Bossing or Protecting? The Integration of Social Regulation into the Welfare State

• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Author: Philipp Trein
• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716220953758

953758ANN
THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYSocial Regulation and the Welfare State
research-article2020
This article is an empirical analysis of how social regula-
tion is integrated into the welfare state. I compare
health, migration, and unemployment policy reforms in
Australia, Austria, Canada, Belgium, France, Germany,
Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden,
Switzerland, the UK, and the United States from 1980
to 2014. Results show that the timing of reform events
is similar among countries for health and unemploy-
ment policy but differs among countries for migration
Bossing or
policy. For migration and unemployment policy, the
integration of regulation and welfare is more likely to
Protecting? The entail conditionality compared to health policy. In other
words, in these two policy fields, it is more common
that claimants receive financial support upon compli-
Integration of ance with social regulations. Liberal or Continental
european welfare regimes are especially inclined to
Social
integration. I conclude that integrating regulation and
welfare entails a double goal: “bossing” citizens by mak-
ing them take up available jobs while expelling migrants
Regulation into and refugees for minor offenses; and protecting citizens
from risks, such as noncommunicable diseases.
the Welfare Keywords: immigration; immigrant integration; labor
State
market policy; health care; public health;
social investment
In the last two decades, the study of regula-
tory governance has become interesting to
political researchers. Scholars have focused on
By
regulatory policy instruments and agencies,
PhILIPP TReIN
which deal with the consequences of economic
liberalization (e.g., Majone 1996; Braithwaite
2008; Gilardi 2008; Levi-Faur 2011; Maggetti
2012) in different policy areas (e.g., Ozel 2013;
Reynaers and Parrado 2017).
Against this background, researchers have also
assessed how regulatory policies have permeated
Philipp Trein is a senior researcher and lecturer at the
University of Geneva. He also holds an Ambizione
Research Grant of the Swiss National Science
Foundation. His research interests cover comparative
public policy, governance, health and social policy, and
the politics of data protection.
Correspondence: josefphilipp.trein@unige.ch
DOI: 10.1177/0002716220953758
104
ANNALS, AAPSS, 691, September 2020

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SOCIAL ReGULATION AND The WeLFARe STATe
105
social policy and the welfare state. Although scholars have assessed the regulatory
dimension of the welfare state for a long time (Kliemt 1993; Swenson 2004), there
is a growing interest in the link between regulation and welfare. More recently,
scholars have focused on the regulation of private pension schemes (Leisering 2012;
Benish, haber, and eliahou 2017), welfare-related effects of utility regulation
(haber 2011, 2017), the regulation of job security (emmenegger 2014; Zohlnhöfer
and Voigt 2020), and social assistance (Özel and Parado 2020), as well as the regula-
tory dimension of social policy at the eU level (Graziano and hartlapp 2018;
hartlapp 2019). Nevertheless, some broader questions remain (Benish and Levi-
Faur 2020). For example, the role of social regulations in the welfare state, which
target the behavior of individuals directly, needs more empirical work (Levi-Faur
2014, 607).
In this article, I explore how social regulation and fiscal transfers are linked
within welfare state reforms in different policy domains and countries. By using
an original empirical dataset, I descriptively analyze (Gerring 2012) the wave of
reforms linking regulation and welfare in health, immigration, and unemploy-
ment policy across thirteen developed democracies. I explain how integrating
regulation and welfare varies between the three policy fields, and I show that
there are differences between countries and over time. harkening back to litera-
ture on the complexity of policy fields (Trein and Maggetti 2020), I argue that we
see different patterns concerning the integration of regulation and welfare
between migration on one hand, and health and unemployment policy on the
other. In migration and unemployment policy, integrating regulation and welfare
entails a strong conditionality dimension, that is, the receipt of monetary benefits
depends on compliance with regulations. In health policy, compliance plays a
minor role as target groups have more political clout (Schneider and Ingram
1993). I hold that there are differences between welfare state types regarding
such reforms, as Continental european and liberal welfare states are more
inclined to use regulations to cover the reduction of benefits and to commodify
social services (Iversen and Wren 1998; häusermann and Schwander 2012; Levi-
Faur 2014).
Second, using the idea of the protective state (Ansell 2019), I argue that inte-
grating regulation and welfare has two faces. On one hand, integrating regulation
and welfare has the potential to protect citizens from the forces of the market.
On the other hand, such reforms and policies have a capability to boss individuals
and to put pressure on them; for example, by forcing them to participate in the
labor market. I use this distinction to develop an argument that distinguishes two
approaches to integrating regulation and transfers through public policy. The first
is a “regulation first approach,” in which the government uses primarily social
regulations to improve welfare, whereas transfer measures have a
complementary role. The second is a “transfer first approach,” which contains the
primary use of transfers and where social regulations play a secondary role. I
conclude by linking the idea of bossing and protecting to the uses of welfare and
regulation in social policy, and I suggest how future research can address this
topic in a theoretical and empirical manner.

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The ANNALS OF The AMeRICAN ACADeMY
Theoretical Starting Point and Dataset
The theoretical starting point for this research is the concept of the regulatory
welfare state (RWS). In two articles, David Levi-Faur developed a regulatory
perspective on the welfare state and coined the term regulatory welfare state
(Levi-Faur 2013, 2014). This term combines the concepts of a welfare state,
which aims to “promot[e] equality, solidarity and social justice” through fiscal
redistribution with the regulatory state, which works according to “criteria of
economic efficiency while keeping politics of equality out” (Benish haber, and
eliahou 2017, 315–6). Against this background, Levi-Faur suggested two ideal
types of the welfare state—the “fiscal-welfare state” and the “regulatory-welfare
state.” Both types aim to achieve welfare goals but with different means: fiscal
welfare policy contains the use of redistributive policy instruments, whereas
regulatory welfare policy uses regulatory instruments (Levi-Faur 2014, 608).
In this article, I focus on the integration of regulation and welfare, that is, the
merging of policy goals or coordination of public sector agencies, for regulating
social behavior with the provision of fiscal transfers or social services. Therefore, the
article focuses on three policy fields. First, in unemployment policy, governments
have integrated regulation and welfare by making the receipt of welfare benefits
conditional upon compliance with regulations that demand benefit claimants par-
ticipate in job trainings or even accept certain jobs (Clasen and Clegg 2011).
Second, another example of regulatory social policies is immigrant integration pol-
icy, which obligates immigrants to make use of integration measures (Goodman and
Wright 2015, 1886–1887) to receive permanent residency or citizenship, which then
entitles them to receive welfare benefits. Third, a further example of integrating
regulation and welfare is the integration of health care services with measures that
incentivize individuals to take preventative health measures (Trein 2017b, 2018).
I compiled a dataset that measures the integration of regulation and welfare
according to the previously mentioned examples. health, migration, and unem-
ployment represent three very different examples of the integration of regulation
and welfare. A description of the data can be found elsewhere (Trein and
Maggetti 2020). The dataset covers over 30 years (between 1980 and 2014) and
thirteen countries, which represent different welfare state types (Levi-Faur
2014): Liberal (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, and the U.S.), Continental
european (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland),
one Southern european (Italy), and one Social Democratic (Sweden). The data
start with the onset of “regulatory capitalism” (Braithwaite 2008, 1), which entails
that government bodies (agencies) that are independent from government’s
immediate control and are in charge of regulatory policymaking and implementa-
tion in many policy fields (Jordana and Levi-Faur 2004; Maggetti 2009; Jordana,
Levi-Faur, and Fernández i Marín 2011). Originally, the dataset was created to
analyze the coordination and integration between policy instruments and public
sector organizations (Trein 2017c; Trein, Meyer, and Maggetti 2019; Trein and
Maggetti 2020). In addition to policy coordination and integration, the data also
measure the integration of regulation and welfare.

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TABLe 1
Empirical...