Post-War Welfare State Development

Abstract

The key characteristic of the ‘Golden Age’ (1945–1970s) is the breakthrough of universal social rights as the normative background for social policy and the responsibility of nation-states to ensure social justice, social protection, and poverty reduction. The expansion phase of the welfare state can be described in five dimensions: (1) self-conception: social policy as a special field of policy was transformed into a new type of statehood: the welfare state; (2) finance: social policy expenditure increased massively and social benefits grew faster than GDP; (3) performance: new programmes, higher benefit levels, and the inclusion of more and more groups, as well as the transition to active employment policies, strengthened the welfare state; (4) governance: the nation-state, the labour movement, and the employers are dominant actors in this period, but new social movements were playing an increasingly important role. Moreover, welfare production in this period was not only based on state institutions; (5) outcomes: the history of social policy until the 1970s is a process of tremendous progress, but accompanied by several ambivalent developments that were also the sources of crises in social policy in the next period. Nevertheless, key features of social protection programmes during the Golden Age have survived the wave of privatization and deregulation.