This project defines a concept, “attention to quality,” and proposes that legislative attention to quality is a dependent variable that political science can use to evaluate the content of representation the political system offers, specifically to trace a means by which politics may influence household exposure to financial risk and possibly income inequality. Upstream of regulation or other formal policy solutions, attention to quality is observable consideration of the possibility that a good poses risk, or fails to shield consumers from risk, due to features of its own design. The project studies congressional attention to quality for three privately-vended, middle-class goods with the capacity to impact household risk exposure: health insurance, home loans, and prescription drugs. It also examines attention to quality in risk-modulating pieces of the welfare-state, taking Medicare as an example. The project explicitly contrasts attention to quality with attention to access for each good. Second, based on original datasets, this project reports robust evidence that legislative attention to access exceeds legislative attention to quality for the privately vended goods, particularly insurance and loans. It finds the reverse true of welfare-state goods. In doing so, the project contributes new quantitative evidence to the emergent body of research in American politics on how political processes, as opposed to strictly the macro-economy, may influence household financial insecurity. Third, the project makes progress in uncovering the underpinnings of quality attention. It finds senator attention to quality linked to partisan considerations—particularly the other political party’s degree of dominance in quality talk—in ways that appear to depress quality attention for privately-vended goods but buoy it for welfare-state goods. Quality’s visibility to the public appears to heighten the degree to which legislators consider the other party’s degree of dominance in quality talk when deciding whether to give quality attention. These patterns occur against a backdrop of what appears to be electorally-minded access attention: incumbents attend to the access facet of privately-vended goods as reelection dates approach, while not exhibiting such behavior around the quality facet. These findings have implications for research on congressional agenda setting and representation.

Why do governments tolerate the violation of their own laws and regulations, and when do they enforce them? Conventional wisdom is that state weakness erodes enforcement, particularly in the developing world. In contrast, I highlight the understudied political costs of enforcement. Governments choose not to enforce state laws and regulations that the poor tend to violate, a behavior that I call forbearance, when it is in their electoral interest. / Government

The diploma thesis deals with the crisis of the welfare state, which is causing problems in the public finance and deteriorating economic situation in many countries. Compares two groups of similar economic level OECD countries which spend the highest and the lowest social expenditure in percentage of GDP. Observes differences in their economic and demographic situation. The thesis also deals with the causes of the crisis and provides an example of successful economic reform, which significantly reduced growth of the welfare state and started a very successful economic period. The results of the analysis and the example of the reform provide some proposals for the welfare state cisis solution throught liberal way.

This dissertation takes a step towards providing a better understanding of post-socialist welfare state development from a theoretical as well as an empirical perspective. The overall analytical goal of this thesis has been to critically assess the development of social policies in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania using them as illustrative examples of post-socialist welfare state development in the light of the theories, approaches and typologies that have been developed to study affluent capitalist democracies. The four studies included in this dissertation aspire to a common aim in a number of specific ways. The first study tries to place the ideal-typical welfare state models of the Baltic States within the well-known welfare state typologies. At the same time, it provides a rich overview of the main social security institutions in the three countries by comparing them with each other and with the previous structures of the Soviet period. It examines the social insurance institutions of the Baltic States (old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, short-term benefits, sickness, maternity and parental insurance and family benefits) with respect to conditions of eligibility, replacement rates, financing and contributions. The findings of this study indicate that the Latvian social security system can generally be labelled as a mix of the basic security and corporatist models. The Estonian social security system can generally also be characterised as a mix of the basic security and corporatist models, even if there are some weak elements of the targeted model in it. It appears that the institutional changes developing in the social security system of Lithuania have led to a combination of the basic security and targeted models of the welfare state. Nevertheless, as the example of the three Baltic States shows, there is diversity in how these countries solve problems within the field of social policy. In studying the social security schemes in detail, some common features were found that could be attributed to all three countries. Therefore, the critical analysis of the main social security institutions of the Baltic States in this study gave strong supporting evidence in favour of identifying the post-socialist regime type that is already gaining acceptance within comparative welfare state research. Study Two compares the system of social maintenance and insurance in the Soviet Union, which was in force in the three Baltic countries before their independence, with the currently existing social security systems. The aim of the essay is to highlight the forces that have influenced the transformation of the social policy from its former highly universal, albeit authoritarian, form, to the less universal, social insurance-based systems of present-day Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This study demonstrates that the welfare–economy nexus is not the only important factor in the development of social programs. The results of this analysis revealed that people's attitudes towards distributive justice and the developmental level of civil society also play an important part in shaping social policies. The shift to individualism in people’s mentality and the decline of the labour movement, or, to be more precise, the decline in trade union membership and influence, does nothing to promote the development of social rights in the Baltic countries and hinders the expansion of social policies. The legacy of the past has been another important factor in shaping social programs. It can be concluded that social policy should be studied as if embedded not only in the welfare-economy nexus, but also in the societal, historical and cultural nexus of a given society. Study Three discusses the views of the state elites on family policy within a wider theoretical setting covering family policy and social policy in a broader sense and attempts to expand this analytical framework to include other post-socialist countries. The aim of this essay is to explore the various views of the state elites in the Baltics concerning family policy and, in particular, family benefits as one of the possible explanations for the observed policy differences. The qualitative analyses indicate that the Baltic States differ significantly with regard to the motives behind their family policies. Lithuanian decision-makers seek to reduce poverty among families with children and enhance the parents’ responsibility for bringing up their children. Latvian policy-makers act so as to increase the birth rate and create equal opportunities for children from all families. Estonian policy-makers seek to create equal opportunities for all children and the desire to enhance gender equality is more visible in the case of Estonia in comparison with the other two countries. It is strongly arguable that there is a link between the underlying motives and the kinds of family benefits in a given country. This study, thus, indicates how intimately the attitudes of the state bureaucrats, policy-makers, political elite and researchers shape social policy. It confirms that family policy is a product of the prevailing ideology within a country, while the potential influence of globalisation and Europeanisation is detectable too. The final essay takes into account the opinions of welfare users and examines the performances of the institutionalised family benefits by relying on the recipients’ opinions regarding these benefits. The opinions of the populations as a whole regarding government efforts to help families are compared with those of the welfare users. Various family benefits are evaluated according to the recipients' satisfaction with those benefits as well as the contemporaneous levels of subjective satisfaction with the welfare programs related to the absolute level of expenditure on each program. The findings of this paper indicate that, in Latvia, people experience a lower level of success regarding state-run family insurance institutions, as compared to those in Lithuania and Estonia. This is deemed to be because the cash benefits for families and children in Latvia are, on average, seen as marginally influencing the overall financial situation of the families concerned. In Lithuania and Estonia, the overwhelming majority think that the family benefit systems improve the financial situation of families. It appears that recipients evaluated universal family benefits as less positive than targeted benefits. Some universal benefits negatively influenced the level of general satisfaction with the family benefits system provided in the countries being researched. This study puts forward a discussion about whether universalism is always more legitimate than targeting. In transitional economies, in which resources are highly constrained, some forms of universal benefits could turn out to be very expensive in relative terms, without being seen as useful or legitimate forms of help to families. In sum, by closely examining the different aspects of social policy, this dissertation goes beyond the over-generalisation of Eastern European welfare state development and, instead, takes a more detailed look at what is really going on in these countries through the examples of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In addition, another important contribution made by this study is that it revives ‘western’ theoretical knowledge through ‘eastern’ empirical evidence and provides the opportunity to expand the theoretical framework for post-socialist societies.

In my thesis I focus on the concept of the Swedish welfare state, which many economists consider as a conclusive evidence that an extensive welfare state is fully compatible with a growing and competitive economy. The main hypothesis is that institutions of the welfare state leads in time to a continual pressure on change of overall condition of all social structures, expansion of the public sector, its overuse and increasing inefficiency. I examine a period from about 1850, when Sweden began to rapidly develop until the turn of the 20th and 21st century, when the Swedish welfare state fell into crisis. The hypothesis is verified by using the methodological approach of induction and with theoretical framework of new institutional economics. Findings of my work shows that the success of Swedish welfare state is rather a result of specific institutional factors that were favorable to business environment for most of the modern Swedish history. On contrary, excessive social spending, high taxes and market regulation from the second half of the 20th century made the system unsustainable and pointed to the need of reformation.

This diploma thesis deals with the welfare state. The first chapter describes the characteristics of the welfare state and its possible different types. The second chapter is concerned with the historical background. The third chapter focuses on the relationship of the welfare state to the middle class and potentional risks which development of the middle class brings. Last, the fourth chapter elaborates one of the proposals for a reform of the welfare state. Specifically, it is focused on Gidden's Third way. This concept is first introduced, followed by critical responses, where a reader learns what above all bothers most opponents of this specific programme.

The diploma thesis is focused on comparison of emergence of welfare states in Great Britain during the government of Labor party in the years 1945-1951 and in Czechoslovakia during the first five-year plan during the government of the Communist party in the years 1948-1953. By degrees there are different elements of the areas of social security, health services, education and housing policy examined. In all these areas the two compared countries faced up to similar problems solved by government interventions; however also significant differences can be found in particular selected solutions. This analysis is focused primarily on the impact on individuals, but also illustrates the difficulty of application of the reforms from the perspective of the government.

Happiness and the effects of happiness on individual level is an well established resarch topic. It is scientifically proven that happy individuals receives benefits regarding health and social life that unhappy individuals does not. This in combination with the average length of an individuals life has increased by 10 years since 1970 makes the relationship between happiness and age an interesting resarch topic. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the existance of a relationship between age and happiness in Sweden and in a selection of other european countries. The data is collected from the european social survey and analysed with multiple regression analysis in SPSS Statistics. The result is discussed in relation to Brüldes (2007) theory of hybrid happiness, Anderssons (2013) theory regarding the life course and Esping-Andersens (1990) theory about different welfare states. The main findings of this study is that there is no relationship between age and happiness in Sweden. There is however a relationship between age and happiness in a couple of european countries included in this study. The countries where the relationship is found belongs to the conservative welfare category. One explanation to why these countries reports a relationship is that conservative welfare gives the citizens individual conditions to care for their family and old ones.

In 1982, when the Social Democrats returned to power, they had two goals. One was to increase the growth in the economy, another to decrease the public debt. This led to a new economic policy for the Social Democrats. The new economic policy was influenced by the neoliberal ideology that started to spread throughout the world from the late 1970s. The purpose of this study is to examine if the Social Democrats favoured economic growth over welfare, fair distribution and state ownership. The results of the study was analyzed with the use of Hiroto Tsukadas Welfare State Theory. The theory claims that politicians favour investments over welfare because welfare consumption decreases economic growth. The empirical analysis is based on parliament debates, party and union congresses, policy programs and memoirs. The results show that the arguments from leading social democrats were pro-growth and for investments over welfare spending and fair distribution policy.

Nordic noir is a distinctive component of the current Nordic cultural export, which has become increasingly popular in recent years not only in Europe. One of the main characteristics of this genre is the description of tensions between the seemingly insignificant and peaceful social climate in the Nordic environment and the murders, racism, inequality and other malfunctioning mechanisms that occur beneath the surface. This creates an ideal spare for criticizing the welfare state. Denmark, as a representative of its Scandinavian model, is also one of the countries where nordic noir has spread very quickly. Therefore, this master thesis will be devoted to analyzing the criticism of the welfare state in the Danish series The Killing in order to demonstrate socio-critical tendencies in the aforementioned genre. It will further examine how they are approached and what specific aspects are subjected to criticism. The work aims to contribute to the current debate by presenting specific examples based on a detailed analysis of the selected case.