This thesis seeks to contribute to the knowledge base about social policy in the United States, using long-term care (LTC) financing policy reform as an illustrative example. Specifically, this thesis explores LTC financing reform efforts during three U.S. Presidential administrations: Bill Clinton (1993-2001), George W. Bush (2001-2009), and Barack Obama (2009-2010). Within this historical framework, the LTC provisions of the Health Security Act of 1993, the development of the Community Living Assistant Services and Supports or 'CLASS' Act during the Bush Administration, and the legislative success of the CLASS Act as a part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 provide comparable cases to compare the drivers of social policy. Drawing on the explanatory frameworks of the welfare state such as ideology, historical institutionalism, and an actor-centered approach to policy analysis, this thesis argues that successful path-departing legislation is difficult to achieve due, in part, to the presumed high costs of social programs and the complex institutional framework of the American political system. Policy outcomes result from the interaction between the complex processes and dynamics of the political system through which policy change (or the failure to change) actually occurs. The fact that the CLASS Act was politically successful, yet administratively inoperable as designed, reinforces the argument that social policy outcomes in the United States are reflective of a complex, enduring struggle of competing ideologies. This continual struggle, coupled with a heightened concern over cost control and fiscal austerity, helps to ensure that policies which are legislatively successful within the institutional architecture of the American political system are unlikely to produce major expansions of the welfare state. Social change is therefore highly difficult to achieve, even in the face of significant unmet social needs. Comprehensive reform of U.S. LTC financing arrangements will remain an elusive goal for the foreseeable future. Instead, incremental, highly pro-market solutions are likely to be the types of policies promoted in the years of ahead.

This thesis explores the relationship between gender policy, gender culture, and political participation in unified Germany. It investigates the extent to which political regimes shape citizens' attitudes towards gender roles and examines the effect of such attitudes on women's participation in politics. The thesis is divided into three parts: The first part explores the differences in gender regime types between the former German Democratic Republic and Federal Republic of Germany during the Cold War period. Building on existing studies, the analysis considers how generations that were socialised in the divided Germany differ in their attitudes toward gender roles. It finds that citizens from West Germany are more socially conservative than citizens from the East. The second part of the thesis tests the effects of these traditional gender attitudes on citizens' participation, focusing on party membership. The analysis highlights that gender gaps in formal political participation in unified Germany still exist, but that these gaps are smaller in the new federal states. The investigation further shows that traditional gender attitudes exert a negative effect on women’s political engagement beyond the predictive power of socio-economic and demographic factors. The final part of this thesis casts a critical look at the political controversy in Germany over the introduction of a cash-for-care subsidy (the so-called Betreuungsgeld). It explores the normative assumptions and ideas about gender roles that have been promoted by Germany's main political parties throughout the policy negotiation process. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, the research presented in this thesis draws on, and contributes to, studies on gender, welfare states, political socialisation, and political participation.

The South Australian Rann Labor government elected in 2002 became the first in the nation to address ‘social exclusion’ through the implementation of a Social Inclusion Initiative. The increasingly popular term ‘social exclusion’ was first used overseas in the early 1970s to describe serious symptoms of socio-economic disadvantage linked with global economic restructuring. Taking the South Australian policy initiative as a point of departure, this thesis provides a multi-layered analysis of social exclusion discourses and policy approaches, exploring their significance in the context of Australia’s shifting welfare state terrain. In so doing, the thesis seeks to break new ground both at general theory and specific case study levels by utilising a regulation approach (RA) to test the research hypothesis that ‘social inclusion’ policies are reflective of a transitional neoliberal (or, in some instances, Third Way) mode of social regulation which is inadequate to arrest rising socio-economic inequality linked to the collapse of the post-war ‘Fordist-Keynesian’ consensus. The cross-disciplinary regulation approach is a method of inquiry used to analyse spatially and temporally specific shifts in phases of capitalist accumulation and the different policy and institutional arrangements that support accumulation in each phase. The complex and interrelated institutional shifts at the Australian national level are critical to understanding the origins and impact of ‘social inclusion’ policies. Hence the adoption of this type of policy approach at the South Australian state level is considered in a broader national political economic context where the phenomenon of social exclusion is located within national welfare to work reforms. By applying a regulationist lens to examine the global concept of social exclusion in a local and broader national setting, the thesis offers empirical evidence to one of the ‘missing links’ in the ‘post-Fordist’ literature. That is, it contributes to the debate about whether nascent neoliberal or Third Way modes of social regulation have potential to stabilise capitalism’s inherent crisis tendencies, or whether they merely extend a period of institutional searching. The thesis concludes that the South Australian Social Inclusion Initiative in various ways appears to be not only partial and inadequate in its own terms, but fundamentally in conflict with the South Australian government’s broader policy objectives. In short, it shows that the Initiative has inadequate capacity to address the impact of global structural changes that have caused the polarisation of wealth and increasing poverty. Furthermore, it is argued that this approach attempts to suppress class dissent by silencing potential critics, and fails to intersect with or compensate for national level policies which have served to depress wages and simultaneously reduce the welfare safety net. It is concluded from these findings that these policies do not have the capacity to contribute to an equitable or sustainable new mode of social regulation. The thesis argues that a more comprehensive approach to ‘social inclusion’ is required in the post-Keynesian era and proposes further research to this end. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1348509 / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Social Sciences, 2008

A central theme in the comparative political economy of the welfare state is the complementaries between political institutions, social policy, and labour markets. Yet little has been written to uncover this political-economic nexus in China, the world’s second largest economy. This thesis partly addresses this gap by studying the country’s public pension arrangement, the most expensive component of the Chinese welfare state. It reveals the working of the political-economic nexus in contemporary China by showing how it leads to two puzzling characteristics of the Chinese pension system, namely the rapid expansion in the absence of electoral pressures and the persistent regional fragmentation despite an authoritarian central government. It argues that the decentralised authoritarianism, in which China’s authoritarian central state delegates to regional governments and motivates them to achieve its developmental goals, drives municipal authorities to compete with each other in generating economic growth. In the inter-municipal economic competition, local leaders adopt an expansionary yet localising pension policy. This facilitates the formation of specific industrial skills, which are productive for particular local industries, and the retention of skilled industrial workers. All of this is important to local economic development in a context of industrial upgrading and labour market tightening. It is argued this is the political-economic logic of China’s pension system.

Korea and Japan stand out in the group of OECD countries for their rapid increase in, and high levels of, non-standard employment. The empirical evidence leads us to a two-part puzzle: Why are there so many precarious workers in Korea and Japan? And what are the institutional determinants of such labour market risks? This thesis commences by introducing the concept of 'risk shift', and the fuzzy-set ideal type approach is employed to conduct a comparative study of 18 countries. The labour market risks in Korea and Japan are then compared in an international context with 16 selected OECD countries. Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis is employed to investigate the institutional determinants of labour market risks. It then focuses on the increase in non-standard employement in Korea and Japan. Taiwan is also included as a contrasting case, the study taking an institutional approach employing Comparative Historical Analysis. Chapters employing CHA examine how the different welfare production regimes evolved and how they matter in explaining the high rate of non-standard employment in East Asia. The new risk discussion, the argument on the definition and impact of deindustrialization and lastly theories on East Asian welfare states are revisited in the conclusion of this thesis. Finally, I critically discuss the notion of precarious workers and highlight the centrality of social policy that their organizational configuration affects political culture, the formation of the production system, the structure of the labour market and the kind of risk a country could experience.

In this dissertation I explore the redistributive effects of second-dimensional identity politics in parliamentary democracies. Specifically, I focus on parties’ electoral incentives to manipulate the salience of the territorial-identity cleavage. My main argument is that a greater electoral salience of the second dimension distorts the nature of redistributive outcomes. Although the redistributive effects of second dimensions of political competition have been explored in majoritarian democracies, much less is known about their effects in democracies with proportional representation (PR). The dissertation brings “bad news” in that regard: when the territorial second dimension is salient, it is no longer true that parliamentary democracies with proportional electoral systems redistribute more –which is the prevalent view in the existing literature. In fact, the so called “left-bias” of PR systems vanishes when the territorial-identity cleavage is politically activated. This key insight therefore offers a fundamental qualification to the institutionalism literature, by making an effort to understand the way in which regional diversity interacts with institutions through multidimensional political competition. The dissertation is divided in two parts: one theoretical and one empirical. First, I develop a formal model that illustrates the way in which parties’ second-dimension electoral incentives affect both the electoral stage and the subsequent post-electoral coalition bargaining among parties in national parliaments. The reason is that both right-wing and regionalist parties have incentives to increase the salience of the second dimension at the electoral stage to attract voters, and subsequently the coalition bargaining among parties in parliaments offers new opportunities for legislative coalitions. In the second part of the dissertation, I test the empirical implications at the macro-level, the meso-level and the individual-level. The main empirical results can be summarised as follows. First, I present empirical evidence according to which the legislative salience of the second dimension induces a negative effect on redistribution and a positive effect on the regionalisation of public policy. Second, I provide evidence which shows that both right-wing and regionalist parties strategically increase the electoral salience of the second dimension when they are “losers” on the first dimension. Finally, I illustrate the way in which the salience of the second dimension affects the formation of individual preferences for redistribution. In sum, this dissertation provides new arguments and empirical evidence that demonstrates how second dimensional politics can have profound redistributive consequences in parliamentary democracies.

This thesis contributes to the growing EU-US literature by comparing and explaining the evolution of urban policy in these two federal systems. The thesis begins with a puzzle: after introducing two similar and equally short-lived regeneration schemes—Model Cities (MC) (1967) and URBAN (1994)—the US and the EU followed different paths: the former replaced MC with the durable Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) in 1974, while the latter ended urban policy by ‘mainstreaming’ URBAN in its regional policy in 2006. To solve the puzzle I formulate a two-part argument: first, I explain the similarities between MC and URBAN as resulting from three factors: a favourable political context, holistic urban policy ideas, and centre-periphery mistrust. I then explain subsequent trajectories by looking at the interplay of policy and politico-constitutional institutions. While both MC and URBAN were unable to ‘stick’ because of their inherent weaknesses, the result of their demise depended on the existence of a federal ‘city welfare’ state. In the US, the Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) embodied this state, and channelled Nixon’s attacks on MC into the creation of the structurally stronger CDBG. In the EU, conversely, DG Regio could not provide a comparable anchor for urban policy: when URBAN was attacked by regions and cities, the DG just reverted to its ‘business as usual’ by mainstreaming the programme. I test my argument with a macro-historical comparison of the two cases and four in-depth city studies—Arlington, VA and Baltimore, MD on the US side, and Bristol, UK and Pescara, Italy on the EU side—aimed at analysing micro-level institutional dynamics. In both parts of the study I use a wide range of sources: secondary and grey literature, statistical sources and, especially, archival material and elite interviews. At both levels of analysis the test confirms my argument.

This thesis explores continuity and change in the developmental welfare approach in Thailand following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. It examines both the exogenous and endogenous forces that generated change as well as both the ‘process’ and the ‘content’ of transformation or responses to the crisis. It uses the One Tambon One Product (OTOP) policy as a case study to explore these changes. The principle research question is: To what extent did the post 1997 crisis policy on social protection in Thailand represent a shift from its existing institutional path of developmental welfarism? Extending from this overarching question are subsidiary questions, which guided the thesis. They include: To what extent did the OTOP policy address the social protection gaps that became apparent in the Asian financial crisis? To what extent did the OTOP policy benefit its target population? The thesis uses historical institutionalism (HI) and the role of ideas as the analytic frameworks in analyzing change. The thesis argues that the exogenous shock of the 1997 financial crisis contributed to some departure from the institutional path of developmental welfarism in Thailand. However, the change did not follow the conventional punctuated equilibrium (PE) model under the HI framework in the sense of moving from one equilibrium to another after an exogenous shock. Rather, the radical change that took place after the exogenous shock was gradual. The new set of institutional arrangement prompted significant ideational and institutional transformations. They involved both intended and unintended consequences of incremental shifts in the forms of ‘layering’ ‘drift’ and ‘conversion’ (Streeck and Thelen, 2005). In addition, the thesis argues that the transformation in Thailand after the 1997 financial crisis lies in an intermediate order of change that is found between shifts in policy instrument and a wholesale ‘paradigm shift’ (Hall, 1993). Here, apart from having introduced a new policy such as OTOP, the Thai government engaged in a broader rethinking of Thailand’s developmental welfare path. Moreover, the study finds that the structure of economic development in a developing country context can both promote and impede social protection, rather than only subordinate the latter. The claim is based on the finding that the expansion of economic policy goals in Thailand supported local development and increasing inclusiveness of the informal sector after the 1997 financial crisis. Finally, the thesis argues that social protection delivery or lack thereof reflects contestation of ideas as well as material interests. Both the state and the policy beneficiaries in the OTOP context pushed for their interests when there were gaps between policy formulation and implementation. As a result, changes occurred both in the policy goals and in who benefited from OTOP.

The collapse of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989-1990 heralded the beginning of an economic transition from central planning to market economies. The subsequent period was marked by malfunctioning of these countries’ social sectors, including their health care systems, raising serious issues of equity. This thesis examines the impact of the transition period and the introduction of social insurance on equity in health care provision in Bulgaria. Equity in health care is investigated with respect to function - i.e. financing (according to ability to pay) and delivery (according to need) - and outcomes - i.e. health status, income inequality and poverty. Differences in health, health care financing and delivery are explored by income, education, ethnic, employment, marital status, age and sex groups. Furthermore, the thesis outlines the impact of health care provision, in particular social insurance, on poverty and health inequalities. The thesis employs empirical analysis based on household data. Its methodology includes concentration and decomposition analysis, and provides new ways of modelling health care financing and delivery, as well as the link between health and health care delivery. The thesis concludes that social insurance does not provide a uniform means of improving equity and that the root cause of the problem lies in the large proportion of out-of-pocket payments and the rather limited size of the health insurance sector. Inequity in health care provision leads to poverty and untreated illness. The data suggests that there are differences between socio-economic groups as regards their likelihood to seek treatment for their ill health, which result in differences in their health status. The social factors that have impacted the most on health are low education and low income.

Varieties of Capitalism theory predicts that the skill specificity of workers determines their demand for social protection. In this thesis, I test this assumption using a measure of occupational mobility between pre- and post-unemployment, which I apply to European workers in different skill groups as defined by Fleckenstein et al., (2011). Using this measure as an indicator of the portability of workers' skills, I then evaluate whether the lower marketability of human capital investments is associated with greater demand for unemployment protection. The findings demonstrate that whilst this relationship is apparent in certain countries, notably Coordinated Market Economies such as Germany, the assumptions do not apply across institutional settings. Consequently, skill specificity cannot explain variation in attitudes towards unemployment protection policies between countries.