The Tragic Decline of the Poverty Reducing Capacity of the Welfare State: Lessons from Two Decades of Social Policy Research

Social policy research on poverty has made great progress in terms of the conceptualization and the measurement of both the dependent and the independent variables and paved the way for the development of social indicators, the use of which is now widespread and has become increasingly influential in Europe and beyond. The sobering conclusion of this rich and abundant research is that, although there was a great diversity in experiences across countries and across time, many welfare states succeed less in their central mission of reducing poverty. The causes of disappointing poverty trends in rich welfare democracies remain, however, poorly understood. In this paper, we provide an overview of what social policy research has learned about poverty and policy in recent decades. We argue that whereas social policy research in the past could limit itself to studying the impact of individual policies in order to come to recommendations on best practices, now more systemic, forward-looking and problem-solving approaches are needed. To that end, social policy research should take a wider time, scale and space perspective, looking not only at individual policies but also at bundles of policies, how these bundles are tied to the basic architecture of welfare states, how welfare states interact with each other and how they respond to changing social, economic and ecological needs.