Welfare reform and public justification

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the conditions of political argument with regard to welfare legislation. It connects to the discussion on the role of ideas in political change but develops a new approach by investigating arguments in light of theories of public justification in a democratic society. The paper uses a recent Norwegian law as the case for studying how politicians frame their arguments for “mandatory activation,” meaning the policy that requires recipients to participate in work-oriented activities. The paper finds that Norwegian advocates of activation use a “justificatory narrative” that presents the new law as a form of paternalistic concern for the benefit recipients. It is argued that this justification can be understood as shaped by certain basic conditions of political viability.

KEYWORDS:

• Public justification
• welfare programmes
• welfare reform
• political viability
• justificatory narrative

Acknowledgments

This paper is part of the project Between Income Maintenance and Activation: the legitimacy, implementation and outcomes of social security policies (TREfF2) and has been supported in several ways by the project leader Lars Inge Terum. We are also grateful to all who have commented in seminars, to Stein Kuhnle, Flemming Larsen and Oddgeir Osland for having prepared comments on earlier versions, and to two reviewers for this journal. Marte Mangset and Silje Tellmann made helpful suggestions regarding interviewing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Andreas Eriksen has worked on professional ethics and welfare policy at the Centre for the Study of Professions at Oslo Metropolitan University. He studies the legitimacy of expert agencies as postdoctoral fellow at ARENA Centre for European Studies at the University of Oslo.

Anders Molander is professor at the Centre for the Study of Professions at Oslo Metropolitan University. His fields of interest are moral, political and social theory and his current research is on welfare policy and on the relationship between democracy and expertise.

ORCID

Andreas Eriksen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7229-6902

Anders Molander http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4315-4558

Notes

1 The OECD defines activations strategies as policies that seek “to bring more people into the effective labour force, to counteract the potentially negative effects of unemployment and related benefits on work incentives by enforcing their conditionality on active job search and participation in measures to improve employability, and to manage employment services and other labour market measures so that they effectively promote and assist the return to work” (2013, 132).

2 We borrow the term and parts of the accompanying conceptual structure from Rainer Forst (2015, Ch. 3).

3 For good overviews, see the entry on “Public Justification” in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Gaus (2003).

4 See Greenawalt (1995), Gaus (1996, 2011), Chambers (2010), Wall (1996), and Zoll (2016, Ch. 7.1.).

5 For the constraints on arguments in formal political institutions compared to the discourse in civil society, see Habermas (2006). See also Mansbridge et al. (2012).

6 See Ronald Dworkin (1977, 179–183, 277) and his well-known distinction between “equal treatment” and “treatment as equals.” For a discussion of this principle, see Gosepath (2004, Ch. 3).

7 More precisely, a throffer can be defined as follows: A threatens B by proposing to make B worse off relative to some baseline; A makes an offer to B by proposing to make B better off relative to some baseline. If B does not accept A’s offer, he will be no worse off in the relevant baseline position. In the case of a throffer, B will make A worse off than in the relevant baseline position, if B does not accept A’s offer. See Wertheimer (1987, 204).

8 The Christian Democrats were positive, but did not have a representative in the Storting’s Standing Committee on Labour and Social Affairs nor did their arguments deviate clearly from the government position. The Liberal Party was lukewarm and in an interview with us its representative in the Committee supported it as an experiment. The Centre Party opposed the suggestion mostly for the same reasons as the two opposition parties we discuss below (Labour Party and Socialist left) but with a greater emphasis on the value of municipal autonomy and frontline discretion.

9 For detailed studies of how this scheme developed in relation to the introduction of more rights-based social insurance benefits, see Bradshaw and Terum (1997) and Lødemel (1997). The former highlights how Norwegian social assistance is similar to analogous schemes in other “small, communitarian, affluent and homogenous countries,” while the latter compares Norwegian “residual” social assistance with the more “institutionalized” British version.

10 Later, due to negotiations with municipalities, the government decided to start with young people. The new clause in the Social Service Act says that frontline workers shall make social assistance conditional on work-oriented activity for those under 30 (Social Service Act, § 20 a., added by law 20 December 2016, in force from 1 January, 2017).

11 While the Conservative Party is similar to other parties of the same name, the Progress Party needs some explanation (here, we draw on an encyclopedia entry by Jupskås and Garvik [2017]). The party ideology is a mixture of right-wing populism and economic liberalism. This is the first government coalition that it is a part of, and it had originally built its political name as a protest movement in the name of the people against the established parties. The party wants to lower taxes and yet spend more money on health care, crime, and infrastructure (which is made possible due to its willingness to spend more of Norway’s oil revenue than other parties). The focus on lowering taxes, which was the original platform (1973), has, over the past three decades, been overshadowed by an increased anti-immigration stand. See also Jupskås (2016) on “how the Progress Party (almost) became part of the mainstream.”

12 The following parliamentary documents make up our sources: the Proposition to the Storting (Prop. 39 L [2014–2015]), the Recommendation to the Storting (Innst. 208 L [2014–2015]), and the White Paper (White Paper, 33 [2015–2016]).

13 But see Molander and Torsvik (2015) for a normative assessment of the comparative merits of the arguments of a similar fourfold justificatory set.

14 https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/483f8241d65d4572824aa5d0f334fc5b/m_jussbuss_aktivitetsplikt.pdf.

15 In an op-ed, the Minister of Labour and Social Inclusion from the Conservative Party spoke of economic savings as a “nice by-product” (VG, 2016.11.14.).

16 A very much cited definition of paternalism is the one by Gerald Dworkin, here cited in the last version: “X acts paternalistically towards Y by doing (or omitting) Z if and only if: (1) Z (or its omission) interferes with the liberty or autonomy of Y; (2) X does so without the consent of Y; (3) X does just so because doing Z will improve the welfare of Y (where this includes preventing his welfare from diminishing), or in some way promote the interests, values, or good of Y” (Dworkin 2013, 29). For the first version, see Dworkin (1972).

17 In a much-quoted interview, Gerhard Schröder did argue publicly against the “right to be lazy”: “Wer arbeiten kann, aber nicht will, der kann nicht mit Solidarität rechnen. Es gibt kein Recht auf Faulheit in unserer Gesellschaft!” [“Those who can but will not work cannot expect solidarity. There is no right to be lazy in our society!”] (Bild, 2001.4.6). This created much controversy in Germany (see the discussion in Kaufmann [2013, ch. 4]). However, this has not prevented academics from arguing along the same lines (e.g. Eichenhofer [2015, 133, 141–142]).

18 On Norwegian (and Nordic) egalitarianism, see Blomquist and Moene (2015).

19 We thank an anonymous referee for the journal for pressing us on this topic.

20 http://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2012/12/cchq-launches-attack-ad-in-marginal-constituencies-hardworking-families-vs-people-who-dont-work.html.

21 “To make demands is to care” was originally a slogan for the Liberal Party in Sweden (Dahlstedt 2008). In Norway, it was the title of an op-ed published shortly before the law in question went into effect (VG 11.14.2015), signed by the Conservative’s Minister of Labour and Social Inclusion.

22 In this regard, their account of the volitional structure of recipients resonates with the account of akrasia given by Scanlon (1998, 39–40). As he describes it, acratic actions are not cases in which rational judgment is hijacked by some desire. Rather, the capacities for judgment themselves are malfunctioning. In line with this, recipients are portrayed by politicians as lacking a clear-sighted judgment on what they should do.

23 In Norway, since the early nineties, it has been called “arbeidslinja,” (“work line”) which is another expression that was borrowed from Sweden. The welfare state shall provide a safety net for those who unwillingly are separated from the labour market, but first do what it can to prevent that people able to work end up living on public benefits. According to a white paper delivered by the social democratic government in 1994-1995 welfare schemes should be “designed, dimensioned and organized” to support the goal of getting as many as possible into work (White Paper 35 [1994-95]).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Norges Forskningsråd: [Grant Number 257603].