to subordinate class and gender interests to those of nation and empire and did so by representing social reforms as the fruits of imperialism, which in their turn required national efficiency and healthy workers, mothers and children. This critique made connections between the increasingly significant political economy of migrant labour and the welfare state, especially the role of migrant labour in reducing social expenditure costs and the use of welfare institutions to police immigration. It found connections between the management of the colonies and the pathologization of the cultures and practices of people, especially mothers and their families, who migrated from those previous colonies. Together these critiques called for a more systematic approach to the study of social policy as the dynamic outcome not only of political and economic forces but of multiple social and cultural forces too.1
The first set of barriers to their accommodation came from within the study of social policy itself. In a paradoxical twist by the 1990s, at the very point when many of the earlier feminist and anti-racist critiques began to gain greater foothold in the discipline of social policy, not only did the rise of neoliberalism in many countries attempt to dismantle the foundations which made the quest for greater social justice possible, but also the core of the discipline of social policy moved into cross-national comparative study. As it did so, it shed some of these new insights garnered through the previous two decades. The new studies in comparative social policy were influenced particularly by the work of Esping-Andersen’s The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990). This was a major step forward in framing subsequent studies of the variations across different welfare regimes through their impact upon systems of social stratification, employment, and labour markets. It established important theoretical advances in providing a grounded quantitative analysis of welfare regime variations; it centred contestation; and it gave welfare states a significant role in shaping social formations. However, these contestations, histories and social formations focused centrally upon class and ignored gender, race or any other form of significant social division in the origins and development of nation welfare states.
Nevertheless, welfare regime analysis provoked feminist critiques of its marginalization of gender and led to new and inventive analyses of the gendered nature of welfare states. So, for example, Jane Lewis showed how the historical separation of the public and private (domestic) spheres was embedded in a male breadwinner model of welfare in different ways and to different extents in different countries, resulting in different ‘gendered welfare regimes’. This focused on the central issue that welfare regime analysis ignored: how far the unpaid labour of women in the family is recognized and valued (Lewis 1992). Other studies sought new concepts to measure that which was missing in mainstream analysis. For example, ‘the capacity to form an autonomous household’ indicates the extent to which the state frees women from the necessity to enter marriage, or equivalent partnership, in order to secure financial support for them or their children (Orloff 1993; and see Sainsbury 1994 for a redefinition of the gendered logics of welfare). They illustrated how significant contestations around the body and reproductive rights had in many countries wrought important reforms (O’Connor et al. 1999). Shaver’s critique noted the need to make room for the institutional complexity of welfare states – that there are no necessary patterns of coherence, unity or linearity in gender policy logics across and within welfare institutions (Shaver 1990). Together, this work provided much richer explanatory power for post-war welfare and overlapped with new feminist critiques of Marshall’s concept of citizenship which was central to welfare regime analysis (Pateman 1989; Lister [1997] 2003). It provided a sound basis to analyse the shift, starting at that time in many developed welfare states, from a ‘male-breadwinner’ model to a more ‘dual-earner’ or ‘adult-worker’ model in which women and men were expected to be earners (Daly 2011). A greater convergence was emerging from different models to reconcile work and care, while, at the same time, different policy goals, policy instruments and historical conditions were beginning to shape variations across countries (Platenga and Remery 2005; Lister et al. 2007; Lewis et al. 2008; Williams 2010; Williams and Brennan 2012; and see chapters 3 and 6).
Other critiques – particularly around racism, ethnicity and migration but also around disability, sexuality and gender diversity – were less amenable to the conceptual parameters and quantitative measures of this new cross-national development. Because of this, cross-national comparative studies in these areas were late to the table, mainly emerging some two decades later – immigration regimes (Sainsbury 2012); intimacy (Roseneil et al. 2020); disability (Halvorsen et al. 2017); old age (Walker 2005); transgender (Hines et al. 2018). Lack of quantitative data was a real problem, as many European countries had not by this time instituted the collection of data on ethnicity or sexuality. It was also the case that welfare regime analysis was at first slow to acknowledge those countries that didn’t fit with US or European modern welfare state development, such as the paradoxes of post-communist societies (Deacon and Castle-Kanerova 1992) and the rapid changes in Latin America (Gough et al. 2004; Franzoni 2008) and parts of South-east Asia (Peng and Wong 2008). It was also in relation to some of these studies that the geo-politics and colonialism between North and South began to be recognized as a factor in welfare state development (Midgley and Piachaud 2011), but this had less impact on the rolling forward of welfare regime analysis.
In relation to racism, in the mid-1990s many European countries saw a rise in migration and multiculturalism as well as an emerging political and popular backlash to these, often expressed as claims for new nationalist conditions of eligibility to welfare (‘welfare chauvinism’ – Keskinen et al. 2016). Cross-national analyses of migration and citizenship regimes were being developed by migration and racism scholars (Bovenkerk et al. 1990; Brubaker 1990; Hammar 1990). With some exceptions (Castles and Miller 1993; Faist 1995; Sainsbury 2012), these were largely outside the discipline of social policy and, even so, did not always relate migration to race and racism. Criminal justice, too, in which much critical work around racism had been developed, such as Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978), often stood outside the discipline. Other exceptions at that time also included more intersectional approaches to the gendering, racializing and classing of welfare states (Mink 1990; Ginsburg 1992; Boris 1995; Williams 1995) and the beginning of research on the significance of female migration into care work (Heyzer et al. 1994; Anderson 2000). None of these touched the body of comparative social policy at that time. In fact they were largely ignored. A vacuum opened up in the core of the discipline, one often excused through lack of data, but it was as much that there was no theoretical space for the new-old hierarchies of postcolonial and geo-political realities. The increased pace and differentiation of migration and asylum seeking was beginning to challenge myths of cultural homogeneity and the realities of national boundaries upon which nation-states and their social policies were built. In addition, when the inadequacy of existing immigration policies and social rights was becoming apparent, and when welfare chauvinism was becoming more assertive, few mainstream welfare state/regime analyses were elaborating theoretically or normatively how to counteract racism and racial inequalities or to deconstruct universalism’s failure to recognize difference (but see Phillimore et al. 2021 for a cross-national study that does just this, discussed in chapter 5).
These omissions were carried in different ways into the next waves of mainstream social policy, which focused upon the restructuring of welfare states in the context of the rise of neoliberalism. Three examples offer an understanding of the narrow ways in which gender and race (by now well established in wider scholarship) began to be acknowledged. First, the historical institutionalist approach was a particularly important contribution to understanding how the contingency of history and the architecture of political institutions matter in the way they shape political claims and political change (Hall 1993; Pierson 1996; Pierson and Skocpol 2002). This was more open to referencing different inequalities, but what was missing was any systematic engagement with the multiple social relations of gender, race or any salient relations other than class. Second, this openness but eventual narrowness can also be seen in other work on the restructuring of welfare states which uses the conceptual device of ‘new social risks’ (Bonoli 2007). This refers to the changes that challenged the post-war welfare state: greater
