Welfare attitude and economic developmentalism in new democratic developmental welfare state: an examination of the Taiwanese case

ABSTRACT

Do political democratization and the worsening income inequality result in the increase in public support for redistribution in East Asian democratic developmental welfare states? This study aims to examine atypical case of new democratic developmental welfare state, Taiwan, through quantitative analysis. Our empirical findings demonstrated that the perception of income inequality will cause dissatisfaction with the performance of the democratic regime, and then, erode public support for redistribution. This study argues that the mitigation of income inequality would be helpful to increase political satisfaction and for welfare state building for new democracies.

KEYWORDS:

• Welfare attitude
• economic developmentalism
• East Asian developmental welfare state
• political democratization
• income inequality
• Taiwan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Recently, welfare attitude studies also gain its importance in welfare state studies when organized interest groups have been disorganized by post-industrialization and globalization which result in the increase in non-regular workers with different social policy preferences from traditional core workers (Gingrich & Häusermann, 2015; Marx, 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan [108-2410-H-031 −069 -MY2].

Notes on contributors

Chung-Yang Yeh

Chung-Yang Yeh is Associated Professor at the Department of Sociology, Soochow University, Taiwan. He received his PhD from Division of Sociology, Social Policy & Criminology, the University of Southampton, the United Kingdom in 2014. His main research interests include ‘comparative East Asian welfare states’, ‘welfare attitudes’, ‘pension policy’ and ‘poverty studies’.

Yeun-Wen Ku

Yeun-wen Ku is Professor at the Department of Social Work, National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Manchester, U.K. and then taught social policy in Taiwan’s universities for over twenty years. He has written widely on welfare development and policy debates in Taiwan, extending to comparative study on East Asian welfare.