Political deliberation in welfare state development

This project uses a mixed-method design to examine how and why politicians engaged in political deliberation before enacting path-breaking social policy reforms in 16 rich democracies from 1900 to 1980. It seeks to understand whether today’s welfare states are predominantly the product of cut-throat power politics or whether elected representatives across the political spectrum also tended to discuss reasons for their policy positions in an open and respectful manner. Which governments deliberated openly about which types of reforms? Why and with what consequences? Did deliberation pay off in the sense that deliberative governments tended to gain electorally or did governments fair better when they restricted public discussion around reforms? It is tantamount to a truism today to say that the welfare state is popular, though early reforms were made in the context of considerable uncertainty and aroused fear and distrust, as in the case of early 20th century vaccination and pension policies in Britain (Pelling 1968). Deliberating, or the act of openly justifying reforms, potentially brings opposing sides to a common understanding, such as in the case of the New Deal in the US (Ackerman 1998). Understanding the role of political deliberation in major social policy reforms sheds light on the promise and peril of employing political deliberation in addressing present-day risks such as climate change.

The methodologies employed are both quantitative (linear regression, quantitative content analysis) and qualitative (qualitative content analysis, process tracing through case studies). In Part I, linear regression is used to gauge broad trends in the determinants and consequences of reform activity using a new dataset on social policy reforms, thereby recommending a subset of reforms for further analysis that are likely to exhibit differing degrees of deliberation given characteristics of the reform and country context. In Part IIa, the legislative sessions for each reform in this subset are analyzed using quantitative and qualitative content analysis. Using quantitative content analysis, legislative texts are used to construct Discourse Quality Indices (Steenbergen et al 2003, Bächtiger and Parkinson 2019), whereas qualitative content analysis deepens our knowledge of the meaning of quality discourse by considering the relevance of the order of various statements and the cultural and political context. Almost all legislative debates are available online, thanks to ongoing advancements in the digitalization of legislative archives. In Part IIb, in-depth country case studies place the analysis of deliberation in legislative debates within its social, economic, and political context. In sum, Part II responds to the question of how and why governments engage in deliberation over major social policy reforms.