The Welfare State and Socialism

Contraception, Abortion and State Socialism

The paper explores the politics of birth control in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), with Russia, Poland and Romania as main cases. By looking at abortion and contraception policies and discourses during and after state socialism, I will discuss to what extent the transition has affected birth control policies. Furthermore, constructions of birth control under and after state socialism are use...

Working in the tracks of state socialism

His remonstrations were enjoined by Robert Merton, who reproached me for the false imputation that mistakes capitalism for industrialism. He was criticising an essay I had written in 1982 about the industrial sociology of his recently deceased student Alvin Gouldner. I claimed that Gouldner’s classic text, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, missed the specifically capitalist character of indus...

The Welfare State and Competitiveness

In all modern industrial countries, redistributive expenditures are a larger component of the government budget than consumption of goods and services. In this paper, we use a general equilibrium, two-country model with exportables, importables and nontraclables to study redistribution across different types of agents in a world characterized by the presence of labor unions and distortionary ta...

The Welfare State and Redistribution

Because it taxes and spends, the welfare state is by definition redistributive, but this does not automatically entail that it creates more equality. A quick historical glance at social reform will dispel of any notion that the welfare state was pursued for egalitarian reasons. Its foundations were typically laid by conservative reformers who, like Bismarck, sought primarily to reproduce, rathe...

Normalization and the Welfare State