Historical institutionalism (HI) is by now so established in political science and
sociology that adherents have begun to publish articles and chapters that take stock of HI’s
achievements and pinpoint its weaknesses (Thelen 1999, Pierson and Skocpol 2002).
Two
weaknesses have received significant attention. First, HI is too institutional and not historical
enough.
Second, HI pays too little attention to ideational variables. The latter criticism is
somewhat surprising given historical institutionalism’s insistence that preferences are not
exogenously given, but are something to be explained (Thelen and Steinmo 1992). Focusing
on the ideational and cognitive sources of preferences could contribute to addressing this
weakness. Several recent studies put ideas at the center of the analysis (Berman 1998; Blyth
2002; Blomquist 2002) but much influential work does little to incorporate ideas and
cognitive processes as explanatory variables (Pierson 1994, 2004; Thelen 2004; Immergut
1992 to name just a few).
The study of the welfare state is especially suited to analyzing the temporal and
ideational dimensions of politics because welfare states as we know them now originated in a
series of political compromises that began in the advanced industrial countries in the late
1800s. If history and ideas matter anywhere, they should matter in the development of the
welfare state. Social policies, probably more so than other kinds of public policy, are infused
with ideas and cognitive understandings about the proper role of the state, market and family
in guaranteeing welfare, and of what the “good society” looks like. But the number of studies
that take a truly historical approach AND pay attention to the role of ideas is not very large.
In most studies, if ideas are important at all, they are captured by the variables ideology or
partisanship.
This paper focuses on how two sets of ideational and cognitive factors shape welfare
state development. First, the paper asks how the ideas and cognitive understandings that are
embedded and institutionalized in existing welfare state institutions shape social policy-
making. Second, the paper investigates the ways in which labor movements developed their
own, nationally distinct understandings of solidarity and the role of the state in the provision
of social welfare and how these visions of “the good society” in Sweden, the Netherlands and
Germany shaped their responses to economic pressures for welfare state restructuring in the
1990s and 2000s. The paper thus examines ideas, visions and cognitive understandings
embedded in public policies themselves as well as in labor movements’ political identities.
This paper argues that explanations based on interests and institutions offer an
incomplete account of social policy responses to economic crisis and “permanent austerity”
1
The title of this paper borrows from Hattam (1993).
2
This is Pierson’s (2004) criticism.
3
As Beland (2004) notes, Amenta’s (2003) review of HI in social policy does not even mention ideational
variables.
4
This is Pierson’s term.
2
Convention