Project description
Demography as a core element of modern welfare policies
Demographic expertise is crucial in shaping modern welfare states. Since the 1960s, reforms have responded to demographic changes. However, it is important to note that demographic assessments vary significantly between national contexts and have evolved over recent decades. Supported by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), the SPADE project examines how demography became a core element of modern welfare state policies since the 1960s. It analyses old-age pensions, health care, and family policies in France, Italy, and Switzerland to identify the actors and institutions prioritising the sustainability of social protection systems and their proposed solutions. The project broadens the historiography of welfare states with perspectives from the history of science and reveals transformations since the 1970s.
Objective
Demographic expertise has become a crucial perspective in debates around the development of modern welfare states. Since the 1960s, many reforms answer to demographic changes (e.g. ageing societies); and demographic calculations are now regularly used for the technical construction of social protection policies. In public debates, demographic statistics also serve as an objectifying rhetoric, legitimising welfare state reforms as necessary or inescapable. However, demography is not a black box: what exactly is counted in demographic assessments (age, sex, fertility, migration) varies a lot, between national contexts and historically over recent decades. This project examines from a historical and comparative perspective how demography became a core element of modern welfare state policies since the 1960s. By analysing three fields of the welfare state (old-age pensions programs, health care and family policies) in three representative European countries (France, Italy and Switzerland), SPADE aims to identify which actors and which institutions contributed to making the problem of the demographic sustainability of social protection systems a political priority, and which solutions were envisaged. The project thus broadens the historiography of the welfare states, traditionally marked by approaches from social and political history, with novel perspectives from the history of science. By combining transnational and comparative approaches and by looking at the origins of the discourse about the so-called welfare state crisis, SPADE cast a new light on the transformations that the welfare state as a whole has undergone since the 1970s.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- humanitieslanguages and literatureliterature studiesliterary genresessays
- social sciencessociologydemographyfertility
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global FellowshipsCoordinator
35122 Padova
Italy