Introduction

In the period following the ‘golden age’ of welfare states, discussion turned towards the crisis of the welfare state, both in the academic literature (O’Connor, 1973; Crozier et al, 1975) and beyond, most notably in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) The Welfare State in Crisis (OECD, 1981). Later on, several contributions such as Mishra (1984), Offe (1984) and Klein (1993) discussed the ongoing crisis of the 1980s from different perspectives. The issue of crisis largely disappeared from the literature (at least in a general sense) between 2000 and 2008. In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 several books and many articles have dealt with the topic of the crisis (Farnsworth and Irving, 2011; Richardson, 2011; Greve, 2012). It has even been labelled a double crisis, in the sense that the pressures from immediate cuts – especially on the most vulnerable and dependent – and longer-term pressures on health and social care, linked to demographic pressures and rising healthcare costs, combine to create greater challenges for welfare states (Taylor-Gooby, 2013). Further, the ongoing reductions in welfare expenditure may, as has been argued, have a negative impact on health in Europe as there is a relation between welfare spending and health (Karanikolos et al, 2013). Crisis or not, there is also evidence of remarkable stability in social policy over the long run (Pierson, 2011) and even, perhaps, an increase in services, such as care for children.

Besides direct retrenchment and gradual changes in welfare spending, although these have varied among different welfare states (Table 5.2), there have been debates in many countries on the ‘Big Society’ and the use of voluntary work as a way of responding to the demand for more welfare. Developments in the Big Society, albeit direct or indirect cuts in spending do have an influence on civil society and voluntary work, are outside the scope of this chapter (cf. for the UK, Ishkanian and Szreter, 2012). At the same time there has been less focus on what has been labelled the more hidden part of the welfare state (Howard, 1997; Greve, 1994), for example the fiscal and occupational side of welfare delivery in Titmuss's understanding of the social division of welfare (Titmuss, 1987).