Globalization and welfare state
On February, 2nd, 2012, Alexander Kustov gave a talk on “Globalization and support of welfare state: do institutions and identities matter?”
On February, 2nd, 2012, Alexander Kustov LCSR associate researcher and student on University of Mannheim gave a talk on “Globalization and support of welfare state: do institutions and identities matter?” His research focuses on influence of globalization on public support of welfare state in OECD countries.
The first part of the presentation covered key theoretical approaches to this topic in social science. The “welfare state” concept is unusual to Russian language, though this term is well-established. The following topic is widely discussed in theoretical literature but the estimates of dissemination of this type of the state are quite controversial. Most researches consider only objective indicators of “welfare state” concept, such as social spending and other characteristics of social policy of the country.
The Alexander’s working hypothesis is that there is a relation between globalization and subjective indicators of welfare state. In particular, respondents’ belonging to the country was measured with the question about national pride.
Author used the regression as a main method of analysis, based on World Value Survey and other datasets. Preliminary results demonstrate that the globalization is connected with the support of redistribution in OECD countries. One of the interesting results is that a social measurement of globalization increases the role of redistribution, while its economic measurement on the contrary declines it.
After the report, some further directions of the research were discussed, including extension of the number of countries under investigation. One of the recommendations was to construct multilevel model in order to gain more representative results.
Alexandra Shishova