Nordic Welfare Chauvinism: A Crisis of Social Democracy?

社会民主主义以其“去修正”福利政策而闻名，该政策赋予公民社会权利，使其免受市场依赖。然而，这是由累进税提供资金的，因此就业水平很高。因此，作为劳动和资本之间的历史关系，本文试图探讨福利沙文主义是对当代经济停滞、工会衰落和新自由主义不稳定所引发的权力平衡变化的制度性反应。从概念上讲，这项研究将运作一个批判政治经济学（CPE）框架。福利国家研究中占主导地位的权力-资源方法侧重于劳动力动员的力量，以解释福利国家设计的可变性。在整个地区工会普遍衰落的地方，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、政治和经济关系之中。CPE框架以社会构成为前提，对资本主义的复杂性采取了一种全面的方法，其中“没有社会就不能理解经济，没有政治就不能理解社会，等等”。因此，CPE提供了一个历史偶然的框架，它理解“市场既完全依赖于国家，又同时构成一种自动的社会逻辑，将自身强加于国家”。因此，我的项目不是将国家和市场不断分离，并通过监管重新引入彼此，而是将其视为一种新的互动，因为其中一种是由另一种的变化相互构建的。首先，我将构建丹麦、瑞典和挪威从1990年至今的福利沙文主义谱系。我将询问福利沙文主义的理论和公共话语，从普遍性的角度概述社会民主政策的主要转折点，从2002年丹麦的改革开始，该改革显着降低了移民和难民的福利，旨在从政策角度对其血统进行全面概述。这一初步研究是第二个目标的必要前提，在第二个目标中，我将使用过程追踪来批判性地评估政策构建逻辑中国家、市场和社会之间的相互作用。我将采访当代倡导福利沙文主义的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，以充分了解当今社会民主主义所面临的历史、制度和社会约束。通过CPE“提出其他地方未提出的综合问题”的能力，“超越跨学科”，我的研究在两个意义上提供了新颖性。首先，通过质疑福利沙文主义的社会构成本质，它为大量定量研究提供了新鲜的、基于历史的见解。其次，通过关注当代资本主义经常被忽视的社会关系，它试图通过主张一种全面的方法来解决改革的复杂性，从而重振关于福利国家发展的辩论。此外，本文将对全球政治经济产生影响，为ESRC 2022战略交付计划的目标做出贡献。特别是在优先研究领域3“健康和社会关怀”方面，本研究将指出福利国家排他性的社会内在原因，即“健康和福祉的不平等”。发展我们对外部压力下“社会和经济是如何变化的”的理解，它将为社会民主可以实施的预防措施提供信息，以“最大限度地提高来自各种背景的人，无论他们住在哪里”。

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 This approach is obsolete where trade union decline across the region is widespread; welfare states are evidently embedded within the broader social, political and economic relations of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'.