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This article suggests that an alternative to a social rights of citizenship approach to comparing welfare states is to use disaggregated programme expenditure data to identify the diverse spending priorities of different types of welfare state. An initial descriptive analysis shows that four major categories of social spending (cash spending on older people and those of working age; service spending on health and for other purposes) are almost entirely unrelated to one another and that different welfare state regimes or families of nations exhibit quite different patterns of spending. The article proceeds to demonstrate that both the determinants and the outcomes of these different categories of spending also differ quite radically. In policy terms, most importantly, the article shows that cross-national differences in poverty and inequality among advanced nations are to a very large degree a function of the extent of cash spending on programmes catering to the welfare needs of those of working age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a critique and analysis of recent OECD research by Adema and Ladaique identifying the impact of taxes and private benefits on social spending. By using the techniques of multivariate modelling, we show that both gross public and net private expenditures are strongly influenced by partisan incumbency, although in opposite directions, and that the more we net out the effect of taxes, the less politics matters and the more spending is shaped by socio-economic forces. In a second stage of the analysis, we show that the crucial mechanism of welfare state redistribution is the taxation of gross social expenditure and demonstrate that this effect is almost entirely political in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the historical development of the Australian welfare state with a view to identifying the role that Australia's federal constitutional arrangements have played in shaping that development. Theoretical paradigms have been unanimous in their prognoses: that federal states are likely to be slow in developing welfare state programmes and typically spend less on them than unitary states. But recently it has been argued that federal institutions may have a “ratchet effect” of slowing down the pace of change, irrespective of its direction. The purpose of this chronological account of significant stages in the development of the Australian welfare state is to use the unfolding of historical events — far too rich in nuance and detail to be captured in quantitative modelling — as a test-bed for establishing whether, and, if so, to what extent, federalism has impacted on the trajectory of Australian welfare state development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that differences in religious adherence and/or in degrees of secularization between advanced nations may be as relevant to understanding cross-national variance in a wide range of public policy outcomes as the impact of socio-economic and political factors. The prima facie evidence for such a thesis is demonstrated in areas as diverse as welfare expenditure, family policy and labour market policy outcomes, and is shown to have a particular salience wherever gender-related outcomes are at issue. On the basis of this evidence, it is suggested that, in policy outcome terms at least, it is possible to identify a distinctive Catholic family of nations consisting of a grouping of core Western European and Southern European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explain cross-sectional variation in public education expenditure levels and change since 1960. Five possible explanations are located: the incremental push of programme inertia, demographic and related pressures, economic resource growth, the impact of party and the cultural impact of Roman Catholicism. A multivariate analysis demonstrates that educational expenditure is an arena in which monocausal explanations are wholly inappropriate. With the exception of programme inertia, each of the explanations is seen to have an important bearing on this aspect of the people's welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares and contrasts the Australian and Scandinavian welfare states with a view to demonstrating that, whilst the extent of welfare expenditures and the instruments of social policy vary quite markedly in these countries, policy outcomes in terms of levels of inequality and poverty and social protection are much more similar. In the course of this comparison, the paper casts serious doubts on the usefulness of both the prevailing paradigms for evaluating welfare state performance: measures of expenditure effort and measures of welfare decommodification, instead, it is argued that welfare state performance can only be properly assessed, as Richard Titmuss pointed out many years ago, by evaluating the impact of fiscal and occupational welfare in addition to the extent and character of the explicit expenditures of the state. When we broaden our conception of social policy in this way, Australia appears much less of a welfare state laggard than it is often taken to be and the oft mooted Scandinavian claim to welfare superiority is, perhaps, rather less compelling than is sometimes argued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on Jim Kemeny's pioneering thesis of a big trade-off between home ownership and the development of the welfare state. Impact of globalization on welfare state development and on federalism and the growth of social policy; Kemeny's claim that declining welfare standards may be a potent incentive for private insurance and private accumulation; Factors affecting rental tenure in certain European countries according to Kemeny.

The article focuses on the determinants of public and social expenditure change in the crisis of the 1970s. The author points out that differences in determinants are purely a matter of semantics, since they agree on all the relevant points of empirical interpretation. They tend to differ in the ramification of approaches to the analysis of policy outcomes. The determinants of change are a considered a legitimate object of scholarly attention. It notes that misspecification can only be avoided if the relationship between change and constant structure is always kept to the forefront of the analysis.