Periodic Reporting for period 4 - EmergingWelfare (The New Politics of Welfare: Towards an “Emerging Markets” Welfare State Regime)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2021-07-01 do 2021-12-31
The project is based on the idea that this welfare development in emerging markets is not only a quantitative expansion, but it corresponds to a radical qualitative shift in the history of the welfare state. The project argues that (i) emerging markets are forming a new welfare regime that differs from welfare regimes of the Global North on the basis of expansive and decommodifying social assistance programs for the poor (Hypothesis 1) and (ii) this new welfare regime is emerging principally as a response to the growing political power of the poor as a dual source of threat and support for governments (Hypothesis 2).
The project’s first contribution is to the existing welfare regimes literature. This literature radically slanted towards Western or OECD countries. This project illustrates the contemporary global welfare state regime structure where emerging markets join as separate clusters. The project’s second contribution is to the contemporary welfare state development literature. The welfare state development literature, especially in the non-west, has been dominated by structuralist explanations, underestimating the effect of political factors—particularly grassroots politics. The project shows that these political causes have determined the actual trajectory of welfare policy changes. The project generates computational, quantitative and qualitative comparative data on welfare and politics and shows this welfare state expansion is caused by particular changes in grassroots politics.
The project will show that the poor are not passive victims of recent economic transformations but instead are active political agents that shape welfare policies. Thus, the project does not only take us beyond the state-of-the-art of welfare state studies but is also highly politically and socially relevant. As a result, the social and political problems most strongly occasioned by emerging markets may prevail in Europe as a permanent political crisis. Hence, if the political power of the poor leads to a new welfare regime, it can be expected that similar dynamics lead to the development of similar welfare policies across Europe, as well.
We used the GLOW database in an article published at the top social policy journal, JESP, where we show four distinct global welfare state regime clusters: institutional, neoliberal, populist and residual. (Yörük, Öker and Tafoya, 2022). This article confirmed the first hypothesis of the ERC project. EMW project has produced a series of publications that confirm the second hypothesis of the project. The project has shown that in there is a global pattern of social welfare programs being used as counter-insurgency and that this strategy is a key driving force behind the welfare state expansion in the Global South, given the escalation of protest movements and violent conflict. We show that in India, South Africa, Turkey, China, Brazil, geographically, culturally and historically distant emerging markets are converging into a new welfare state regime as a result of shared political dynamics.