logic of policy construction.I will conduct interviews of contemporary political party members and policymakers who advocate welfare chauvinism, including members of the Norwegian Progress Party, Danish People's Party and Sweden Democrats, in order to fully understand the historical, institutional and societal constraints faced by today's social democracies. Through the CPE capacity to 'pose totalising questions unasked elsewhere' that 'transcends interdisciplinarity', my research offers novelty in two senses. Firstly, by interrogating the socially-constituted nature of welfare chauvinism, it offers fresh, historically-grounded insights to the largely quantitative scholarship. Secondly, by paying attention to the often-neglected social relations of contemporary capitalism, it seeks to reinvigorate the debate on welfare state development by asserting a holistic approach to the complexities of reform.Furthermore, this thesis will offer impact to the global political economy in its contribution to the goals of the ESRC 2022 strategic delivery plan. Particularly in relation to priority area of research 3 'health and social care', this research will point to the societally-embedded causes of welfare state exclusivity as 'inequalities of health and wellbeing'. Developing our understanding of how 'society and economy are changing' under exogenous pressure, it will inform preventative measures that social democracies can impose to 'maximise the support that people from all backgrounds receive, wherever they live'.

社会民主以其“去修改”福利政策而闻名，该政策通过免除对市场的依赖而赋予公民社会权利。然而，这是由累进税收提供资金的，因此就业水平很高。因此，作为一种劳动力与资本之间的历史关系，本文试图探索这样一种观点，即福利沙文主义是对当代经济停滞、工会衰落和新自由主义早熟引发的力量平衡变化的制度性反应。福利国家研究的主导力量-资源方法侧重于劳动力动员的强度，以解释福利国家设计的可变性。在整个区域普遍存在工会衰落的情况下，这种做法已经过时；福利国家显然植根于当代社会更广泛的社会、政治和经济关系中。CPE框架以社会构成为前提，对资本主义的复杂性采取了全面的方法，在资本主义中，经济离不开社会，社会离不开政治，等等。因此，CPE提供了一个符合历史的框架，它理解了市场如何既完全依赖于国家，又同时构成了一种自动的社会逻辑，将自己强加给国家。因此，我的项目着眼于国家和市场，而不是不断地分离和通过监管重新引入彼此，而是融入新的互动，因为一个是由另一个的变化相互构建的。首先，我将构建一个从1990年到今天丹麦、瑞典和挪威的福利沙文主义谱系。我将审问有关福利沙文主义的理论和公共话语，概述社会民主政策在普遍性方面的主要转折点，首先是2002年丹麦的改革，该改革大幅降低了移民和难民的福利，旨在从政策方面全面概述其血统。这项初步研究是第二个目标的必要先导，在第二个目标中，我将使用过程跟踪在政策构建的逻辑中批判性地评估国家、市场和社会之间的相互作用。我将采访主张福利沙文主义的当代政党成员和政策制定者，包括挪威进步党、丹麦人民党和瑞典民主党的成员，以全面了解当今社会民主国家面临的历史、制度和社会制约。通过CPE的能力，我的研究提供了两种意义上的新颖性，即“提出在其他地方未被问到的问题”，这种能力“超越了跨学科”。首先，通过质疑福利沙文主义的社会构成本质，它为主要是量化的学术提供了新的、有历史依据的见解。其次，通过关注当代资本主义经常被忽视的社会关系，它试图通过断言对改革的复杂性的整体方法来重振关于福利国家发展的辩论。此外，这篇论文将对全球政治经济产生影响，因为它对ESRC 2022战略交付计划的目标做出了贡献。特别是关于研究的优先领域3“健康和社会关怀”，这项研究将指出福利国家排他性的社会根源是“健康和幸福的不平等”。通过加深我们对“社会和经济如何在外部压力下发生变化”的理解，它将为社会民主国家可以实施的预防措施提供信息，以“最大限度地扩大各种背景的人得到的支持，无论他们住在哪里”。