How Did Welfare States Develop and Do These Processes Still Apply Today? Essay Sample

Welfare states are forms of government in which the concerned state promotes and protects the social and economic well-being of its people. In this welfare, the state based upon the principles of equal opportunities, equitable wealth distribution, and public responsibilities for the people who are not able to benefit themselves from the least provisions for a good life. According to Levenson (2017), welfare states developed as states became richer. The government had pressured and developed the welfare states to ensure that different societal sectors were not being abused. The government intervened in laborers’ wages and their working conditions as the states grew more affluent. The goals that facilitated the formation of the welfare states were based on promoting: class politics, redistribution, and coalitions; risks reapportioning and social needs; state-building and political integration; and socio-economic development and modernization.

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The welfare states fund the governmental organizations for education and healthcare, along with other privileges given to individuals. According to Flora and Alber (2017), old welfare state features, including social insurance and public pension, arose from the 1880s onwards in industrializing European countries. The First and the Second World Wars, and the Great Depression are the most outstanding events that ushered the development of the welfare state. The world wars made nations economically unstable as they focused more on the war rather than building their economy. During the Great Depression, the welfare states were developed as eligibility of the governmental responses to the overwhelming number of citizens and families who needed financial help assistance. Although most countries are offering the necessary support to the citizens up to today, there has been no single requirement set.

The states set their eligibility and programs for themselves. In the United States, the federal government funds the programs which comprise the welfare system. Besides, some individual citizens and non-governmental organizations still fund the programs to help the people who are in need. The welfare public policy covers the support of the people who are in need, as cited in Greer et al., (2017). According to Asatiani and Verulava (2017), welfare case laborers are consistently implementing state policies that are created and developed to discourage the societies from depending on the welfare, in which they mandate employment-related deeds. These vicissitudes establish a revolution in social policy. By then, the system based on making sure the government supports all the citizens who are in need, especially the poor. Today, the public policy for the welfare states regulate the people eligible and the duration in which one can access these benefits. The political polarization was a candid indication of social class conflict in the classical model of industrial societies. As industrialization gave way to industrial nations, politics developed a trend of polarizing along new dimensions that cut across the conventional left-right axis. The discrepancy between the dynamic of contemporary issues polarizations and the traditional alignments of the political parties placed the parties’ system under chronic stress.

In the pre-industrialization era, the states were not well developed, and the economy was somehow not well stable. During this time, the empires, grand civilizations, and prosperity were limited to particular regions. However, in the industrialization and modern globalization, there was incitation of the development of the world capitalist economy as social advances. The development of the welfare states facilitated the industrial revolution and modern globalization to raise the living standards of people and provide employment opportunities to equip the economy. According to Levenson (2017), enlightenment and reformation fundamentally transformed the societies in Europe, whose impacts in the economy sector created a way for the growth of the global market.

In the 1880s in imperial Germany, Otto Von Bismarck was the conscientious person who created the welfare legislation to establish the first welfare state in the modern industrial society. In this era, Bismarck used this state-building strategy to extend the civil liberties of the Junker social classes to ordinary citizens. He created the existing German laws which insure employees against industrial perils found in the workplace and introduced employee health insurance, accident insurances, and old-age pensions, thus forming the foundation of the modern welfare states in Europe. The paternalistic programs which he created focused on forestalling social unrest and undercutting the modern Social Democratic Party’s appeal. In this case, the welfare state secured the social and economic aid of the working-class German citizens. It reduced the emigration to America, which was offering higher wages but no welfare existent.

In the beginning, the liberal social welfare reforms were viewed as sequences of the social legislation, which was approved by the Liberal Party. Welfare represents the growth of modern welfare states. However, the reforms demonstrated the split, which rose within liberalism between the emergence of classical liberalism and social liberalism, and the transformation in the directions of the liberal party from laissez-faire traditional liberalism to a party advocating a larger, more active government protecting the socio-economic issues of the society. As per the conservative approach of welfare, movements and parties of the right do not obliterate the economic safety net for the elderly, the sick, underprivileged, and the unemployed and substitute it with nothing at all. In the beginning, the concept of welfare states was accurately coherent with the conservative political philosophy. In the highly mobile lifestyle, industrialized, and urbanized societies, people, require competent and reliable actions from their federal governments. In this case, the citizens need support, demand for assistance, and the government should provide it. The welfare states were very successful, where the adequate benefits were made available to the unemployed, the widowed, the sick, and the retired. The development of the welfare states neutralized the Greta depression effects and raised the economy of the world.

The reforms facilitated improvements in the working conditions, housing, education, and health services. For instance, according to Mackenbach (2017), the welfare state system helped Northern Ireland’s population through maternity benefits, public assistance, unemployment benefits, and family allowances. Notably, welfare states accomplish their goals. Unemployed citizens can get support from the aligned system, thus boosting their living standards. Considering the financial disaster which was experienced during the Great Depression lowered the living standards of the people globally. During this era, the number of unemployed people increased massively, leading to a high rate of poverty (Pritchard 2019). Thus, with the establishment of the welfare states, the pandemic was neutralized. The welfare states led to industrialization and urbanization, thus promoting the growth and expansion of societies as far as economic and social factors are concerned. The health issues among the citizens have been handled whereby the government supports the people who get sick by paying a full or certain percentage of their bills. Therefore, the welfare states have accomplished their goals in the past and are still achieving their goals and raising the living standards of the peopleEsping-Andersen presented a topology of 18 Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) welfare states basing on three primary principles: decommodification, social stratification, and the private-public mix. Esping-Andersen argued that in the liberal regime states, the delivery of welfare by the states, the benefits offered are moderate and entice strict entitlement criterion. At the same time, the receivers are always stigmatized and means-tested. The conservative welfare state regime is differentiated by the status distinctive welfare programs in which the privileges are regularly earnings correlated, and the benefits are dispensed through the employers and directed towards maintenance of the existing social patterns. In this case, the family role is accentuated, and the re-distribute effects are minimal. He states that the social-democratic regime is a minor regime cluster. The welfare provision is attributed to comparatively and generous universal privileges, an obligation to full employment, and income protections. The sturdily interventionist states are used in promoting equality by a redistributive social security system.

According to Pascall and Sung (2020), decommodification is defined as the extent to which peoples’ welfare is dependent on the market, specifically in terms of sickness, unemployment benefits, and pension. The decommodification concept was introduced by Esping-Andersen, who was sparking contemporary researches efforts on inequalities as far as welfare states are concerned. He pointed out that the total attention on the working peoples’ welfare, facilitates a significant bias in the hunt for the decommodification. Somewhat, the goals of females are to be firstly commodified to enter the labor market. Besides, the ecological economists recognize decommodification as an approach for sustainable consumptions acting one level up on official contexts of use in the societies of the Western comparing to strategies such as eco-sufficiency and eco-efficiency. Therefore, as the eco-efficiency approach focuses on the products and eco-sufficiency aim the consumer as the person making the decision, the decommodification stresses the institutional contexts where consumptions happen. According to Isakjee (2017), it decreases the influences of the commodities and limits the commercialization effects.

There has been social conflict towards the established welfare states. The central focus on the social protection and labor market programs has a critical correlation with the reliance on decommodification as the measure of the welfare impacts. However, modern welfare states emphasize social amenities such as health in the amendment of anguish caused by frailty, accidents, and illnesses. The current states undertake human investments and self-development via allied programs, work experiences, pieces of training, and education. According to Asatiani and Verulava (2017), the early expansion of the mass education states in the United States of America offered an alternate criterion of the social growth to the European welfare states. Another vital flop in the concept of the welfare regimes was the sightlessness of gender. In this case, the women were undertaking the massive bulks of unpaid labor across the advanced world; thus, it established a gendered division of labor that embraced the paid work. The caring roles reproduced inequalities between females and males within their families. In turn, the welfare entailed a significant split between the private and public spheres of social life.

Welfare states and gender centers on the states’ traditional social welfare policies. It focusses on the way it exerts influence on the general social structures. As far as welfare state regimes are concerned, the gender has its variations basing on how a country acts or perceives the gender value. There are three perspectives involved within the welfare state regimes and gender.