Five Rational Actor Accounts of the Welfare State

In this paper, I want to explore possible explanations of the ‘welfare state’. I am not here interested in defending the welfare state, or criticising it, or suggesting how it might be made more effective. I want rather to treat it as a political phenomenon, and to ask what kind of explanation (or explanations) the rational choice tradition of political theory might offer as to why the welfare state came into being, and what impulses if any its continued existence depends on. Put a slightly different way, I am interested in the question: is distributive justice politically feasible? Or more specifically, what is it about political processes (if anything) that inclines us to the view that they are more conducive to the achievement of distributive justice than markets are? After all, a standard picture of the welfare state involves the proposition that the freely operating, more or less competitive, market order is likely to give rise to a distribution of income that shows excessive dispersion from the point of view of distributive justice. Or, if the market order is not likely to generate excessive income inequality, it at least cannot robustly ensure that excessive inequality will not emerge. That being so, we need government to correct the market distribution, or to be available to correct it, should norms of distributive justice require such corrective measures. Or so the argument goes. However, one of the important and consistent general themes of public choice theory (that brand of rational actor political theory that emerges from welfare economics) has been that this kind of justification for government action is inadequate. Perhaps interpreted as a statement about alternative conceivable distributions, the proposition that less dispersion ceteris paribus is better than more is unexceptionable (though which particular ceteris would have to