Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

CATHERINE SPIESER
redistributive, and whether it is pooling risks
(and to what extent). This assumes a certain
consistency across branches or policy areas, or
at least that the actors interpret it as such.
Comparative welfare studies provide models for
the explicit or implicit political compromises that
are underlying solidaristic- or individualisticoriented
welfare regimes and ensure their
stability over time. Welfare state generosity
is often thought to be rooted in a democratic
class struggle in which the social democratic
parties and unions prove particularly powerful
(Korpi 1983). However, class is a problematic
concept in Poland where there is little empirical
evidence of class consciousness (Meardi 2000;
Ost & Crowley 2001 and Ost 2005) and
widespread aversion to class-based ideology.
Baldwin’s (1990) idea of risk communities is
more enlightening to explain the emergence
of institutions providing risk-pooling, or their
absence. Social insurance, he argues, introduced
a distinctive political dimension in that ‘the
terms of misfortune’s reapportionment were
determined not privately, but by society as a
whole in accordance with commonly accepted
standards of equity’, a process through which
‘concerns that had formerly been individual
became political’ (ibid.: 2).
Redistributive policies such as welfare
programmes (or income tax) tend to create
‘haves and have-nots’ (Lowi 1964: 691),
redistributive winners and losers. Social
insurance redistributes the cost of managing
socioeconomic risks rather than resources
(Baldwin 1990: 19). Policies respond and give
rise to demands for protection and support,
expressed by certain categories of individuals,
while other groups are satisfied by the primary
distribution of socioeconomic capacities and
security. The ‘risk categories’ group ‘actors
identified and given interests in common by
their shared relations to the means of security,
by their stake in or against the redistribution
of risk promised by social insurance’, in
accordance with ‘the interaction of (...) (1)
the simple incidence of risk as it afflicts the
group in question, and (2) the group’s ability
to shoulder its burdens unaided, its capacity
for self-reliance’ (Baldwin 1990: 11-12). The
simple incidence of risk relates to the effect of
market mechanisms in the allocation of work
and income, especially in the extraordinary
politics of adjustment. The capacity for selfreliance
is evaluated prior to the intervention
of social policies. Therefore, ‘social security
demands are best understood in terms of how
risk communities coalesce. Risk communities
are defined in terms of their relations to the
means of security, and they may or, more likely,
may not coincide with class identity’ (Esping-
Andersen 1991: 225).
Support for social protection is rooted in the
amalgamation of a relatively high exposure to
economic uncertainty, a low capacity for selfreliance
and a capacity for collective action
or political representation. 4 Universal social
democratic welfare states and policies, which
exhibit the highest level of risk-pooling,
arise in the presence of a strong risk-pooling
coalition. Only when such a risksharing
coalition exists can solidaristic
policies be pursued. Conversely, page 127
residual or minimal welfare policies,
placing an emphasis on individual
responsibility, are adopted when the capacity
for self-reliance of risk communities prevails
at the expense of solidarity among them.