Content area
Abstract
One important dimension in which welfare states differ across time and place is the amount of inequality built into their institutions. Such differences are man-made, just as inequality in social protection entitlements is based on political choices, and both evolve as the result of political decisions. Major welfare reforms can render a country's social protection institutions more broadly and equally accessible or more unequal and to a greater extent contingent on status or merit. What explains such decisions?
In answering this question this study calls attention to the practical and often outright technical dimensions of decision-making about welfare institutions. Despite the broad normative significance of inequality, it is specific substantive policy challenges that dominate legislative debates. The key analytic task is in developing an explanation that can capture this duality of welfare reform as solving practical problems and making programmatically significant decisions about inequality in the welfare state. This study presents an explanation that clarifies this connection between the issue-specific rationale of decision-making and the broad and normatively significant outcomes of major welfare reforms. It also clarifies the connection between power resources and policy preferences in the explanation of welfare state development.
This conceptual framework is put to work explaining the institutional choices of four cases of major welfare reform in Germany since WW II. These four instances demonstrate how the substantive contents of the key reform issues selects the actors most affected by institutional changes of the welfare state and most actively involved in the reform debate. Specific tangible issues on the reform agenda also define preferences and suggest what these different actors reasonably want to see accomplished by legislative changes. The constellation of actors involved then establishes the "empowering process" by which some of these actors become pivotal and their demands indispensable centerpieces of a reform initiative, while others are marginalized. It turns out that it is not the dominant groups in society or the major parties' core constituencies that are most successful in getting their interests served. Instead, minorities in strategically important positions become disproportionately influential and able to shape reform decisions in their favor.
