The impact of culture on welfare politics and welfare state types

The central role that cultural values play in shaping social policy was clearly stated by the early researchers in the field who saw that welfare systems stood on dominant views in society of what human nature is and on the shared answers to value-laden questions about 'who should get what and why'. Yet, contemporary analysts have paid rather little attention to the impact of culture on welfare state formation or the role culture has played in shaping the rather different models of welfare found across different nations.

In part, culture has been neglected because of practical difficulties in defining and measuring it. However, with the recent release of the latest wave of the European Values Survey, analysts have an unprecedented amount of data about the beliefs and values of people in European nations at their disposal. Moreover, this data now spans three decades of recent history allowing us to look back on values over a considerable period of social, political and economic change.

Previous work by the research team has pioneered a method for identifying patterns of stable values that rest in between the very abstract notions of cultural foundations (e.g. liberalism, socialism, conservatism) that some analysts have suggested may be important and the very fluid and rapidly changing dimensions of public opinion that have been analysed in much recent work. This conception of culture at an intermediate level relies on analysis of detailed data about values over time for its goal is to reveal aspects of the cultural context that are deeply embedded in society and quite stable over time, even in the face of considerable social and economic change.

In its first stage, the research will exploit the recently released European Values Survey data in order to identify differing patterns of stable values in 30 European societies. It will then explore the links between these values and different patterns of social policy across Europe. In its final stage, the research will then use innovative methods to examine how culture might be included as a key factor in identifying the different types of welfare state model that exist across high-income countries.

In completing the above, specific questions that will be addressed by the research include:
(i) Is there robust empirical evidence to support the 'culture matters in welfare' thesis?
(ii) Is the cultural context for policy making measurable from a comparative quantitative perspective? If so, within which theoretical framework and through which method is it measurable and how plausible are such approaches?
(iii) What kind of value changes have European people experienced in the past three decades? Especially, what are the patterns of religiosity/secularisation, political conservatism and family values?
(iv) How are the patterns of welfare attitudes changing - for example, how are views around welfare dependency and public perceptions of the cause of poverty changing?
(v) How (strongly) does the cultural context matter in public welfare opinions, policy decisions and policy attitudes of the public toward specific social policies?
(vi) How different is the cultural context across the European societies (in spite of their relative closeness geographically and historically)? Are there any groups of countries with clear similarities and distinctiveness in the cultural context?
(vii) Are there three (or four) worlds of welfare capitalism even in terms of their cultural contexts? And, tying these strands together, how might culture best be included as component in welfare state typologies?

In short, through an analysis of quantitative data about differing patterns of stable values in European societies and an exploration of the links between these values and welfare state strategies we aim to bring the 'cultural dimension back in' to debates about cross national variations in social policy.

This research has the potential to impact on practical policy-making, public service design and wider public debates in a longer term not only within the UK but elsewhere, although it is difficult to plan or predict any direct long-term user-engagement at this level in a short macro-quantitative research project.

Earlier examinations of the effect of the cultural context on welfare politics have suggested that the value-characteristics of each society are important factors for public support for policies. That is, the legitimacy of a policy, a key determinant of its ultimate fate, is in part dependent upon the cultural context of each society. It might be suggested, therefore, that policies and public services should be informed by the value-characteristics of their own society and furthermore, of target groups, in order to be more effective (through having wider public support, and more importantly, having higher user- or take-up rates amongst targeted or entitled beneficiaries) or that failure to address the cultural underpinnings of policy over the long term may erode political support for welfare (e.g. see Taylor-Gooby, 2008a; Taylor-Gooby, 2008b: 8; Taylor-Gooby & Wallace, 2009). Though addressing such issues indirectly, some policy makers and policy influencers will find our analysis of the links between societal values and social policies of interest to their own agendas. The wider public may also be interested in these issues too and there is potential for the research to contribute to popular media debates that address questions about 'British values' and how particular public services fit with these values. Clearly there is a need to approach such debates with sensitivity and we stress here that such debates are one remove from the concerns of our project, but they demonstrate nonetheless the potential broader public debate that the research could feed into.

In methodological terms, the multi-dimensional approach for comparing welfare policies using fuzzy-set ideal type analysis also has the potential to appeal to non-academic policy research communities as well as the academic research community. Cross-national comparative policy evaluation has not always been satisfactory when conducted on the basis of single-dimensional linear measures. (For instance, as part of the Bologna process in European higher education there has been considerable debate amongst stakeholders about the need for 'multi-dimensional transparency tools' that move beyond simple league tables that rank all institutions in the same manner). Contributing to debates about the value and potential of multi-dimensional models and methods will help further awareness of the possibilities of these methods for both theoretical and applied policy work.

Finally, while we expect to create only a relatively short space for us to communicate directly with a wider policy-related audience within the short time frame (16 months) of the proposed research, we will attempt to communicate the relevant findings of our work with political think tanks mainly by creating short reports that might fit into their work and through short, non-technical, postings on our project website.