Nordic Welfare Chauvinism: A Crisis of Social Democracy?

Social democracy is known for its 'decommodifying' welfare policy which endows citizens with social rights through immunisation from market dependency. This, however, is financed by progressive taxation, and thus high employment levels. As therefore a historical relation between labour and capital, this thesis seeks to explore the idea that welfare chauvinism is an institutional response to changing balances of power onset by contemporary economic stagnation, trade-union decline and neoliberal precarity.

Conceptually, this research will operationalise a Critical Political Economy (CPE) framework. The dominant Power-Resource approaches to welfare state study focus on the strength of labour-mobilisation to account for the variability of welfare state design. This approach is obsolete where trade union decline across the region is widespread; welfare states are evidently embedded within the broader social, political and economic relations of contemporary society. The CPE framework, premised on social constitution, takes a holistic approach to the complexities of capitalism, where 'the economic cannot be understood without the social, the social cannot be understood without the political,
and so on'. CPE thus provides a historically-contingent framework that understands how 'markets both depend entirely upon states and yet simultaneously constitutes an automatic social logic that imposes itself back upon states'. My project therefore looks at the state and market not as continually separated and re-introduced to one another through regulation, but as settling into new interactions as one is reciprocally constructed by changes in the other.

Firstly, I will construct a genealogy of welfare chauvinism in Denmark, Sweden and Norway from 1990 until today. I will interrogate the theoretical and public discourses on welfare chauvinism, outlining major turning points for social democratic policy in terms of universality, starting with the 2002 reforms in Denmark, which significantly lowered benefits for immigrants and refugees, aiming to build a comprehensive overview of its lineage in policy-terms.

This initial research acts as a necessary precursor to the second objective, where I will use process tracing to critically assess the interaction between state, market and society in the logic of policy construction.

I will conduct interviews of contemporary political party members and policymakers who advocate welfare chauvinism, including members of the Norwegian Progress Party, Danish People's Party and Sweden Democrats, in order to fully understand the historical, institutional and societal constraints faced by today's social democracies.

Through the CPE capacity to 'pose totalising questions unasked elsewhere' that 'transcends interdisciplinarity', my research offers novelty in two senses. Firstly, by interrogating the socially-constituted nature of welfare chauvinism, it offers fresh, historically-grounded insights to the largely quantitative scholarship. Secondly, by paying attention to the often-neglected social relations of contemporary capitalism, it seeks to reinvigorate the debate on welfare state development by asserting a holistic approach to the complexities of reform.

Furthermore, this thesis will offer impact to the global political economy in its contribution to the goals of the ESRC 2022 strategic delivery plan. Particularly in relation to priority area of research 3 'health and social care', this research will point to the societally-embedded causes of welfare state exclusivity as 'inequalities of health and wellbeing'. Developing our understanding of how 'society and economy are changing' under exogenous pressure, it will inform preventative measures that social democracies can impose to 'maximise the support that people from all backgrounds receive, wherever they live'.