On the Road to Welfare State Dualism in Germany: Defining the Non-Deserving in Underclass Debates

Description

In the first decade of the 2000s, a German Social Democratic-led government passed labor market and social policy measures of the Agenda 2010, a package of institutional reforms of the labor mar-ket and the welfare state that many observers hail as the basis for the country's recent strong labor market performance. German underclass debates had appeared on the scene of political commu-nication briefly before, as an outlet for expressing strong concerns about the viability of the coun-try's system of social protection and labor market governance. This paper theorizes the different ways in which such discourses can be linked to social policy development. Analyzing the substance of the German underclass perspective on the one hand and the objectives and the direction of social policy change on the other, it probes the way in which the German un-derclass debate was linked to social policy development. It finds that ideas conveyed in public de-bates and popular science publications often play a reflective and rationalizing role rather than initi-ating or guiding policy change. If anything, the discourse of undeservingness helped alienate Social Democracy from the welfare and labor market reform program of the Agenda 2010, a process that has culminated in the current (Social Democratic-led) coalition government's undoing some of its core measures. Over time the retrospective role of underclass debates has begun to shift and is assuming a much more proactive role, suggesting characteristic ways of addressing social needs. This shift has signifi-cantly been driven by the fact that with the growth of Germany's right-wing populist party, the AfD, there has been a political outlet and an actor that has made the exclusivist policy agenda its own.  

Period	27 Jun 2023
Event title	29th International Conference of Europeanists
Event type	Conference
Location	IcelandShow on map