Social services as critical infrastructure – conceptualising and studying the operational core of the social investment state

IF 1.5 Q3 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Tanja Klenk, Renate Reiter
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

‘Social investment’ as an idea to justify social policy reforms has become more and more accepted in recent years and has decisively shaped agenda setting and policy formulation in European welfare states. The effectiveness of this new welfare state model, however, depends highly on the capacity to provide social services. Social services – job training, counselling and support for care work – are a key component of the social investment model. Drawing on the policy capacity approach, the article provides an analytical framework to study the ‘operational core’ of the social investment state. This implementation perspective allows us to assess whether governance actors actually have the resources to fulfil the social investment idea of enhancing citizens’ freedom to act. Empirically, the article concentrates on two selected European welfare states, Germany and France, countries with similar welfare systems but very different politico-administrative systems, and on two fields of social service provision that are addressed differently in the social investment debate: early childhood education and care (ECEC) and elderly care. Empirically, we use systematic content analysis to intensively study policy documents and secondary analyses. We show that both countries (still) lack policy capacities in these two sectors as a basis for resilient implementation of the social investment paradigm.
作为关键基础设施的社会服务——概念化和研究社会投资国家的运营核心
近年来,“社会投资”作为一种证明社会政策改革合理性的理念越来越被接受,并决定性地影响了欧洲福利国家的议程制定和政策制定。然而,这种新的福利国家模式的有效性在很大程度上取决于提供社会服务的能力。社会服务——工作培训、咨询和护理工作支持——是社会投资模式的关键组成部分。本文借鉴政策能力方法,提供了一个分析框架来研究社会投资国家的“运营核心”。这种执行视角使我们能够评估治理行为者是否真的有资源来实现增强公民行动自由的社会投资理念。从经验上讲,这篇文章集中于两个选定的欧洲福利国家,德国和法国,这两个国家的福利制度相似,但政治行政制度截然不同,以及在社会投资辩论中不同处理的两个社会服务领域:幼儿教育和护理(ECEC)和老年护理。实证上,我们使用系统的内容分析来深入研究政策文件和二次分析。我们表明,这两个国家(仍然)缺乏这两个部门的政策能力,这是有弹性地实施社会投资模式的基础。
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来源期刊
European Journal of Social Security
European Journal of Social Security PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION-
CiteScore
1.80
自引率
14.30%
发文量
28
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