Democratization, post-industrialization, and East Asian welfare capitalism: the politics of welfare state reform in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan

Abstract

This review article provides an overview of the scholarship on the establishment and reform of East Asian welfare capitalism. The developmental welfare state theory and the related productivist welfare regime approach have dominated the study of welfare states in the region. This essay, however, shows that a growing body of research challenges the dominant literature. We identify two key driving factors of welfare reform in East Asia, namely democratization and post-industrialization; and discuss how these two drivers have undermined the political and functional underpinnings of the post-war equilibrium of the East Asian welfare/production regime. Its unfolding transformation and the new politics of social policy in the region challenge the notion of “East Asian exceptionalism”, and we suggest that recent welfare reforms call for a better integration of the region into the literature of advanced political economies to allow for cross-fertilization between Eastern and Western literatures.

Keywords:

• democratization
• post-industrialization
• welfare capitalism
• developmentalism
• Japan
• South Korea
• Taiwan

Notes on contributors

Timo Fleckenstein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His main research interests are comparative social policy and political economy with a focus on Western Europe and East Asia.

Soohyun Christine Lee is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Comparative Politics in the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Leeds. Before joining POLIS, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the transformation of East Asian welfare states and political economies, but she has also a keen interest in comparing East Asian and European welfare states.