6. The Historical Political Economy of the Welfare State

Emanuele Ferragina (Sciences Po Paris)

Guillem Verd Llabrés (International University of Catalonia) 

Keonhi Son (Mannheim Centre for European Social Research) 

Analysing the history of contemporary welfare states is key to understanding the connection between social policy and political economy phenomena such as inflation, the renewal of nationalism and war, and increasing strains on democracies. For instance, during the Great Depression and World War II, welfare programs, such as unemployment insurance and family allowance, emerged as a part of a Keynesian, contracyclical economic policy to mitigate the effects of economic insecurity and inflationary pressures on working-class families. In the Cold War era, heightened geopolitical tensions influenced welfare policies in divergent ways: while increased military spending often came at the expense of welfare budgets, inter-regime competition also spurred welfare expansion. A historical analysis of the welfare state enriches our understanding of its capacity for resilience and the drivers behind its transformations under pressure.  

Building on the principles of historical institutionalism, states often turn to past precedents to address present challenges and state systems exhibit a path-dependent nature (Skocpol 1992; Pierson 1993; Streeck and Thelen 2005). Comparative welfare research has a long tradition of examining the origins of welfare systems and their drivers, including for example modernization (Wilensky 1974; Flora and Heidenheimer 1981), class politics (Baldwin 1990; Esping-Andersen 1985; Kuhnle and Sander 2010), religion (Morgan 2003; Kersbergen 1995), and war (Obinger and Schmitt 2020). A wide array of approaches and methods have been used to explore these issues, such as comparative historical analysis, process tracing, QCA/Fuzzy-set and various types of quantitative and qualitative analyses. Recently, advancements in digitization and online access to archival materials, have established new opportunities for advanced and innovative historical analysis for comparative welfare scholars.  

We invite exploration of how welfare institutions have adapted to political economy shocks, war, and demographic transitions throughout the 20th and 21st century both in the Global South and Global North. We seek contributions that examine the formation of new social policies, the restructuring and recalibration of welfare systems, and the dynamics surrounding these transformations.  

Specifically, we are interested in how partisan politics, institutional frameworks, organized interests, institutional legacies and the timing and intensity of crises account for the temporal and cross-national variations in welfare state responses. We welcome contributions in all domains of social policy. 

We encourage interdisciplinary approaches such as comparative historical sociology, historical political economy, and international political economy to foster dialogue between fields like history, economics, political science, sociology, demography and comparative welfare research. Through this interdisciplinary lens, we seek to embrace diverse theoretical, methodological, and chronological perspectives.  

We welcome a wide range of methodological approaches, including comparative studies (large-N and small-N), case studies, process tracing, text analysis, and mixed-methods research. Our overarching aim is to deepen our understanding of disjunctive welfare states, examining their path dependencies and comparing historical and contemporary strategies for addressing welfare challenges. Through a long-term historical lens, we seek to uncover the conditions under which path dependency prevails or radical/gradual structural change occurs, offering fruitful insights into the evolution of welfare states over time.