Field Notes

concept

Welfare-state dualization

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Welfare-state dualization is the increasing separation of social protection between labour-market insiders and outsiders. Insiders have stable employment, contribution records, collective representation, or accrued entitlements; outsiders have insecure work, unemployment, weak attachment, or incomplete eligibility.

Dualization is not equivalent to shrinking the entire welfare state. A state can preserve or improve benefits tied to established employment and retirement while making unemployment, sickness, or social-assistance provision less generous or more conditional. Aggregate spending can therefore obscure a large change in who is protected and on what terms.

The concept provides a more precise interpretation of rhetoric about work, self-support, and benefit dependency. Such rhetoric may express a general fiscal concern, but it can also legitimate a distributive boundary between protected earners and disciplined outsiders. Determining which account fits requires programme-level rules and incidence, not slogans alone.

Dualization of social rights in Sweden and beyond develops a direct measure of these differences in programme rules. Swedish pension and unemployment-insurance reforms show that organized interests and Social Democratic participation can be central to retrenchment. This helps explain how parties can adapt around established constituencies without a simple mass switch from left to right. Boomers and democracy asks whether cohort ageing contributed to that adaptation; the dualization evidence alone cannot answer the cohort question.

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