with the ‘national’.
Analyzing ‘welfare states’ rather than social policy necessarily drives attention to the ‘state’ itself, and relatedly to the focus on ‘national’ units as the subject of study. Historically, this has made sense as national political events since 1945, such as the strength of national labour movements, their capacities in formal politics and their alliances with other interest groups such as the parties representing the middle classes or farmers, have shaped what are now the formally established systems of welfare provision in the global North. In the balance of provision within these systems, the roles and responsibilities of the state emerged as most influential in the achievement of social welfare, and a focus on state intervention therefore often overshadowed the activities of other non-state actors. From the 1970s, a backlash against state intervention began to gain political and popular support, leading to much greater interest in the activities of market actors, families and non-governmental (‘third-sector’) organizations and their place in the mixed economy of welfare.
There has been a more sustained contemporary academic critique of the problem of ‘methodological nationalism’ which characterizes comparative social policy scholarship and treats states (and their welfare arrangements) as stable, easily defined units of comparison. It is argued that this approach omits the increasingly important transnational and global influences, interests, actors and activities which, in many countries, have greater significance for welfare outcomes than those which are nationally confined (see Yeates, 2002, 2007; Wimmer and Schiller, 2003; Deacon, 2005, 2007). ‘International’ social policy is equally prone to this national categorization, especially where ‘international’ simply means the discussion alongside each country’s welfare arrangements and applies international in the sense that the countries described stretch beyond Europe (for example Alcock and Craig, 2001). The development of the subfield of global social policy (Deacon, 1997) was thus an important break from a scholarly focus on national actors to shift attention to the extremely powerful but under-researched interests and influences that operate in the global and transnational sphere. In this sphere, the ideas, desires and influences of political and economic actors, including international governmental organizations (IGOs) such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and United Nations (UN) as well as transnational businesses, aid organizations and activist networks, are all significant in shaping not only the general tone of social policy debate at the world level but also the development and implementation of social policies in individual countries and across world regions. The regionalization of social policy has itself become of much more direct significance and consequently of academic concern in the 2000s (Kaasch and Stubbs, 2014).
This is not to say that the role of interests beyond formal state institutions have been neglected. Historical analyses are clear that they also have their part to play – the medical profession in the emergence of the British welfare state for example, or the role of business actors in lobbying and shaping developments to minimize their costs or maximize their power. However, the operation of these interests was somewhat less complex in the mid-twentieth century than it is today. Even though borders have always been porous to some extent, certainly ethnically and culturally but also economically and even politically, in the 2020s the influences shaping mature welfare states are supranationalized, and the economy is globalized. For those countries where welfare state development is in its early stages (emerging economies such as India and Brazil), where it has yet to gain a stable institutional and bureaucratic foundation (such as Honduras and Nigeria), where conflict has devastated social systems (El Salvador, Syria, Somalia) or where society has been subject to a significant political intermission that has halted one trajectory and left the door open to an onslaught of possibilities (such as in Central and Eastern European countries), the traditional comparative understanding of ‘how’ welfare arrangements are brought to life and subsequently sustained is challenged. In this context, hierarchical categorizations based on whether a country has more or less of something – public spending as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP), public administrative bureaucracy or social democratic cabinet seats, for example – are not only bound to emphasize difference rather than commonality, but in focusing on state-level institutions are also unable to capture the complexity of social policy actors and interests and their interaction amid and beyond the state. An approach which attempts to view social policy from a global perspective therefore requires a recognition that not all national social policies involve the state, and that not all social policies within states are state policy. It also reflects a looser understanding of the mixed economy of social policy and directs attention to a range of often unconnected programmes and projects with welfare objectives (see Deacon, 2007) as much as the overarching policy environments in which they exist (see Seelkopf and Starke, 2019).
One of the difficulties in mapping a world of social policy in this way, however, is the availability of data and, where data are available, the scope and scale of its detail. The picture provided by international comparative data is very mixed, and biased towards the richer nations. Data on ‘welfare states’ relating to levels of spending, participation in markets such as labour and housing, and indicators of outcomes, inequalities and diswelfare are accessible through international organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union statistical service (Eurostat). The databases managed by these organizations provide important sources of information for comparative research among countries in the global North, that is, Europe (Eurostat) and the OECD – high- and middle-income countries which have passed the membership tests relating to economic and political values. OECD data routinely cover the current thirty-six member countries, although not all data are available for all countries because the databases rely on national statistical office submissions (Coicaud and Zhang, 2011). Outside of the richest states, Mexico and Chile are OECD members and both Colombia and Costa Rica are progressing with membership applications. While the scope of OECD data is considerable, and the organization is a prolific publisher of working papers and annual reviews of economic and social issues, OECD data clearly also have a geographical disadvantage in attempts to present a global perspective.
To answer questions about the worldwide state of welfare, ‘global’ social policy-related data are therefore generally drawn from the key IGOs: the World Bank; the agencies of the UN; the International Labour Organization; and sometimes the IMF. This ‘official’ data can be supplemented by so-called grey literature such as survey reports from international non-governmental organizations and private organizations that undertake mainly economic research. As a result, analysis that aims to produce global comparisons is limited in two key ways. Firstly, in databases that hold data for all nation states, depth is traded for breadth. Many countries with limited resources for data collection are only able to meet the collection of headline data targets and missing data are prevalent at the more granular level and across time. More importantly, in terms of robust analysis, international organizations such as the World Bank do not operate in a political vacuum and are themselves policy makers. As scholars of global policy making have shown, data collection is itself a political process, as issues are constructed and defined and the ways in which they are subsequently measured are determined by these organizations and their results feed into the wider policy agendas of both the IGOs and their member countries. In this way the IGOs have ‘social construction power’ (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004) and are able to assert ‘cognitive authority’ (Broome and Seabrooke, 2012) in relation to the social problems faced around the world, how they should be understood and what kind of responses are required.
Reflecting on the capacity for assessing the world of social policy, therefore, it is necessary to accept that due to limitations of data, depth of knowledge, sources of evidence and breadth of coverage, in practice scholars tend to work towards a global-comparative perspective rather than achieving like for like comparison wherever analysis goes beyond headline counts of key socio-economic indicators. To some extent, due to space constraints, qualitative depth is traded for quantitative breadth in this book too, and the balance of evidence in the chapters to follow also tends towards the use of statistical data rather than evaluation of the rich and significant qualitative research that informs social policy study.
