Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Setting the scene
- 2 Reasons for welfare
- 3 Alternative institutional designs
- 4 National embodiments
- 5 Background expectations
- 6 Testing the theories with panels
- Part II One standard of success: external moral criteria
- Part III Another standard of success: internal institutional criteria
- Appendix tables
- References
- Index
3 - Alternative institutional designs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- Part I Setting the scene
- 2 Reasons for welfare
- 3 Alternative institutional designs
- 4 National embodiments
- 5 Background expectations
- 6 Testing the theories with panels
- Part II One standard of success: external moral criteria
- Part III Another standard of success: internal institutional criteria
- Appendix tables
- References
- Index
Summary
In this chapter, we present stylized models of different types of welfare regimes. These models represent alternative ‘institutional designs’ (Goodin 1996). ‘Design’, here, does not necessarily imply a designer, some Rousseau-style Lawgiver from whose brow institutional structures sprang fully formed. The institutions of welfare states, and of the larger socio-economic orders in which they are set, emerged over many years, the product of many hands and much political horse-trading.
In the course of all this wrangling over the design and redesign of our inherited institutions, though, patterns nonetheless emerge and clusters form. To some extent this has to do with intentions, ideas and values. According to received wisdom, there are only so many ways of pursuing any given social objective; and unless they can think up some altogether new way of doing things, people (particularly people closely engaged in the day-to-day fray of political life) tend to fall into whichever of the old intellectual ruts suits their principles and purposes. Furthermore, to some extent these ruts are real. That is to say, there is, to some extent, an internal ‘regime logic’ that dictates what institutional options can fit together coherently and work together well.
These institutional designs, by their very nature, blend many different elements. Moral values and social goals are the guiding lights; but they must be given more operational form than ordinarily is the case in more abstract philosophical argumentation.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism , pp. 37 - 55Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999