Drawing together leading international experts such as Knut Halvorsen, Robert Y. Shapiro, Stefan Svallfors and Wim van Oorschot, this volume addresses issues of justice and legitimacy in the context of welfare state transformation. The contributors demonstrate that the Western welfare state is not at risk of losing support or encountering fundamental opposition, but does face serious challenges including growing social and ethnic diversity, new social risks, fiscal constraints and contested notions of justice. The volume focuses on four main aspects: attitude formation in cross-national perspective, the just distribution of burdens and benefits, political factors mediating the effects of social attitudes on public policy and challenges to the welfare state stemming from immigration and ethnic diversity. Providing a comparative perspective on the issue, Social Justice, Legitimacy and the Welfare State makes a significant contribution to the literature on the public standing of the welfare state.

Drawing together leading international experts such as Knut Halvorsen, Robert Y. Shapiro, Stefan Svallfors and Wim van Oorschot, this volume addresses issues of justice and legitimacy in the context of welfare state transformation. Providing a comparative

This critical and highly topical introduction to the current debates and politics surrounding welfare reform in the United Kingdom and the United States explains the origins and main tenets of the Blair-Clinton orthodoxy. Central to the book is an examination of this orthodoxy′s appeal to the concept of social justice. Bill Jordan demonstrates how values derived from the family and voluntary associations are in danger of running counter to the more fundamental principles of liberal democracy and the requirements of transnational economic exchange. He links the new politics of welfare to liberal and communitarian theories of citizenship and social justice, and assesses the broader prospects for European social policy in the struggle over economic and political integration. `For more than a decade, Bill Jordan has been one of our most thoughtful and independent thinkers on the future of welfare. Anyone who wants to know more about what is happening to global welfare and why and how it should be changed should read this book′ - Chris Pierson, Department of Politics, University of Nottingham

This accessible and original text combines a systematic examination of the theories of welfare with an historical account of the evolution of the welfare state and its impact in promoting social justice. It identifies the principles governing social distribution and examines the rationales for these different distributive principles. This book also links the theories of distribution to the actual development of social policy and considers their outcomes. Understanding State Welfare will be essential reading for students of social policy. It provides a clear understanding of both theories of welfare and the history of the development of the British welfare state.

The commitment to &“end welfare as we know it&” shaped public policy in the 1990s. Analysts all seemed to agree that public welfare programs were a resounding failure. What should better public care look like? Democracy, Justice, and the Welfare State sets up a dialogue between work on the ethic of care and studies of public care in practice. White argues that care as it is currently institutionalized often both assumes and perpetuates dependency and so paternalistic relationships of authority. Better public care requires that such paternalistic practices be challenged. Care appropriate to a democratic context must itself be a democratic practice.

This book addresses new perspectives on the perceived popular deservingness of target groups of social services and benefits, offering new insights and analysis to this quickly developing field of welfare attitudes research. It provides an up-to-date state of the art in terms of concepts, theories, research methods and data. The book offers a multi-disciplinary view on deservingness attitudes, with contributions from sociology, political science, media studies and social psychology. It links up with central welfare state debates about the allocation of collective resources between groups with particular needs, and wider categories of need.

In this book Bo Rothstein seeks to defend the universal welfare state against a number of important criticisms which it has faced in recent years. He combines genuine philosophical analysis of normative issues concerning what the state ought to do with empirical political scientific research in public policy examining what the state can do. Issues discussed include the relationship between welfare state and civil society, the privatization of social services, and changing values within society. His analysis centres around the importance of political institutions as both normative and empirical entities, and Rothstein argues that the choice of such institutions at certain formative moments in a country's history is what determines the political support for different types of social policy. He thus explains the great variation among contemporary welfare states in terms of differing moral and political logics which have been set in motion by the deliberate choices of political institutions. The book is an important contribution to both philosophical and political debates about the future of the welfare state.

An argument for justifying the welfare state politically rather than economically, based on an ideal of democratic equality.