Which of the following statements most directly supports the use of social welfare programs?

1 The Gender Division of Welfare

Social welfare policies—especially assistance and social insurance benefits—traditionally have been conceived as instruments of social protection and redistribution. At a minimum, social welfare policies should protect individuals from poverty and relative deprivation. More ambitiously, the policies aim to promote the general welfare and well being of the population. Mainstream studies evaluating the redistributive effects of social welfare policies largely have been gender blind. The units of analysis have been social class or occupational groups, households, generations, regions within a country, or nations. By contrast, feminist research has focused on the gender division of welfare and how the construction of policies has produced differences in the benefits received by women and men. The differences concern both access to benefits and benefit levels.

With this focus, studies have mapped out the gender composition of beneficiaries of social welfare policies. Early research found that a disproportionate number of women were beneficiaries, but these studies examined the English-speaking countries. When other countries were included in the examination, a different pattern emerged: men predominated as beneficiaries. In these countries social insurance schemes whose eligibility was based on labor market participation were central to social provision; men also collected family allowances as part of these schemes. Even when the allowance has been paid to the married mother, eligibility has been determined by the father's rights as an insured employee. Although men predominate as beneficiaries in some countries, households headed by women are more reliant on social welfare benefits than male headed households because men command a larger share of earnings. In many cases, especially when benefits are earnings related, the benefit levels of men are higher than those of women.

Studies have also documented disparities in the poverty rates of women and men. An initial finding was the feminization of poverty in the US in the mid-1970s. Although the poverty rates of women and men in the US had dropped substantially since the 1950s, the composition of the poor had changed dramatically so that women were overwhelmingly in the majority. In many countries the poverty rates of women are higher than those of men. However, among the industrialized countries, the poverty rate of women in the US ranks as highest, and the gender poverty gap is also the largest (Casper et al. 1994) (see Poverty and Gender in Affluent Nations). Nonetheless, there are countries—such as Italy, The Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries (Sainsbury 1999)—where differences in the gender poverty gap are small or women have lower poverty rates than men. In summary, empirical research on the gender composition of beneficiaries of income maintenance programs in the US revealed an anomaly: women outnumber men as beneficiaries but their poverty rates were much higher than men's. This anomaly, together with cross-national variations, spurred theorizing about the sources of gender inequalities in benefits and the gendered construction of social welfare policies.

2.3 Public Funding and Planning

Social welfare policies are generally targeted to specific population groups, such as families in substandard housing, children in poverty, the physically disabled, minorities historically disadvantaged or mistreated, victims of particular diseases. Assessing the size and geographic distribution of groups targeted for welfare payments or subsidies is the task of a nation's statistical system. Frequently public funding formulae are based on census counts of particular population groups (Nathan 1999). In the United States, for instance, in 1999 approximately $US185 billion in medical, education, housing, transportation, unemployment, and other payments depend in part on census data. Similar funding formulae using census information occur in many countries with advanced social welfare systems.

When public funds are allocated to target groups based on their size, they have a strong interest in being fully counted. But these are also population groups that are difficult to reach in standard census operations, and even if reached, will sometimes resist being counted because of concerns that census information can be used against them. This situation has given rise to advocacy organizations that work with and put pressure on census bureaus to assure as full a count as possible of their particular constituencies. Where this has occurred, census taking is no longer the domain only of professional statisticians and their government minister, but becomes of much more generalized political interest.

In addition to targeted welfare spending, national governments frequently use census information for program planning across many policy domains such as public transportation, health and education services, job training, police and fire protection, sanitation and sewage disposal, and land use.

The census also plays a role in national security policy. As indicated above, since biblical times the state has relied on census information to assess the numerical strength of its fighting age population, and also at times to design and implement actual conscription. Of course, a reliable count of the fighting strength of one nation's population will be used by another nation to calculate whether that nation poses a military threat. The first US census in 1790 was declared by the nation's leaders to have missed a sizeable portion of the population, and the Secretary of State took care to announce that fact to European powers that might otherwise have concluded that the young nation was too weak to protect its independence. Of course not just population censuses but also economic censuses help the state assess its military capacity and that of other nations.

The relative strengths and weaknesses of contending groups within a nation are also revealed by census information, and have often played a role in strategic choices that precede internal warfare. The suppression of census data in several African countries reflects a decision by the ethnic group in power to disguise the comparative numerical strength of ethnic groups challenging its rule. In the period preceding the Civil War in the United States the more rapid growth of ‘free-states’ compared to ‘slave-states,’ as revealed in the 1850 census, was a factor leading to the succession of the South from the national union.

Positive Standing and Policy Benefits

Since the birth of US social welfare policies, older people enjoyed, at least in policy terms, a favored existence. Unpleasant as they were, the nineteenth century poor houses that provided sustenance for poor and isolated elders were more accommodating than those established for younger and what were perhaps seen as shiftless populations. Old-age relief and pension programs were always among the first ones established at the state and local levels. Most notable are the pathbreaking initiatives taken on behalf of elders at the federal level in America’s “reluctant welfare state” (Wilensky & Lebeaux, 1958, p. xii). The list of “elders first” policies from the mid-1930s through the mid-1970s is impressive: Old Age Assistance as Title I of the original Social Security Act and Old Age Insurance as Title II in 1935; Disability Insurance, initially only for workers over the age of 50, in 1956; Medicare, initially and still primarily for individuals 65 and older in 1965; Age Discrimination and Employment Act for workers over age 40 in 1967; Supplemental Security Income, creating a national minimum income for poor elders and people with disabilities or blindness in 1972: and the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, providing federal insurance protection for defined benefit retirement plans in 1974.

Principally responsible for these largely unique developments was the policy legitimacy that has long been enjoyed by older Americans. In a nation with low levels of class-consciousness and a political ideology centered on individualism and private markets (Lipset, 1997), older people came to enjoy – at least comparatively – a coveted policy spot. Old age stood as a proxy for both need and deservingness, an understanding bestowed on no other population. Haber (1983) notes that from early in American history, the aged were consciously omitted from “the redeemable,” that is, those who should be expected to earn their own support. The social insurance pioneer, Isaac Rubinow (1934), spoke of the unquestioned needs of older people as “the final emergency” after what workers might have faced – and not have been publicly protected against – earlier in life. Franklin Roosevelt opined that “poverty in old age should not be regarded as a disgrace or necessarily as a result of lack of thrift or energy … it is a mere by-product of modern industrial life” (Rimlinger, 1971, p. 212). In Pitied But Not Entitled, Linda Gordon’s (1998) historical analysis of policy toward single mothers early in the twentieth century, she found elders to be “a group quintessentially deserving,” much unlike the women whose lives she was investigating. And Marmor’s (1970, p. 17) account of Medicare’s enactment echoes Haber, stating that the elderly were “one of the few population groupings about whom one could not say that the members should take care of their financial-medical problems by earning or saving more money.”

Such data as exist from these earlier periods largely support the needy, if not desperate, situation of many elders. The first issue of Social Security Bulletin, the official journal of the US Social Security Administration, featured an article by Shearon (1938) in which she found two-thirds of the older population to be “dependent” on others but found, as well, that one-half of those who were deemed “self-dependent” may have relied on friends of relatives for additional income. Borrowing from Shearon and other sources, Upp (1982) estimated that three-quarters of older people’s income prior to Social Security’s enactment came from their adult children, a figure that 50 years later had fallen to 1.5%. With less than one-half of older people having health insurance at the time of Medicare’s enactment in 1965, Wilbur Cohen, an architect of the plan, noted that the amassing of statistical data to prove that the aged were sicker, poorer, and less insured than other adult groups was “like using a streamroller to crush an ant of opposition” (quoted in Marmor, 1970, p. 17). Programs for protection against chronic illness, inadequate as they may be today, did not exist, the earliest approximation being the Old Age Assistance benefit denied to persons residing in state institutions in order that coverage might be found in the community, as it occasionally was in early “mom and pop nursing homes” (Vladeck, 1980).

In the years leading up to the 1970s, there was little opposition to expanding old-age benefits; indeed, the institution of the automatic cost-of-living adjustment to Social Security benefits in 1972 was seen as a cost-containment measure, designed to preclude continued passage of “Christmas Tree” legislation increasing benefits as Congressional elections approached (Tufte, 1978). This permissive consensus that spawned early age-related programming was based significantly on elders’ positive image and unique vulnerability, a political reality well-captured by Binstock’s (1983) “compassionate stereotype” label. Using a broader typology of political “target populations,” Schneider and Ingram (1993) found older Americans of this earlier period enjoying a “positive social construction,” that is a group that “should be the beneficiary of a particular proposal” (p. 335). The great political utility of population legitimacy is captured by Sherman and Kolker (1987) seeing the effects of such construction or legitimacy as far-reaching for “when people agree, power or coercion becomes unnecessary; consensus prevails” (p. 123).

Of course, for purposes of policymaking, this sympathetic standing had to be activated. At a later point, political power became a prime mover in this activation, but in much of the period leading up to the late-1970s, it was a small number of highly placed officials and advocates who advanced the aging policy agenda. Multiple analyses of the enactments enumerated earlier – with the partial exception of Medicare – find elite political actors seizing on supportive views of elders’ needs as the driving force behind policy gains. In the 1930s, Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security worked largely behind closed doors in devising the Old Age Insurance program, and Derthick (1979) found that for the ensuing 40 years a group consisting almost exclusively of program executives and specialty committees within Congress were largely responsible for program governance. In the 1960s, a small coterie of federal officials devised the pull back from earlier national health insurance initiatives put forth by Presidents Roosevelt and Truman to focus exclusively on older Americans.

Enactment of Supplemental Security Income represents the most illuminating example of elite figures employing elders’ positive standing for policy gains. Licking their wounds in the wake of defeat of President Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan in 1970 – designed to “cash out” Aid to Families with Dependent Children – federal officials quickly redirected the program toward the so-called “adult public assistance categories”: the poor aged, blind, and disabled. Within a matter of weeks SSI passed its critical legislative hurdle when the Senate Finance Committee approved the program and its nationwide income guarantee, with Wilber Cohen exclaiming “do you realize what they’re doing in there? It’s not even controversial, it’s not even controversial!” (Burke & Burke, 1974, p. 198). Whether from indifference or support, only seven out of 535 members of Congress even mentioned the guarantee in public testimony. In the then-prevailing constricted world of old-age policymaking, supportive elites were responsible for much of what transpired.

1 The Political and Intellectual Context

Poverty policy is informed by public policy in general or social welfare policy in particular. These policies are by their very nature ideologically loaded. The political labels to be applied may be debated. For the present purpose the conventional political categories of conservatism, liberalism, and social democracy appear useful. The ideology based on the supremacy of the market will be termed neoliberalism. Conservatism and neoliberalism may be situated more to the right, liberalism and social democracy more to the left of the political spectrum. By means of these categories an involved pattern will be presented in an oversimplified way to offer an intellectual context for poverty policy.

The political right perceives poverty as an individual rather than a social problem, attributing its causes to the variations in individuals' merits and achievements. One conservative position adds as a main cause of individual failure genetic inheritance that explains for instance the poverty of the intellectually ‘inferior’ races in America (Herrnstein and Murray 1994). The variation between individuals being natural, poverty itself is seen as a natural and inevitable phenomenon. Its alleviation for altruistic reasons may be approved of, but attempts at its eradication are rejected as futile. Conservatives may prefer voluntary charity as a means of poverty alleviation. Neoliberals may accept state intervention in the form of a well-targeted safety net for the truly needy. The political right usually regards poverty policy as the only acceptable type of social welfare policy.

In a left perspective, poverty is considered as the outcome of social inequalities generated by the economic, political, and social power structure, by the unequal distribution of all the forms of capital. Poverty policy is seen as a must to alleviate immediately the lot of the poor by means of public redistribution. The prevention of the continuous reproduction of poverty is also a major concern, though. This objective requires broader public policies. Public intervention should promote a fairer access to all socially relevant material and symbolic resources, which in turn requires curbing the domination of the market over society. The success of such policies depends on, among other things, the empowerment of people and strong economic and social rights. In this broader policy framework, poverty policy becomes residual.

Abstract

The first section examines the entrenchment of educational policy in the tradition of three social welfare policies. These three basic concepts that help guarantee social welfare services each attach a specific value to educational policy.

The second section presents the international results of educational policy in three ‘welfare regimes.’ The particular political structures contained within are confronted with ‘educational outcomes,’ i.e., educational quality and equity.

The third section transfers this comparative approach to countries with emerging welfare policies in Latin America. The particular focus of educational policy and integration into the country's social policy determines educational quality and the level of equity.

10.1 The ILO

The ILO has built over the decades a rich web of international and national legislation, investigations, and interpretations of its conventions and recommendations. Its role in developing social welfare policies, and standards for the regulation of labor conditions in a wide range of occupations, has helped to build credibility in countries in every area and at different levels of economic, social, and political development. It remains the only international institution where the workers and employers have a voice in decision-making and policy determination. It has survived serious crises that threatened its continuity and viability. (For information on the ILO in the year 2000, see Table 1.)

Table 1. Basic information on the in the year 2000

For its first three decades, the ILO was the sole international voice advocating and defining human rights. In the postwar era others have taken up this role; UN human rights covenants set standards for governments. Codes of conduct are negotiated with individual firms that operate in more than one country. The ILO's decision-making structure is based on representation by nations in a period when strong economic and demographic forces challenge the ability of national governments to deal with them. The ILO's efforts to gain a seat at the rule-making table had achieved only limited results at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Extent of poverty – dimensions and alternative estimates

During the winter of 2007, taking a taxi in Beijing would almost certainly have led to a conversation about a 70-year-old criminal who had masterminded several robberies in the Beijing West Railway Station. Hailing from Hunan Province, he had robbed numerous passengers, but had never fled the scene of his crime, preferring to wait for the police to arrive. Not only did this criminal hope to be captured, but also imprisoned – and fed. He explained that he would rather stay in prison with a roof over his head and three meals a day than struggle to avoid starvation on the streets each day.

The 2007 global financial crisis brought to the fore the issue of poverty and income disparity in China. People with low incomes or living on a small pension came to sympathize greatly with the case of the old robber and criticism of the government’s social welfare policies mounted. Most Chinese would ask themselves two questions:

Was the price the Chinese people paid for modernization too high?

Are the majority of poor people in China paying for those few who became rich first?

After 30 years of rapid growth since the 1978 economic reforms, China has become the world’s third largest economy1 and will almost certain take the place of Japan to become the second largest by 2011.2 It has also become one of the largest trading countries in the world, the most desired destination for foreign direct investment, and the largest producer of countless industrial and agricultural products. Despite this, given that China is home to a quarter of the world’s population, it is a very poor nation in terms of income per capita with millions living in absolute poverty. The geographical and sociological distribution of poverty in China is clearly linked to income inequality and unfair wealth distribution within society.

Poverty alleviation is a major challenge facing the Chinese leadership. It is not just about social relief, but is also related to economic development strategy, making it a political task as well.3 The effectiveness of anti-poverty efforts in China affects not only the living standards of the poor, but also the political legitimacy of the leadership. For this reason a war against poverty was declared by the State Council in 1994, which set up a grand plan – the Seven Year Poverty Eradication Program 1994–2000 – with the objective of eradicating poverty by 2000. This chapter starts by interpreting the multi-dimensional poverty line set by the Chinese government. It then goes on to analyze the causes and evolution of poverty/income disparity in urban and rural China respectively, and finishes with a critical evaluation of the government’s anti-poverty efforts and policy recommendations.

Intraregional and Extraregional Comparative Studies

While the majority of studies of East Asian politics published in English in the post–Cold War period were single-nation studies, a modest number of works investigating certain political phenomena, such as Confucianism and democratization and political underpinnings of economic development or debacle, in cross-national or cross-regional comparative perspective, have emerged. These include studies of political and economic reforms and social welfare policies in South Korea and Taiwan, reunification issues between mainland China and Taiwan on one hand and South and North Koreas on the other, ‘crony capitalism’ in South Korea and the Philippines, political and economic reforms and transitions in China and Hungary, political power of business corporations in Japan and France, etc.

In the most ambitious studies of this type, region-wide political phenomena or developments in East Asia are compared with those in another region or regions. Stephen Haggard and his colleagues' work on the political economy of democratic transitions in East Asia and Latin America is an outstanding example of this type of studies (Haggard and Kaufman, 2008). McGuire's on the complex relationships between the levels of wealth, the quality of the welfare state, and the state of democracy in a dozen nations in the same two regions is another (McGuire, 2010).

Most of the comparative studies published in English in this period were descriptive case studies, like their predecessors of the Cold War period. Some, however, employed one or another theoretical model, or at least perspective. These include the use of a sociological evolutionary model in a study of Chinese foreign policy, the two-level games model in a study of Japanese–United States trade negotiations, network analysis in a study of Japan's relations with its Asian neighbors, and so on. Rational choice theory was used in a few studies of Japanese and South Korean politics.

The studies of East Asian politics in the post–Cold War period have thus become far more thematically and methodologically diversified than in the Cold War period.

2.2 Welfare Rights

A second category of claimed rights is that government should guarantee children a basic level of well-being; these are often called welfare rights. The CRC provides that children should have a right to ‘a standard of living adequate for the child's physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development’ (ART 27), ‘the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health…’ (ART 24), and to education (ART 28). The CRC goes beyond these basic goods, and seeks to afford children a broader set of welfare rights, including the right ‘to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts’ (ART 31).

Since the 1950s, governments have assumed increasing responsibility for guaranteeing that children have adequate food, nutrition, shelter, and health care. In many countries, children benefit from general social welfare policies, which provide all citizens with universal health insurance and various forms of income support. Most industrialized countries also have partially socialized the cost of caring for children through children's allowances, paid parental leave after the birth of a child, and public provision of day care. Many less economically developed countries are moving in the same direction, despite limited financial resources.

The laggard in this regard, given its capacity, is the United States. In the late 1900s child poverty actually grew in the United States. Resistance in the US reflects, in part, the belief of many political figures that childhood poverty is caused by ‘irresponsible’ adult behavior, such as having children out of wedlock, and that it is impossible to provide goods to children without also giving them to adults, thereby ‘rewarding’ the adults action. In addition, many politicians support the premise of libertarian theorists like Robert Nozick that there is no moral justification for the redistribution of wealth (Nozick 1974).

Even in countries that accept a welfare state, the level of support that a child should receive remains largely a political issue, not a legal right enforceable by courts. No matter how wealthy a country, tradeoffs between levels of socially provided health care, housing, education, and other welfare goods are now seen as inevitable. Courts, appropriately, are reluctant to get too deeply into these decisions. Since the scope of the claimed right is so vague, courts lack the legitimacy and authority to order elected governments to provide people with specific levels of well-being. In addition, some theorists contend that, in the political process, framing political debates in terms of moral obligations that the citizens of a country pledge to provide to each other may prove more productive thn trying to establish rights (O'Neill 1988, cf. Freeman 1992).

Another critical question is whether welfare rights should encompass the right to ‘equal opportunity.’ Opportunity focuses on each child's options in adulthood. Social scientists have struggled to identify the goods that must be provided to children during childhood in order to equalize their opportunities as adults. Much of the focus is on education. But opportunity is also highly influenced by the quality of parenting a child receives and the social and cultural environment in which the child is raised. A right to equal opportunity is far more difficult to guarantee than a right to basic necessities and may require restricting parental rights (Fishkin 1983).

Welfare Rights

A second category of claimed rights is that government should guarantee children a basic level of well-being; these are often called welfare rights. The CRC provides that children should have a right to “a standard of living adequate for the child's physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social development” (Article 27), “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health…” (Article 24), and to education (Article 28). The CRC goes beyond these basic goods, and seeks to afford children a broader set of welfare rights, including the right “to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts” (Article 31).

Since the 1950s, governments have assumed increasing responsibility for guaranteeing that children have adequate food, nutrition, shelter, and health care. In many countries, children benefit from general social welfare policies, which provide all citizens with universal health insurance and various forms of income support. Most industrialized countries also have partially socialized the cost of caring for children through children's allowances, paid parental leave after the birth of a child, and public provision of day care. Many less economically developed countries are moving in the same direction, despite limited financial resources.

The laggard in this regard, given its capacity, is the United States. Despite its wealth, approximately 20% of children in the United States live in poverty. Resistance to greater income support for children in the United States reflects, in part, the belief of many political figures that childhood poverty is caused by ‘irresponsible’ adult behavior, such as having children out of wedlock, and that it is impossible to provide goods to children without also giving them to adults, thereby ‘rewarding’ the adults' actions. In addition, many politicians support the premise of libertarian theorists like Robert Nozick that there is no moral justification for the redistribution of wealth (1974).

Even in countries that accept a welfare state, the level of support that a child should receive remains largely a political issue, not a legal right enforceable by courts. No matter how wealthy a country, trade-offs between levels of socially provided health care, housing, education, and other welfare goods are now seen as inevitable. Courts, appropriately, are reluctant to get too deeply into these decisions. Since the scope of the claimed right is so vague, courts lack the legitimacy and authority to order elected governments to provide people with specific levels of well-being. In addition, some theorists contend that, in the political process, framing political debates in terms of moral obligations that the citizens of a country pledge to provide to each other may prove more productive than trying to establish rights (O'Neill, 1988; cf Freeman, 1992).

Another critical question is whether welfare rights should encompass the right to ‘equal opportunity.’ Opportunity focuses on each child's options in adulthood. Social scientists have struggled to identify the goods that must be provided to children during childhood in order to equalize their opportunities as adults. Much of the focus is on education. But opportunity is also highly influenced by the quality of parenting a child receives and the social, economic, and cultural environment in which the child is raised. A right to equal opportunity is far more difficult to guarantee than a right to basic necessities and may require restricting parental rights (Fishkin, 1983).