Tracing Contradiction: A Mediation Analysis of Austerity in Britain, 2010 - 2019

Around the world, welfare states are undergoing dramatic and path-breaking change. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the neoliberal-era has seen the transformation of the 'liberal welfare state' to the 'workfare state' (Jessop, 2002). More recently in the Scandinavian 'social democracies', there has been a rise of racialised welfare provision, countering their founding principle of 'universality'. In Germany, 'the Hartz reforms [of the early 2000's] 'visibly shifted the design principles that underlie the German transfer system for the working-age population away from status maintenance to increased means testing and poverty alleviation' (Brulle & Gangi, 2023). Set against the mainstream 'regime-type' approach, which posits path-dependency and institutional inertia (Hay, 2002), these ruptures are puzzling. How can we explain such profound change?

The primary object of this thesis is to deepen our understanding of the causes of change in the welfare state by investigating how societal conflicts shape the development of social policy. Specifically, it examines the relationship between antagonistic social relations (class, race and gender) and welfare retrenchment and racialisation, taking British Austerity as a case study. It does so through an experimental 'Mediation Analysis' methodological framework which will employ critical policy analysis and semi-structured interviews to trace the path of social policy change through four interdependent moments: (1) the intersecting contradictions underpinning the conditions of struggle, (2) the materialisation of these contradictions as struggle at both the civil and political levels, (3) the mediation (translation) of these contestations at the level of the state, and (4) the reproduction of the originary contradictions as subsequent presuppositions of capitalist development.