’Late Industrializers’ and the Development of the Welfare State

Industrialization has long been recognized as a key component in the emergence and development of state welfare regimes. The classic source in the comparative literature is Wilensky’s (1975) The Welfare State and Equality. Drawing on the earlier work of Cutright (1965), Aaron (1967) and Pryor (1968), Wilensky concluded that ‘economic growth and its demographic and bureaucratic outcomes are the root cause of the general emergence of the welfare state’ (1975: p. xiii). According to this account, the origins of the welfare state lay in secular changes associated with the broad process of industrialization and, particularly, the breakdown of traditional forms of social provision and family life. These changes included economic growth (and the greater affluence it generated), growth in population (especially of an aged and urban population), the developed division of labour, the creation of a landless working class (and, subsequently, its political mobilization), the rise of cyclical unemployment, changing patterns of family and community life and (at a somewhat later stage) industry’s increasing need of a reliable, healthy and literate workforce. The empirical work of Cutright, upon which Wilensky drew, suggested that ‘the degree of social security coverage is most powerfully correlated with its level of economic development’ (Cutright 1965: 537). Wilensky’s own empirical work led him to conclude that more than 85 per cent of the international variance in social security effort was to be explained by economic development, combined with the dependent effects of the proportion of aged in the population and the age of the social security system. He concluded that ‘there is not much variance left to explain’ (Wilensky 1975: 22–5, 47).