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The Growth of Public Welfare Provision: Does Politics Matter?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Barbara Roweth ,
Frank Gould  and
Desmond S. King
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Extract

In their article – ‘Public Welfare Provision, Scandinavia, and the Sheer Futility of the Sociological Approach to Polities’ – Castles and McKinlay claim to have demonstrated that

two factors contribute to and explain the particularly high levels of public welfare provision in Scandinavian countries [compared to other advanced, industrial democratic states]. The absence of a large right-wing party establishes the initial necessary condition that removes the primary barrier to the development of welfare provision. The historic strength and unity of the working-class movement, reflected in the dominance of social democracy, is the factor which is then responsible for the development of public welfare to its current high level.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , October 1980 , pp. 525 - 530
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 British Journal of Political Science, IX (1979), 157–71, pp. 169–70.Google Scholar

2 See for example: Peacock, A. T. and Wiseman, J., The Growth of Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom, 2nd edn (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967)Google Scholar; OECD, Public Expenditure Trends: Studies in Resource Allocation No. 5 (Paris: OECD, 06 1978)Google Scholar; Bell, D., The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 232et seqGoogle Scholar: Niskanen, W., Bureaucracy and Representative Government (Chicago: Aldine, 1971)Google Scholar; Heclo, H. and Wildavsky, A., The Private Government of Public Money (London: Macmillan, 1974)Google Scholar; Wirz, H. M., ‘The Implications of Demographic Change for Europe’, Futures, IX (1977), 42–52Google Scholar; Wildavsky, A., The Politics of the Budgetary Process, 2nd edn (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1974)Google Scholar and for a survey, Peacock, A. T. and Wiseman, J., ‘Approaches to the Analysis of Government Expenditure Growth’, Public Finance Quarterly, VII (1979), 3–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See Baumol, W., ‘The Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: The Anatomy of the Urban Crisis’, American Economic Review, LVII (1967), 415–26.Google Scholar

4 Castles, and McKinlay, , ‘Public Welfare Provision’, p. 165.Google Scholar

5 For a synthesis of a number of approaches see Peters, G., Doughtie, J. C. and McCulloch, M. K., ‘Types of Democratic Systems and Types of Public Policies’, Comparative Politics, IX (1977), 327–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Castles, and McKinlay, , ‘Public Welfare Provision’, p. 163.Google Scholar

7 Castles, and McKinlay, , ‘Public Welfare Provision’, p. 169.Google Scholar

8 Castles, and McKinlay, , ‘Public Welfare Provision’, pp. 169–70.Google Scholar

9 Castles, and McKinlay, , ‘Public Welfare Provision’, p. 157.Google Scholar

10 Cf. Gould, F. and Roweth, B., ‘Politics and Public Spending’, The Political Quarterly, IL (1978), 222–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Castles, and McKinlay, , ‘Public Welfare Provision’, p. 159Google Scholar (footnote to Table 1).

12 Castles, and McKinlay, , ‘Public Welfare Provision’, p. 159.Google Scholar

13 For a discussion of these problems see Little, A. and Mabey, C., ‘An Index for the Designation of Educational Priority Areas’, in Shonfield, A. and Shaw, S., eds., Social Indicators and Social Policy (London: Heinemann, 1972)Google Scholar; and Craig, J. and Driver, A., ‘The Identification and Comparison of Small Areas of Adverse Social Conditions’, Applied Statistics (JRSS), XXI (1972), 25–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Castles, and McKinlay, , ‘Public Welfare Provision’, p. 166, fn. 24.Google Scholar

15 This inter-correlation means that it would be quite possible that a simple linear regression of public welfare provision (assuming it could be accurately measured) on some measure of the influence of other sociological factors could also yield a fairly high value of R2: i.e. to regress public welfare provision on both sorts of factors together would not significantly increase the value of R2 if they were highly correlated (‘significant’ is used here in the substantive, rather than the statistical, sense).

16 It is interesting to note that they are satisfied with levels of R2 = ·30 etc. in their related article: ‘Does Politics Matter: An Analysis of the Public Welfare Commitment in Advanced Democratic States’, European Journal of Political Research, VII (1979), 169–86.Google Scholar This leaves about 70 per cent of the variation unexplained by political factors, which can hardly be said to be strong evidence for their hypothesis. They appear to have little understanding of the interpretation of R2 or of statistical design for the control of variables.

17 Castles, and McKinlay, , ‘Public Welfare Provision’, p. 169.Google Scholar