Social disadvantages and welfare problems: The role of collective welfare resources
Doctoral thesis, Peer reviewed
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https://hdl.handle.net/10642/5277Utgivelsesdato
2017Metadata
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Sammendrag
This thesis investigates the relationship between social disadvantages and welfare problems,
and assesses the role of collective welfare provision in alleviating the risk of welfare
problems. Welfare is studied as a multidimensional phenomenon, and here I examine both
distributional aspects, i.e. poverty, and relational aspects of welfare, i.e. social exclusion and
social capital. Collective welfare state resources are resources provided by welfare state
institutions such as health care systems and social insurance systems. In this thesis, the focus
is on the level of generosity in the provision of such resources. A long-standing debate within
social policy concerns the dilemma between re-distribution on the one hand and the possible
detrimental consequences of generous welfare provision on the other. This major debate
involves opposing views that disagree on whether generous welfare provision is related to
different welfare problems. The overall research question of the thesis is: What are the
relationships between social disadvantages and relational and distributional welfare
problems, and how are the welfare problems modified by collective welfare provision?
According to welfare critics, generous welfare provision may distort people’s capacity to plan
and control their lives and pervert norms whereas according to welfare proponents on the
other hand, generous welfare provision alleviates poverty and inadequate social participation.
In line with the ‘command over resources’ approach, generous welfare provision are believed
to improve the conditions that determine choices, strengthen agency and the ability to direct
the conditions of life as well as ‘buffer’ the extent to which individual disadvantages in one
area are related to disadvantages in another area
Three out of four studies (studies I, III and IV) in this thesis contribute to shed light, in
different ways, on whether generous welfare provision is related to different welfare
problems, and hence provide results that are consistent with either welfare critics on the
detrimental consequences of generous welfare provision, or welfare proponents on the
benefits of welfare provision. The results of this thesis show that both relational welfare
problems, i.e. non-participation in networks (Study I), as well as distributional ones, i.e.
material deprivation and income poverty (studies III and IV), invariable decreased as welfare
generosity increased. The results on relational welfare problems show that there were no
indications of higher levels of social exclusion in more generous welfare states, i.e. the
association between welfare generosity and non-participation did not differ between
disadvantaged groups and compared to the reference group (Study I). Results on distributional
welfare problems show, with few exceptions, that the risk of income poverty and material
deprivation decreased with increasing welfare generosity among disadvantaged groups in
absolute terms. The absolute inequalities as well as the absolute levels among disadvantaged
groups were lower in more generous welfare state contexts (studies III and IV). The low
educated benefitted the most from generous welfare provision, compared to other social risk
categories, in terms of a substantially lower risk of material deprivation (Study IV). However,
findings on both relational as well as distributional welfare problems showed that social
inequalities assessed relatively were not necessarily smaller in generous welfare states. Study
II based at the individual level in the context of the social capital ‘rich’ and egalitarian
country of Norway, show that relational aspects of welfare was not equally available to all, in
particular, education seemed to matter for both social trust and civic participation (Study II).
The finding of this thesis lends support to the welfare proponents and the view that welfare
resources enables participation in society and support the view that generous welfare
provision provides disadvantaged individuals with resources to alleviate the risk of poverty.
Eventually the views that generous welfare states distort self-efficacy, values and norms,
whether these concern the moral obligation towards others or the incentive to work, does not
seem justified. The results of this thesis is however, based on cross-sectional data. I am
therefore unable to establish causal relations and, hence, present convincing arguments for
generous welfare provision in the future. Generous welfare provision introduced in countries
with different cultural and institutional conditions will not necessarily increase social
participation and alleviate poverty. However, the findings of this thesis, supported by a range
of other studies (at both the macro and the micro level), seem to warrant encompassing state
intervention and generous welfare provision to handle welfare problems, at least up to now.